The lawyer who led the charge against the Boy Scouts of America’s “perversion files” is releasing a forthcoming documentary to showcase the lasting impacts of the near-centurylong cover-up scandal that led to the sexual abuse of tens of thousands of former scouts.
Around 82,500 men who were once minors in Boy Scouts are poised to receive anywhere from $3,500 to $2.7 million in the landmark $2.4 billion settlement, which was tentatively reached in February this year. Attorney Bruce Nagel, who was the first to sue the organization on the basis that it deliberately withheld pedophile data in the scout master ranks since the 1920s, detailed the legal saga that is relayed through the film Boy Scout’s Honor in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
BOY SCOUTS OF AMERICA’S LIABILITY REACHES AT LEAST $2.4B IN LARGEST SEX ABUSE SETTLEMENT
Nagel referred to the 2011 revelation of the “perversion files” that were kept by the BSA for 90 years, which detailed accounts of “scoutmasters who were doing these horrible and criminal things to children.”
“They covered it up, they kept it under lock and key in Dallas, and it literally took 90 years … to finally have these files see the light of day,” Nagel said.
The film follows the story of a former scout, Aaron Averhart, who was an 8-year-old when he met his Boy Scouts leader William Sheehan. Averhart was still a Cub Scout, and Sheehan aided him in his progress through the ranks.
Averhart slowly became aware that he was being “groomed” by Sheehan and even made an attempt to reach out for help.
In 1989, Averhart accused Sheehan, who was 50 at the time, of sexually molesting him at Boy Scouts’s Camp Miles in Punta Gorda, Florida. However, Charlotte County Sheriff’s Office investigators found no grounds to pursue the case, according to the News-Press.
After a series of similar allegations that appeared to corroborate Averhart’s earlier claims, Massachusetts detectives traveled to Fort Myers to arrest Sheehan but found him in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Sheehan died in 2017 and was never arrested or charged with any crimes.
Nagel said the focus of the documentary takes a closer look at the “grooming process as an educational tool” and digs “into the human toll on people and the way in which they tried to reclaim what they had lost their childhood.”
Asked whether his years of work in handling sexual abuse cases from the BSA affected his view of Scouting as a whole, Nagel made clear he doesn’t believe “you throw the entire institution into the garbage can.”
“I say clean out the garbage, get rid of the toxicity, get rid of the malignancy, and make it better. And it’s no different from any other institution. Make it better,” Nagel added.
BSA has already spent more than $327 million in fees and expenses following its February 2020 declaration of bankruptcy, which came after several states changed their laws and allowed victims to sue over decades-old allegations.
Last month, more than a dozen insurers filed appeals to challenge the BSA’s sex abuse settlement, alleging that “likely fraudulent” abuse claims helped to rig the deal against them, according to court records.
Insurers including Liberty Mutual alleged the rise to nearly 90,000 alleged abuse incidents was due to plaintiffs’ lawyers “who saw the bankruptcy as an opportunity for a windfall” and recruited clients in large numbers, in some instances without reaching out to the claimants.
U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein ruled in July that the settlement was not the result of any type of bad faith collusion. In their appeal, insurers claimed the judge never took a detailed look at the negotiations without acknowledging the “82,000-claim bazooka” aimed at the insurers.
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Since the appeals are still occurring, it could delay the BSA’s exit from bankruptcy for a year or longer, even if they’re unsuccessful.
The film was written and directed by Ash Patino and is set to release on Dec. 13.
