Abuse cases span years
Boy Scouts in region grapple with mountain of assault claims
When Ralph Morse was a boy, he stood in the woods at night and looked up at the sky.
Morse joined the Boy Scouts in the 1960s, and one of his early courses was astronomy. His scoutmaster was a man named John Brown, 6-foot-3 and well over 250 pounds. On a camping trip, Brown led some of the boys into the woods to show them the night sky, pointing to the stars, the constellations and the planets.
“Then he would come up behind you and put his knee on your knee and force your backside to his groin. And I didn’t know what to do,” said Morse, now 68. “I was 11 years old, I didn’t weigh 100 pounds soaking wet. It was dark that night.”
Morse grew up on a farm near Russell, in St. Lawrence County. The community was tight-knit, and his school, church and family funneled him toward the Scouts.
The abuse went on for four years, Morse said. Sometimes, Brown would take the Scouts out for pizza or soda. In the car, Brown would move his hand from the manual transmission and grab Morse’s crotch as the boy sat next to him.
Morse has grappled for decades with what he experienced. Before it happened, he had been a star Scout, a basketball player and very involved in his Methodist Church. He quit those things, eventually struggling with alcohol dependency. It wasn’t for more than 20 years, when he married his second wife, that Morse felt he came to terms with what he experienced.
Morse says he knows of many other boys abused by Brown who haven’t been so lucky — including his older brother, who fell into alcoholism and drug addiction, and died alone in a nursing home in Tennessee in his 50s. Morse blames Brown for his brother’s demise.
More than 20 years after Morse was abused, Brown — still a Scout leader — was arrested and pleaded guilty to molesting a child in the same community.
“When I came home and I testified, and this first came out when the lawsuit was finally being able to go forward, everybody in the community ... that did nothing while me, my brother and all these young boys that were being molested, everybody in the community came out and said, ‘Well, everybody knew about John Brown.’ What the hell does that mean? If you knew about it, why didn’t you do something about it?”
All across the country, the stories are similar: Young boys went to the Scouts to develop as men, learn outdoor skills and spend time in nature — only for the very men who volunteer as role models to use those positions to prey on them.
The Boy Scouts of America declared bankruptcy last year, and since then more than 80,000 people have stepped forward to say they were sexually abused as Scouts, a number that dwarfs the roughly 9,000 who have alleged abuse at the hands of Catholic priests, according to one estimate by The New York Times.
Late Thursday night, lawyers for some 60,000 abuse claimants against the Boy Scouts announced that they’d reached a settlement deal with the BSA. The Associated Press reported that the payout would be nearly $850 million. There are 84,000 abuse claimants, and lawyers for at least 1,000 said the payout wasn’t enough, with survivors receiving less than $10,000 each and many of the local Scouting organizations hanging onto billions more in assets.
Experts say New York is among the hardest-hit because there were such a large number of Boy Scouts for so long. The exact statewide number of sexual abuse allegations against the Boy Scouts from New York is unknown, but it’s in the thousands.
A Times Union analysis of Child Victims Act lawsuits found that more than 42 in the Capital Region, related to allegations regarding incidents dating as far back as 1953. In one suit filed last week, more than 56 people said they were sexually abused as children while under the care of the Boy Scouts in the Capital Region from 1957 to 2001. Many of the Scouting organizations in the area over the decades were consolidated into the Twin Rivers Boy Scout Council, which is the defendant in these lawsuits, along with the national Boy Scouts.
In the Capital Region, 74 percent of CVA cases have been against the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese, with 9 percent against the Boy Scouts. In recent weeks, however, the trickle of cases against the Boy Scouts has increased, with more coming in Albany against the Scouts than against the church. The deadline for CVA cases is next month.
‘Perversion files’
In all, nearly 100 people have come forward in court to say they were sexually abused while in the Boy Scouts in the Capital Region.
Ten of the cases — brought by different people and some from entirely different law firms — identify a single Scout leader in the Capital Region as their abuser. They describe horrific abuse over decades. In one case, on “hundreds of occasions” the lawsuits say that the scoutmaster sexually penetrated two brothers throughout an eightyear window starting in the mid-’60s
“I’d love to say that
Twin Rivers Council was different than other councils,” said Mike Pfau, an attorney whose firm specializes in representing survivors of child sexual abuse. “But the shocking truth of it is it’s the same as all over the country.”
After Brown was arrested in 1984, he was added to the Boy Scout’s “ineligible volunteer files.”
The Scouts were founded in 1910, and for most of its history has kept careful records of alleged child molesters in its midst — known internally as the “perversion files” — to bar the predators from further volunteering opportunities. Some ended up as scout leaders again in other areas of the country despite the files, sometimes with the knowledge of the organization’s leadership, according to Pfau and other attorneys interviewed for this story.
In the Capital Region CVA lawsuits, there were about 30 from the BSA named as abusers, plus an unknown number from the large case with 56 plaintiffs. But an internal BSA record existed for just one of those named — and not the person with the 10 claims against him.
In some ways, those who come forward with their abuse claims are the lucky ones. Studies show that many who faced child
All across the country, the stories are similar: Young boys went to the Scouts to develop as men, learn outdoor skills and spend time in nature — only for the very men who volunteer as role models to use those positions to prey on them.
sexual abuse fall into drug or alcohol addiction, and nearly a third attempt suicide.
While most of the cases were reported to law enforcement, an analysis from the Los Angeles Times found, many were not. The newspaper reported that in cases where the Scouts were the first ones to be told of abuse, 80 percent of the time they did not tell authorities.
“There have been instances where people misused their positions in Scouting to abuse children, and in certain cases, our response to these incidents and our efforts to protect youth were plainly insufficient, inappropriate, or wrong,” said Wayne Perry, former national president of the BSA, in 2012.
While the perversion files were set up early in the history of the Scouts as a way to keep the program safer, Pfau said, they quickly became “an albatross.” As they grew into the tens of thousands, he said, the Boy Scouts refused to recognize that they had an institutional problem with child abuse and that it required an institutional solution.
The Scouts added some background checks and child-safety policies in the early 1990s once some of those files began to be made public, Pfau said, noting that the Boy Scouts have only ever released those files under court orders. At that time, the Scouts had the better part of a century of files showing widespread abuse by scoutmasters.
A spokeswoman for the BSA said: “We are deeply saddened by the pain and suffering that survivors of past abuse have endured. We are heartbroken that we cannot undo their pain, and we are committed to fulfilling our social and moral responsibility to equitably compensate survivors while also ensuring that Scouting’s mission continues.”
The Scouts touted their modern youth-protection policies, with most of the claims occurring before 1990. The Scouts now require child protection training for all staff and volunteers, bans on oneon-one times for adults and children, background checks for Scout leaders and mandatory reporting.
While those policies have been implemented since 1990, the BSA’S extensive files on known abusers in their midst predated them by decades. The BSA knew for almost its entire history that predators frequently infiltrated their organization for easy access to children, and they apparently did little about it for at least 50 years.
The Boy Scouts continue to refuse to release their perversion files, even the most recent ones. Records show that there are at least six alleged abusers in the Capital Region in the Boy Scouts’ files that remain secret. Many of the allegations contained in the files have not been reported to authorities or vetted in court.
“Without them, there’s no way to truly determine whether they have eradicated abuse in Scouting like they say they have,” Pfau said.
‘I hold the Scouts responsible’
All Thomas Stevens wanted was to be an Eagle Scout.
He completed all his merit badges, he said, and even now — nearly 60 years later — it still brings him to tears that he didn’t reach the highest rank.
That motivation was
what led Stevens, a pseudonym to protect his identity for this story, to never say anything after a group of his fellow Scouts stripped him and forced him to perform oral sex on one of them at Camp Boyhaven near Milton, in
Saratoga County. Afterward, he was so terrified he spent the night alone outside without a flashlight.
But his dedication to Scouting continued, even after it happened again two summers later, when he was sexually assaulted by his peers in the Scout training advanced group, young Scouts chosen for their leadership potential. Two boys started it in
their cabin one night and three more joined in. They stripped him and pinned him to a table, Stevens said, molested him and threatened to rape him. Two others stood in the doorway and watched in horror, Stevens said, a larger boy shielding a younger boy from the sight. He stayed in the cabin with his abusers for weeks afterward until the camp ended, he said.
Stevens’ account of abuse by other Scouts is also not unique. Lawyers who work with Scouting abuse claimants say that such claims are a sizable number of the total, although not a majority, and offer further evidence of
neglect by the Scouts.
Beyond the rules and policies of the Boy Scouts that critics say enabled sexual abuse to occur and proliferate — such as the lack of vetting of volunteers, the sealing of the perversion files or no mandated disclosure of sexual abuse — survivors such as Stevens point to cultural factors that did the same.
“These boys who assaulted me weren’t born this way. They learned this somewhere,” Stevens said. “Yeah, I hold the Boy Scouts responsible. They allowed these sexual assaults to happen and they didn’t educate us about this . ... We were kids. They
were supposed to be the adults.”
If Stevens had left the camp early he wouldn’t have earned his lifesaving merit badge, he said, and if he’d told the camp director he might not have been believed. Or, he may have asked Stevens if he was gay and had welcomed the abuse. (The Boy Scouts didn’t allow openly gay members until 2013.)
He felt trapped. Those last badges were the hardest for Stevens to earn — he was small for his age, but had to meet the same physical requirements that the bigger boys did.
Another CVA plaintiff against the Twin Rivers Council, Peter Thomas (another pseudonym), said he was sexually abused by a man named Jim, a higher-up within the Scouts whom he befriended through his father, who was member of his local Scout council. Jim would drive Peter around, the
There have been instances where people misused their positions in Scouting to abuse children, and in certain cases, our response to these incidents and our efforts to protect youth were plainly insufficient, inappropriate, or wrong,” — Wayne Perry, former national president of the BSA, in 2012
two of them drinking and smoking cigarettes or marijuana, when he was a teenager.
On one occasion, Peter said, Jim took him to a regional Scouting event. They stayed in a hotel room together, and they were drinking in the room with a group of other adults from the Scouts. Peter was the only child in the room, but they supplied him with alcohol. No one seemed to find it odd, which he took as a compliment — an endorsement of his maturity. Now, he sees it very differently.
Later, Jim secured Peter a summer job at the Adirondack High Adventure Base where backpackers would stop before lengthy trips. Peter said he remembered having very few responsibilities, just emptying mouse traps, but Jim would visit him and they would drink and smoke together.
Jim drove Peter to his cabin, offering him Baileys Irish Cream, an alcoholic drink. Peter’s memory of what happened is spotty, which is a common symptom of childhood trauma and also a side effect of the heavy drinking. But Peter remembers Jim chasing him around the cabin, forcibly hugging him, and he remembers the next morning, noticing that he was bleeding when he sat to use the bathroom.
He felt overwhelmed with shame, but he couldn’t answer why.
“It seemed like something that I needed to keep private. And that I would be OK as long as I could clean myself up, and I didn’t bleed to death, then everything would be fine,” he said.
To this day, Peter has only told his girlfriend and his lawyers what happened to him. But the emotional effects of what he experienced persist. He suffers from depression and debilitating anxiety, sometimes unable to summon himself to leave his home to go to the grocery store.
“I still have problems concentrating. I do have disturbing dreams about (what happened), but not about Jim. Not about anything that happened to me specifically, but just about being there at night.
And it’s usually like it’s abandoned. The whole place is abandoned. It’s not particularly scary dreams, but just makes me feel melancholy. But just a feeling of loss somehow.
“I think what I feel is lost is my, like, opportunity. Like now I’m old and I missed out on all sorts of good things,” he said. “It seems to me like the opportunity for a good life has been lost in some way, or a better life.”
Other survivors, too, tried to articulate what it is like to accept the unacceptable.
Stevens said that even at age 69, he speaks about the trauma from his childhood with the voice of his inner child. This is common for survivors of childhood trauma, he said, sexual or otherwise, as their minds are not equipped to fully grow and move on from the experience.
“I couldn’t leave Camp Boyhaven. I needed the lifesaving merit badge to become an Eagle Scout. I couldn’t just call up Mom and Dad to go home,” he said. “... By the time I got home I was a broken boy.”
Stevens never became an Eagle Scout. He wandered downtown Schenectady so his parents wouldn’t realize he’d stopped going to Scout meetings. His dad had been a Boy Scout, his uncle too, and his family would have been disappointed.
Stevens fell in with a bad crowd, he said, and he started smoking marijuana. Eventually he was arrested, and the police searched his home for drugs. His troop leader came to his home, and Stevens thought he was coming to ask how he could help get Stevens back on the right track, but the man instead told him his future in Scouting was over.
“I had recurrent nightmares for 30 years about not becoming an Eagle Scout. I don’t know why I didn’t have nightmares about the sexual assaults themselves,” he said. “Maybe (memory) blur protects us in mysterious ways. I couldn’t have lived with that. But it still hurts.”