Bill ends sex cases’ statute of limitations
Anne Elrod Whitney was just 10 years old when her gymnastics coach allegedly sexually abused her in a northwest Houston gym in 1983.
The girl — who didn’t yet have words to describe what happened to her but knew it felt wrong — disclosed the abuse for the first time about two years after it happened. She told some close friends first and later a teacher and other trusted adults.
But nothing happened for almost four decades. Some of the adults were mandated reporters — those legally required to report suspected abuse — but they likely didn’t take her case to authorities. If they did, Whitney never got a call from the police asking to follow up.
As the years passed, so did the statute of limitations for sex crimes. Whitney missed the window to pursue criminal charges against her alleged abuser, blocked by a statute of limitations that the Legislature eliminated in 2007. Even then, the new rule didn’t apply to old cases.
She also cannot file a lawsuit against the coach. Though the Legislature lengthened the civil statute of limitations in 2019, allowing survivors up to age 48 to seek monetary damages, the bill didn’t include a retroactive clause.
Now, Texas lawmakers are looking to change that. A bill under consideration this legislative session would eradicate the civil statute of limitations entirely, allowing survivors of any age to file lawsuits against their abusers and any organizations that protected them.
“To me, this is about the state of Texas making a decision to no longer stand with perpetrators,” said state Rep. Ann Johnson, a Houston Democrat who authored the legislation.
“We’re going to stand with the victims, and we’re going to give them a lifetime, (so) that whenever they get the strength or courage to come forward, their voice can be heard.”
Her measure, House Bill 206, has bipartisan support. State Rep. Jacey Jetton, a Fort Bend Republican, is a joint author and said the legislation “enables more survivors to come forward and seek justice for crimes committed against them.”
State Sen. Pete Flores, a Pleasanton Republican, is carrying the same measure — Senate Bill 751 — in his chamber. Both versions have already been referred to committees, giving supporters hope that Texas will make the change this year. (A spokesperson for House Speaker Dade Phelan declined to comment, and representatives for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to requests for comment.)
Johnson filed a similar bill in 2021, but it failed as the session clock ran out, she said. It was never scheduled for a hearing.
Whitney, 49, is considering testifying if the legislation gets a hearing this year. She lives in Pennsylvania now but is an outspoken advocate for survivors of abuse — and knows that many others don’t report as early as she did.
The average age of disclosure for victims of child sex abuse is 52, and the median is 48, according to a 2014 study of more than 1,000 survivors.
Every survivor’s story is different, and there are many reasons they may not share what happened to them. Children sometimes don’t recognize sexual abuse, don’t have a trusted adult in their lives or aren’t believed when they do tell someone. There are often difficult power dynamics involved, and no person’s trauma response is the same.
Survivors often feel shame and guilt over what happened to them, and many struggle with their mental health.
Even if they do tell an adult who believes them, “it takes a long time from disclosure to get disclosure to the right person who can effectively go forward,” Whitney said.
Whitney’s alleged abuser, Mike Spiller, was arrested in November — 39 years after she was molested. That spring, Whitney had filed a complaint with the U.S. Center for SafeSport, the congressionally authorized agency that investigates allegations of abuse in Olympic sports.
The center received another report against Spiller around the same time, alleging the coach had inappropriately touched a 10-year-old girl he’d encountered that April.
But it wasn’t until another survivor filed a report with the Boerne Police Department in October that law enforcement began to act. This victim accused Spiller of exposing himself to her during bus rides in the early 2000s.
“It just took a long time for my disclosure to be heard outside the room in which I was telling it,” Whitney said. “What a kid has, in terms of voice and platform, is really different from an adult — and what a kid could do in terms of public speech or public messaging is a little different now than it was in the 1980s when I was a kid.”
Whitney isn’t even sure that she’d file a lawsuit if the statute of limitations were removed, but it would be nice to have the option.
Twenty-seven U.S. states and territories have revived previously expired sex abuse claims, according to the think tank Child USA. Most of them have thrown out the statute of limitations entirely or have created a “look-back” window that temporarily eliminated it, usually for a year or two.
Jessica Schidlow, the legal director for Child USA, said there are three main reasons to do so. First, lawsuits expose predators — some of whom still work with children — to the public.
Second, litigation shifts the cost of abuse away from victims and their families, who pay for years of therapy and other resources to help a survivor heal. There are public costs, too, that taxpayers fund — from health care and education to the criminal justice and welfare systems, Schidlow said.
Lastly, she added, policies such as these help prevent future incidents, raising awareness about the signs and prevalence of child sexual abuse.
“We see this with big names — like with Larry Nassar, with (Jeffrey) Epstein, Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church — the public can then pressure these institutions to implement prevention policies, and transparency moving forward tends to be much higher,” Schidlow said. “We can implement accountability processes.”
Plus, these laws give survivors a long-awaited day in court. Many just want to share their story, to have others acknowledge what happened to them and make sure that it doesn’t happen to anyone else, said Kathryn Robb, a survivor who now serves as the executive director of CHILD USAdvocacy.
“There’s something so profoundly healing in holding your abuser accountable and being brave,” Robb said. “I always think to myself, ‘If I speak up, maybe another little girl can speak up. A little boy can speak up.’ There’s so much of that in having the ability to speak up without the fear of a slander claim.”
In New York, a two-year lookback window from 2019 to 2021 produced almost 11,000 lawsuits against abusers and their employers. New York State Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a Democrat who spearheaded the Child Victims Act, said it was a “transformative” policy that “put large institutions on notice.”
Opponents had suggested there would be a never-ending flow of lawsuits that overwhelmed the state court system, but that wasn’t the case, Hoylman-Sigal said. Others worried about false claims, but he hasn’t heard of any — and, he noted, survivors still have to prove their case in court.
The message these laws send is clear, Hoylman-Sigal said.
“To those who prey on children: We’re coming after you,” he said. “The Child Victims Act and the bill that the Texas State Legislature is considering help facilitate that. The pursuit of justice is not just justice for the survivor but justice in a wider sense — that abusers are smoked out.”