Decades of sexual abuse against Charlotte-area Boy Scouts alleged in new lawsuits

As the window begins to close for North Carolina sexual assault victims to take their attackers to court, two new lawsuits pull back the curtains on allegations of more than a half century of Boy Scout abuse in Charlotte.

In one complaint, 29 former Scouts have sued the Mecklenburg Council of the Boy Scouts of America over assault allegations dating back as far as 1950 and as recent as 2007. At least one of the former Scouts is now in his 80s.

In a second lawsuit, a New York City man claims that as a 13- and 14-year-old, he was abused by his Scoutmaster in Charlotte for more than a year in the early 1980s, triggering a lifetime of emotional and physical problems. He, too, is calling on the Mecklenburg courts to hold the Boy Scouts council responsible for abusers it should have been aware of and crimes it should have stopped, according to his complaint.

Mark Turner, chief executive officer of the Mecklenburg Council, did not immediately respond to an Observer email Friday seeking comment.

While all of the accusers’ names appear in the filings, the Observer generally does not identify victims of possible sexual abuse.

The timing of their filings is far from coincidental. Under the state’s novel SAFE Child Act, many victims who were sexually abused as children have until Dec. 31 to file claims against their abusers. Beginning in January 2022, the regular three-year statute of limitations on these cases returns, blocking the ability of most victims to recover damages.

The Mecklenburg cases are the latest in a rush of sexual-abuse complaints filed against organizations in the state, including schools, churches and youth groups:

▪ Three Boy Scout abuse lawsuits were recently filed in Winston-Salem.

▪ More than three dozen former high school students at the North Carolina School of the Arts allege they were abused by some 30 faculty members or school administrator. The sexual assaults bridged five decades, according to the complaint.

▪ Also last month, a Charlotte man said he endured multiple sexual assaults from his Catholic priest during the 1990s when he was an elementary school student in an east Charlotte parish.

Fund for sex abuse survivors

The local scouting lawsuits surface within days of an agreement between an insurance company and the national Boy Scouts of America to create an $800 million account to pay damages to sex abuse survivors.

“This is an extremely important step forward in the BSA’s efforts to equitably compensate survivors,” the Boy Scouts said this week in a statement accompanying the agreement.

The money, according to NBC News and other outlets, would be used to help settle around 82,500 claims from people who say they were sexually abused as children by troop leaders. The damages fund now stands at some $2.7 billion. The national organization declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020 as a way of dealing with a barrage of abuse claims over the last decade that have crippled the once iconic program for children.

While the national Boy Scouts group is not a party in the Mecklenburg lawsuits, its decision to keep thousands of abuse claims hidden for generations serves as a backdrop for the filings.

Scouts’ ‘perversion file’

Scouting began in 1910 as a means to use the outdoors and over activities “to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes.”

The organization failed to meet its own goal. According to one of the Mecklenburg lawsuits, as early as 1919 the Boy Scouts began compiling an ineligible volunteers list to keep sexual abusers away from the children under its care. But it kept those files secret until 2012, with a list of 8,000 names of adult volunteers from the Scouts’ so-called “perversion file” were made public for the first time.

As part of its 2020 bankruptcy, the Boy Scouts of America finally admitted that “predators” used the program “to gain access to children, and volunteers or employees of the BSA or Local Councils did not effectively act on allegations and transgressions.”

That included the Mecklenburg council, the new lawsuits claim.

Due to failure to protect the children under its guidance from attacks, “plaintiffs have suffered and will continue to suffer from severe and lifelong physical and mental injuries, including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, emotional distress, substance abuse, and feelings of worthlessness, shamefulness and embarrassment,” the lawsuit from the 29 former Scouts says.

The assaults themselves are revisited in the documents with few details. The abusers, all nameless volunteers, take on a generic and almost timeless quality.

It’s the persistence of the abuse — decade after decade, from one century to the next — that stands out. As one generation of victims aged out of the program, another group took a Scout’s oath and took their place.