Scouts must pay man $18.5M

UPDATED:

PORTLAND, Ore. — An Oregon jury’s decision to award a man $18.5 million in punitive damages in his case against the Boy Scouts of America will likely be the first of many financial hits the Scouts will take as it prepares to defend itself against a series of sex abuse lawsuits.

The jury on Friday ordered the Scouts to make the payment to Kerry Lewis, the victim of sex abuse by a former assistant Scoutmaster in Portland in the early 1980s.

The case was the first of six filed against the Boy Scouts in the same court in Oregon, with at least one other separate case pending. If mediation fails to settle the other cases, they also could go to trial.

Lawyers for Lewis had asked the jury to award at least $25 million to punish the Boy Scouts for what the jury had already agreed in the first phase of the trial was reckless and outrageous conduct.

They also noted the Boy Scouts had never apologized to Lewis, who said Friday at a news conference that the verdict shows that “big corporations can’t be above the law.”

Lewis added that an apology “would mean something to me, but I’m not expecting it.”

The jury decided on April 13 that the Boy Scouts were negligent for allowing former assistant Scoutmaster Timur Dykes to associate with Scouts, including Lewis, after Dykes admitted to a Scouts official in 1983 that he had molested 17 boys.

The jury awarded Lewis $1.4 million in compensatory damages with that verdict and agreed the Boy Scouts were liable for punitive damages to be determined in the second phase of the trial that ended Thursday.

Scouts officials declined to comment on details of the case because other cases are pending, but issued a statement saying it maintains a “rigorous” system to screen Scout leaders.

“The Boy Scouts of America has always stood against child abuse of any kind,” it said.

The verdict came as the Boy Scouts mark their centennial.

For more than a month, dueling experts and a parade of witnesses from both sides wove together a picture of an organization that compiled secret files on child molesters for nearly the entire century it has been in existence.

The “ineligible volunteer” files, nicknamed the “perversion files,” are kept under lock and key at Scouts headquarters, now in Irving, Texas, a practice that began back in the 1920s.

The Scouts said the files were put to good use quietly keeping molesters out of the organization for all those years. But Lewis’ attorneys argued that the Scout should have brought the files out into the open decades ago.

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