A 59-year-old man filed the lawsuit in Mecklenburg Superior Court in April against the Children’s Home, which is now known as Crossnore School & Children’s Home, and the Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, which ran the Children’s Home at the time of the alleged abuse.

The man said in the lawsuit that Bruce Jackson “Jack” Biggs and his wife, Beatrice Hatcher Biggs, a married couple who served as house parents at the Anna Hanes Cottage at the Children’s Home, sexually abused him repeatedly, starting at age 10, from 1970 to 1973.

The man also said that the couple sexually abused other children at the Children’s Home. The couple was never criminally charged, and it is believed the Biggses were fired in 1973 due to the sexual-abuse allegations, the lawsuit said.

Wilson has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. An attorney for the Conference has also filed a motion to dismiss.

The focus is on the SAFE (Sexual Assault Fast Reporting and Enforcement) Act, which Gov. Roy Cooper signed into law on Nov. 7, 2019. The law extended statute of limitations so that victims of child sexual abuse could more easily file civil lawsuits. Attorneys for the defendants in this lawsuit argue that the new law is unconstitutional when applied to the Children’s Home and the Conference.

“Such previously terminated civil liability cannot be revived now by an act of the General Assembly without violating North Carolina’s substantive due process protections, particularly when such revival attempts to reinstate claims against this defendant that are almost 50 years old,” Wilson said.

Kelly Hughes, an attorney for the Conference, makes similar arguments in her motion to dismiss.

This is at least the second time such an argument has been made against a lawsuit involving child sexual-abuse allegations that happened in Forsyth County. Attorneys for the Kernersville YMCA and the YMCA of Northwest North Carolina also argued that the SAFE Act was unconstitutional in arguing that a lawsuit against them should be dismissed.

Richard Serbin, the lead attorney for the plaintiff in the Children’s Home lawsuit, said Thursday that he was not surprised by the motions to dismiss. It has become a familiar tactic, he said.

“In every suit that has been filed that I’ve aware of under the new law, there have been motions to dismiss by the various church entities,” he said.

He has said that without the SAFE Act, 95 percent of his clients wouldn’t be able to file a lawsuit. Serbin, who is head of the Sexual Abuse Division of the national law firm Janet, Janet & Suggs, said he is seeing similar challenges to laws like the SAFE Act in other states.

Jack Biggs died in 2015. Beatrice Biggs, 82, is still alive. Serbin has said it appears that she lives in a nursing home but is not sure where. The Biggses were not named as defendants in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is seeking at least $100,000 in compensatory damages as well as an unknown amount in punitive damages.