HONOLULU (HI)
Associated Press
April 26, 2020
By Jennifer Sinco Kelleher
Eight men were sexually abused when they were Boy Scouts in Hawaii in the 1960s and 1970s, they alleged in a lawsuit filed Friday as the state’s window closed on allowing child sex abuse claims that would have been barred under a statute of limitations.
Various states and Washington, D.C., extended or suspended statute of limitations to allow child sex abuse claims stretching back decades. In Hawaii, a window for filing old claims was first opened in 2012. It was reopened in 2018 and closed Friday.
The lawsuit by the eight men now living in Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington state also comes while attorneys urge potential victims to come forward as Boy Scouts of America works on its bankruptcy plan.
The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy protection in February in an effort to halt hundreds of individual lawsuits and create a huge compensation fund for men who were molested as youngsters decades ago by scoutmasters or other leaders.
The Scouts resorted to Chapter 11 in hopes of surviving a barrage of lawsuits, many of them made possible by changes in state laws to allow people to sue over long-ago sexual abuse.
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