Deadline nears for national Boy Scouts sex abuse lawsuit

REXBURG (ID)
Post Register

November 10, 2020

By Sally Krutzig

Fifteen years ago, Adam Steed came forward to the Post Register with his story of abuse.

Steed detailed his experiences of sexual assault at the age of 14 by Brad Stowell, a Boy Scout counselor, while at Camp Little Lemhi in Swan Valley in 1997. The Post Register’s six-part “Scouts’ Honor” series investigating Stowell and the cover-up of his crimes by many connected to the Boy Scouts of America sparked outcry from all directions in eastern Idaho.

The Steed family learned that the Boy Scouts had settled claims from lawsuits alleging Stowell had abused other boys and gotten the lawsuits dismissed. When one of those court files was finally made public in January 2005, “it revealed that before the Scouts settled the suits and paid the victims, Stowell had testified under oath that from 1988 to 1997 he molested at least 24 boys, many of them Scout campers,” the Post Register reported.

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