NEW ORLEANS (LA)
Nola.com [New Orleans, LA]
March 26, 2024
By Stephanie Riegel
Attorneys involved in the Archdiocese of New Orleans bankruptcy process said Monday they were evaluating how a major ruling by the Louisiana Supreme Court that makes it harder for victims of childhood sexual abuse to sue their accusers will impact the long-running case and the 550 survivors of child sex abuse who claim they were sexually abused by local Roman Catholic clergy.
In a decision that surprised the local legal community and victim advocacy groups nationwide, a split Supreme Court court ruled 4-3 last week that a pair of state laws creating a “lookback window” for survivors of childhood sex abuse to file legal claims was unconstitutional.
The laws had granted child sex abuse survivors a three-year window to sue, regardless of when the alleged abuse took place. But the state’s high court said that the laws violated the due process of alleged perpetrators.
“This is a very, very, serious decision that will have consequences in the Archdiocese of New Orleans bankruptcy case,” said Molly Burke, an attorney with the Jeff Anderson and Associates in Chicago, which represents hundreds of clergy sex abuse survivors around the country. “It makes an already very complicated case that has failed to move forward after four years even more complicated.”
The Archdiocese of New Orleans filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy court protection in May 2020 amid mounting claims of child sex abuse by clergy —most dating back many decades. At the time, about 30 cases against the local Roman Catholic church had been filed in state court.
Since then, those cases have been frozen by the bankruptcy court proceedings. Meanwhile, some 550 abuse survivors have come forward to file claims in the bankruptcy case seeking compensation.
It is unclear how many of those claims, which could cost the church some $100 million, will be impacted by the recent ruling. But attorney Kristi Schubert with the Lamothe Law Firm, which represents about 60 claimants, estimates “the vast majority of claims in the case will be ineligible.”
The Archdiocese of New Orleans declined to comment.
Significant impact
The Supreme Court ruling focused on a series of laws aimed at trying to offer alleged victims of decades-old childhood sexual abuse an opportunity to fight for compensation in court.
Until the 1990s, a victim of child sex abuse only had one year to file a lawsuit against an alleged abuser. In 1993, state lawmakers changed the law, giving victims until age 28 to file suit against an alleged abuser, though that law did not apply to old abuse cases, only new cases moving forward.
In a pair of laws passed in 2021 and 2022, the legislature did away with any age limits and said survivors could file claims regardless of how long ago the alleged abuse occurred. As had been done in many other states, the law created a temporary “lookback window” that set a June 2024 deadline for those old claims to be filed.
Most of the abuse claims in the archdiocese case have been filed under seal. What is known in cases that have been made public is that the much of the alleged abuse dates back to the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s.
“This basically affects all of the child sexual abuse claims that had become time barred before the lookback window was passed (in 2021 and 2022) and most of them were barred by the old, one-year prescriptive statute,” Schubert said of the Supreme Court ruling.
What now?
While Schubert expects most of the abuse claims filed in the bankruptcy case to be impacted by the ruling, it doesn’t mean they will necessarily be thrown out by the bankruptcy court or ruled invalid, according to attorneys involved in the case.
Rather, some sort of process will have to be established to determine whether the claimants are eligible to receive a portion of whatever settlement is ultimately negotiated in the case.
That evaluation process could take place before a settlement is negotiated and finalized, but it will more likely take place after a plan has been finalized and approved by the court, attorneys said.
At that point, a trustee would be appointed to oversee how settlement funds are disbursed and how much each claimant would receive.
“If we look at other bankruptcies, the claims can be treated differently based on whether a claimant is within a statute of limitations or not,” Burke said. “There could be all different categories based on when did the abuse occur, is such a claim within the statute of limitations, was it a late-filed claim.”
Those categories would determine how much each claimant is eligible to receive.
But claimants will have to make a case for why they did not file an abuse claim within the required time limit — either because of extenuating circumstances or because they had suppressed the memory of the abuse, according to attorneys, who said such a process will be difficult and potentially time consuming.
“Now all these survivors are going to have to prove why they did not file a claim when they were young,” said one local attorney involved in the bankruptcy case. “It’s going to be on a case by case basis.”
‘Step backwards’
What is clear from the ruling is that it will impact settlement negotiations, which have only recently showed signs of moving forward after nearly four years.
It could also pressure survivors to accept a lower settlement offer from the archdiocese than they would have otherwise, according to attorneys for abuse survivors.
As the number of church bankruptcy cases around the country have increased in recent years, insurance companies have ponied up ever smaller amounts towards settlement claims than they did two decades ago. In some cases, they have filed competing plans of reorganization that offer to pay little or nothing towards a settlement. In the Archdiocese of New Orleans bankruptcy, at least one insurance company has complained for months in court documents and hearings that it is being left out closed-door settlement talks.
The ruling gives them more leverage, attorneys familiar with the cases said.
The ruling could also have implications beyond the church bankruptcy case to other non-archdiocesan churches and organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, said Burke, who called the ruling a “step backwards” for the push to provide some type of compensation for decades-old abuse claims
“It was extremely disheartening to see the state Supreme Court rule that way against survivors,” she said. “Many states have addressed those laws and come out on the right side so this was a step backwards for survivors and the overall movement for victims’ rights.”
Email Stephanie Riegel at stephanie.riegel@theadvocate.com.