UNITED STATES
Reuters
BY FIONA ORTIZ
Minnesota’s reform of child sex abuse laws has given Laura Adams a chance to come forward with accusations she long feared to make public: that an employee of a children’s theater in Minneapolis abused her in the early 1980s when she was a teenager.
Adams, 48, and another woman sued the Children’s Theatre Company and former employees for abuse and failure to prevent it. The lawsuit was filed last year during a legal window the state created for victims.
Hundreds of people have brought similar lawsuits in Georgia, California, Delaware and Hawaii, which enacted similar reforms to eliminate or extend statutes of limitations for up to three years to allow victims to bring civil actions.
Without reforms such as these, people who say they survived sex abuse decades ago have little hope for seeking justice.
Criminal prosecutions of decades-old abuse cases remain impossible since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that it is unconstitutional to retroactively change statutes of limitations. Still, advocates say civil cases give victims a chance to break decades of silence. Most such lawsuits lead to out-of-court settlements, according to lawyers who handle sex abuse cases.
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