WILMINGTON — The Boy Scouts of America filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on February 18, 2020, weighed down by an avalanche of sexual abuse lawsuits from victims who say the organization covered up crimes by volunteer supervisors for decades. Documents published in 2012 had revealed the scale of the cover-up: thousands of pages showing the BSA quietly removed accused leaders while routinely failing to report them to police.
The 110-year-old organization, which has 2.2 million members aged 5 to 21, chose the bankruptcy process to continue operating while creating a compensation fund for victims of sexual abuse. Court documents filed with the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware estimated the BSA’s liabilities at between $100 million and $500 million. The legal structure of the fund — which would take the form of a trust — still required judicial validation.
“The BSAs deeply care about all victims of abuse and sincerely apologize to anyone who was injured during their period of scouting,” the organization wrote in its statement. “We are outraged that there was a time when individuals took advantage of BSA programs to harm children.” The leadership said the compensation fund was “the best way to compensate the victims fairly and while preserving their identity.”
For victims’ attorneys, the bankruptcy filing was a qualified moment of accountability. Michael Pfau, a lawyer representing around 300 victims, called it “an acknowledgment from the Boy Scouts that they had this huge problem and that it is so important that they cannot take care of it themselves,” as NBC News reported. Pfau and other victims’ representatives also expressed concern that the bankruptcy procedure would limit the window in which new victims could officially come forward.
The revelations date to 2012, when the Los Angeles Times published thousands of pages of internal BSA records showing the organization had covered sexual abuses committed by thousands of volunteer supervisors over decades. About 5,000 “cases of perversion” were identified at the time, corresponding to that many alleged sexual assailants among Scout leaders. Management had typically confined itself to removing the accused without notifying law enforcement.
By the end of January 2019, during a trial in Minnesota, a BSA-retained expert who had reviewed the internal files identified 7,819 suspected attackers and 12,254 victims between 1944 and 2016 — figures that exceeded all prior estimates. Legal actions against the BSA multiplied across multiple states, aided by legislative changes that extended statutes of limitation on child sexual abuse claims. The bankruptcy filing was the organization’s answer to a volume of litigation it could not manage individually.
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