Boy Scouts Failed to Protect Boys, Lawyer Says

The lawyer for a Portland man who filed a $29 million sex abuse lawsuit against the Boy Scouts of America told a jury the Scouts knew they had a serious problem but failed to act.

Kelly Clark says the Scouts had been keeping a list of Scout leaders suspected of abuse since the 1920s but never came up with any system to improve screening, reporting or prevention.

But a lawyer for the Scouts, Chuck Smith, told the jury the organization relied on local volunteers to take action because they were supervising the boys - not the national organization.

Both sides gave closing arguments on Thursday.

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On Tuesday, a Boy Scouts leader testified that he reported the abuse confession of another group leader, only to find the man still with the organization more than a decade later.

Larry O'Connor said he was surprised to see the man he reported in 1970, wearing the full uniform at a national Scouts jamboree in 1981.

"I went up to him and asked, 'What are you doing here?'" O'Connor said. "And he just walked away from me."

O'Connor, 67, said he volunteered to testify after reading about the Portland lawsuit.

O'Connor, who now lives in Alaska, served briefly as a district executive with the Boy Scouts in Kansas in the late 1960s and that he had attained the Eagle Scout rank, the organization's highest for members.

He said he ran into problems with the organization as an adult, including his refusal to follow the practice of creating "ghost units" to inflate membership ranks that caused a national scandal for the Scouts in the early 1970s.

"I almost lost my job over it," he said.

In the case of the abuse that a fellow Scout leader confessed to him, O'Connor said he called his boss, who was the Boy Scouts council executive for his area, and also wrote him a letter about it. He said he was never told what action the Scouts took, and he was not told what happened after his report of seeing the man again 11 years later.

"We were told to report to the executive of the council we were in and then be quiet and not talk about it to anyone," O'Connor said.

He also said he learned on a visit to the former Boy Scouts of America headquarters that the national office kept files on suspected sex abusers now called "ineligible volunteer" files, but nicknamed "perversion files."

O'Connor said they were contained in black binders atop file cabinets at the former headquarters in New Jersey. The Scouts have since moved their national headquarters to Irving, Texas.

Copies of the files from 1965 to July 1984 were introduced into evidence in the Portland lawsuit, and one of the attorneys, Kelly Clark, said it was the first time a jury will have seen them.

Donald Wolff, a retired judge from St. Louis, Mo., testified Tuesday that he has been involved with the Big Brothers Big Sisters of America for about 45 years and that organization wanted the Boy Scouts to join them in child sexual abuse prevention in the 1980s.

Wolff said problems with abuse came to light in the early 1980s and that he was so concerned he consulted William Webster, a friend and colleague who was also head of the FBI and a St. Louis native.

Wolff said the concerns arose partly because a group called the North American Man-Boy Love Association had published an article that said the best places to find victims were the Big Brothers and the Boy Scouts.

"I knew that, as a national organization, we could no longer hide our head in the sand," he said.

Wolff was on the national board of directors for the Big Brothers at the time and serves as their legal counsel. He said there were concerns that publicity about the problem would reduce funding, but that his top priority was to prevent abuse by improving screening, supervision and reporting.

Wolff said calling attention to the problem and making sure volunteers knew they would be under increased scrutiny reduced the number of applications and likely eliminated potential abuse.

Despite his recommendation that the Boy Scouts do the same, they did not join in the effort, Wolff said.

"If we did come out, it would be better if two national organizations came out together," Wolff said. "We could have worked together and accomplished a lot."