Muttsy

Wow! You guys are true blue. You buy insurance coverage for yourselves just to volunteer to serve? Are your wives on board with it? If I was your best friend I’d take you out for a beer and a heart to heart.

My point is that if your church gets sued under a “should have known of the hazardous potential” theory or any theory, your church has already lost. It’s lost money for lawyers. To even get to a summary judgment dismissal stage, it has endured discovery and motions practice - easily 100k in defense costs depending on prevailing law firm billing rates. it’s also suffered reputational damage in the community. A single lawsuit could crush a small church or civic organization.

Barriers to entry do work and are the most effective. Your argument seems illogical. If YP actually works as a barrier to entry, then logically the perpetrator will go elsewhere. Sex crimes laws on the state and federal level have gotten much tougher over the past thirty years. To your point, the pedophiles have gone elsewhere and in the process created a huge offshore child sex tourism industry to places like Thailand, Romania and Mexico to name a few.

All I’m saying is that they could still get sued and possibly held liable depending on the facts. The cost of defense could be prohibitive. I also question whether BSA could obtain insurance that does not contain an exclusion for sexual abuse which has been standard since beginning in the late 1980’s. If it could it would probably require a huge deductible. Hey Skeptic, don’t shoot the messenger because you don’t like the message.

Very illuminating post. Thank you. Something I don’t understand is why any COs believe that a facilities use agreement will protect them. Landlords/lessors can be held liable if the sexual assault happened on church property under a variety of theories. Many of the fact patterns in the IV files occurred at meetings in the church, school, Kiwanis basements. It wasn’t the chartering agreement that established their liability, it was the facts. You can’t let crimes be committed on your property, when you knew or should have known they could occur. You must do something. To do nothing is unreasonable. I suspect these CO’s will have difficulty getting their own liability insurance once they disclose on the renewal application that it is hosting a scout troop. And assuming the FUA has an indemnity provision requiring BSA to indemnify, what’s the value of that now? Fool me once…

Not endorsing TrailLifeUSA. Just observing that alternatives are popping up. https://www.traillifeusa.com/ 70% growth in past 12 months.

To my knowledge this is true. There have been numerous Congressional Charters issues to various civic and patriotic groups over the past century. The Congressional Charter to BSA granted it IP rights. Other perks to BSA are also littered throughout the US Code. IF BSA liquidates in a Ch 7, I think the Charter becomes a legal nullify and it has no IP protection. It is a valuable asset which the Ch 7 liquidation trustee would have to decide how, if possible, to monetize it for the trust. But Congress would have to sign off on any transfer of the IP rights to a new scouting entity. If nothing was done then I suppose any group could use it with a lot of ensuing confusion amongst the scouting public. If there is no BSA to enforce it, then I don’t know. Perhaps the best thing would be to retire the name, let new scouting orgs emerge and see which ones do the best job of rebuilding the movement. That was the state of scouting prior to 1913. The idea of nationalizing scouting back then was to ensure high standards and uniformity. Maybe granting a single scouting organization the BSA that monopoly power was not the best idea as things turned out. I believe there is great potential in a movement that has the autonomy to reimagine how scouting should be run. The BSA mutated in to a top down autocratic bureaucratic monster that placed the interests of the executives and the commercialization of scouting above scouts and scouting itself. It is a good omen for the future of scouting that people on this forum are starting that process of reimagining scouting.

I think it’s been said the coalition has about 5000 claimants total of various firms who signed consents to be represented as a whole not as individuals by Brown Rudnick. The judge said earlier that attorneys would not be allowed to vote their clients’ ballots without express written authority. Is anybody here a Coalition member? If so, were you asked to sign a proxy to have your lawyer vote your ballot? i don’t understand why these Coalition lawyers statements to the media that they represent 70 000 men means they control their votes. I don’t think they actually have much if any client control. It’s misleading and the brainless MSM report it has real.

Did you read the joint AIS 2019? It couldn’t be clearer. His firm DOES represent those clients. So do AVA and Eisenberg. Jointly.

All three firms jointly represent 15,103 clients. They are all correct. Their clients will vote their own ballots after receiving the perspectives of the three law firms that represent them. The question is who will make the most sense to their collective clients about the pros and cons of a plan that it is presented to them. That’s what happens in joint representation. Presidents have advisors and cabinet secretaries who strongly sometimes violently disagree with each other. They make their respective cases to the President and he decides. Same thing here. Not mysterious. Client decides.

If Hartford settlement 2.0 is still tethered to a Century 1.3B contribution, she has no basis to approve a Plan Disclosure Statement. Is it 800M, 500M, 300M? If so, it never goes out for a vote. By the time the carriers’ lawyers get finished with the Coslition mass torters’ aggregators, the Coalition will have less street cred than it has now which has been thoroughly crushed by the court. I’m surprised the C hasn’t imploded by now. I want to see TCC step up and show us the money. Show us their super duper plan.

Can CerebralScouter, er, CynicAlScouter remind us if BSA exclusivity has expired? Stang said something a while back along the lines that he has a BSA only plan he wants to file. Does anyone know if that’s in the works? The way he alluded to it it sounded like maybe Toggle Plus.

There so much more to this and I know it’s been suggested to go elsewhere with this topic/thread. I’d love to do that, if anyone else is interested. MCVAStory has posted other great stuff, as I recall. For what it’s worth to anyone: There is remarkable research by Harvard Med School professors that involved MRI brain scans of adult survivors of sexual abuse that show how the developing brain was altered by the stress hormones. I’ll dig out the article.

Who says it has to be nation-wide? If people from closed states have no right to compensation, then they can’t be creditors. Their claim is worth zero, right? So then why do you need a discharge order that applies to them? If down the road more states pass windows and claims mount, you go back in to another Ch 11. Happened all the time in asbestos.

No I don’t but there is no amount of money that can compensate these men. In the real world plaintiffs rarely if ever get 100%. CS, you keep switching back and forth it like watching a tennis match. You chide me for making the moral case and demand that I give you the LEGAL case. When I give you the LEGAL case of a consensual settlement including the carriers you switch back to the moral case of fairness. You asked me a legal question and I gave you the LEGAL answer. The only way for BSA to escape this cockroach motel is for the parties to get a number with the carriers that is achievable. Fair? No. Possible? Maybe.

Why was it necessary to seek a nationwide discharge? Who did that benefit? Notice of what? We intend to pay you nothing and extinguish your legal rights forever. But come forward and disclose your most painful memories and be retraumatized? You keep using the word conspiracy not me. A conspiracy is simply an agreement to do something unlawful or something lawful by unlawful means. This was not a conspiracy but it was an agreement the effect of which leaves 50,000 victims out in the cold. Sort out SOL issues later like now? How’s that working out?

No. That claimant is not classified as a future claimant. He’s a claimant who will lose his legal rights forever even if his abuse state opens a window one day after BSA gets its discharge. Heads BSA wins, tails you lose. Everyone knows these claimants have no reason to support a plan like that so the lawyers offered 3500 bucks to shut up and go away. That still won’t cut it, so they want to take away their vote.

That’s exactly what happened, didn’t it? In my world I don’t reveal sources and methods.

The only legal mechanism in Ch 11 is a consensual plan which includes the insurance carriers. I believe the carriers want to resolve this case but can’t come to the table because of the counter productive actions of the TCC, FCR and especially the Coalition. As I stated before the carriers arguments are “mostly” BS but not entirely so. The carriers need “process” and they haven’t gotten enough in their view and that’s the only thing that matters. The judge SHOULD grant their 2004 motion tomorrow at least in a pared down form. I heard in one of the carrier’s arguments an opening. He mentioned in frustration the TCC’s 110B demand. Stang and the TCC were foolish to talk publicly about that kind of number. if you want the dog to jump, you have to lower the hot dog to a spot the dog thinks he could jump and reach. That’s not 110B The lawyer mentioned above probably thinks the carriers could get closure in the 9-12B range. Just my guess. The problem is that the RSA is a loser for everyone. It seeks to deprive the carriers of their contract rights in violation of Due Process. It is a naked power grab that won’t work and will only serve to delay until BSA dies of natural causes. The plaintiffs have not been well served by their bankruptcy professionals

No. You keep mixing apples and horse pucky. The agreement was to support a national discharge of all victims knowing survivors in non window states would be forever barred with no chance of getting fair value for their claims. In just eighteen months five more states opened. im not saying all these survivors would get justice but look what happened for victims who were screwed when NY,NJ, CA, North Carolina, AR, LA, DC. They got lucky, is that your filter of justice? Dumb luck? Tell me why BSA should continue. If the BSA’s fate was in the hands of a jury on its history, how many jurors would be wanting to be the one to throw the switch? Scouting began as a movement decades before there was a BSA Scouting is the accomplishment of tens of thousands of earnest volunteers It needs to go back to its roots and I believe it will. It doesn’t need a national bureaucracy, at least not this one

I want fairness for all bona fide claimants regardless of statutes, absence of insurance or other technical defenses. only two questions: what did he/they do to you and how did it impact you? in this case the answers to those questions would play out on a bell curve with 80% of the awards within 5-10% of each other. The other 20% would fall at the ends of the curve. That’s what happens in every sexual abuse bankruptcy.

Stang and the TCC signed the RSA. What are you talking about?

By the way: you know who did NOT file any objections to the BSA plan for soliciting and notifying victims? AIS. If Kosnoff, AVA, or anyone else had a problem they could have filed objections. The insurers did. The TCC did. AIS never did. At the time AIS was represented by the TCC. The TCC represented the AIS claimants indeed all claimants interests at that time. That objection was filed on behalf of all survivors. The objection was fine and it got some of what it wanted but please don’t conflate a nation-wide noticing campaign intended to protect BSA with justice for survivors in non-window states that you apparently agree should be thrown under the bus.

C’mon CS be straight. There is nothing in the TCC objection opposing the nation-wide noticing. These were objections about the budget and the length of the claims bar period. Don’t parry with things that aren’t relevant to the point you are attempting to rebut.

Then what are they worrying about. They’ll do just fine in state court, right?