SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) - The Boy Scouts of America must turn over 20 years of old personnel files to a plaintiff in a sexual abuse lawsuit to settle an authenticity dispute, a California judge ruled Friday.
Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Donna Geck ordered the Boy Scouts to give the plaintiff’s attorney the original files from 1971 to 1991. The plaintiff’s attorney had copies of those files from a third party, but the Boy Scouts had stalled in authenticating them.
The files will remain sealed to the public, and it’s unclear how many of them will actually be allowed as evidence at trial.
In court papers, attorney Tim Hale said he obtained the files from 1971 to 1991 secondhand from another attorney who tried a case against the Boy Scouts decades ago. The Boy Scouts have already authenticated similar files from 1991 to 2011 that Hale hopes to use in his civil case, which goes to trial in October.
Some of the files are “perversion files,” or P-files, and include information about Scout leaders who were accused of sexual abuse. The plaintiff, a former Scout who claims he was molested at age 13 by a volunteer Scout leader, hopes that the combined 40 years of internal files will show the Boy Scouts were aware of sexual abuse in their organization and didn’t do enough to protect and warn Scouts and their parents.
Geck has previously ruled that Hale can seek punitive damages.
On Friday, Boy Scout attorney P. Ryan Ortuno told Geck the Boy Scouts had been working in good faith with the plaintiff and had suggested narrowing the number of documents that needed to be authenticated, according to the Santa Barbara News-Press.
“Plaintiff’s counsel was not interested in that proposal,” he said.
Geck rejected that option, although she did urge Hale to give the Boy Scouts more than 30 days to turn over their files, if needed, because of the number of redactions necessary.
The Scout volunteer leader, Al Stein, ultimately pleaded no contest to two counts involving the plaintiff and another boy after the 2007 incident.
The Scouts have previously been forced to reveal large portions of files dating from 1965 to 1985 but files from 1991 to 2011 have not been made public before.
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