California's yearlong experiment designed to provide justice to victims of childhood sexual abuse drew to a close Wednesday, with hundreds of lawsuits having been filed against churches, charities and youth organizations across the state.
As many as 800 claims -- filed over the last year by adults who said they had been molested decades ago as children -- name Roman Catholic dioceses in California as defendants. An estimated 500 are aimed at the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the nation's largest, shifting the focus of the church sex scandal in the United States from its origins in Boston to the West Coast.
"If Boston was the beginning and the cornerstone of the scandal, California is going to be the capstone of the crisis," said Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine monk and national expert on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church who acts as a consultant to plaintiffs' attorneys.
Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said that, although many of the claims are true, most allegations are so old that proving or disproving them is difficult.
"The overwhelming majority of claims against the archdiocese are several decades old, making them virtually impossible to verify," he said. "There are likely many suits that are exaggerated or just plain false. But, sadly, there are many in which the claimed abuse did occur. There were men who used their position as a priest to commit the most awful crimes against the innocent, the trusting and the faithful."
The civil cases took on more public significance this summer after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a California law that had permitted the retroactive criminal prosecution of decades-old child molestation cases.
The Catholic Church may be the institution hardest hit by the civil suits. But other organizations have been affected as well by the state law that lifted the statute of limitations for a year so victims of childhood sexual abuse could sue employers who failed to protect them from known molesters.
"The whole notion that the law was created for the Catholic Church -- while that may be true, it has much wider consequences," said Newport Beach attorney Mark Kelegian, who has filed two dozen cases against religious organizations and community groups, including the Boys Scouts of America.
Other lawsuits name a variety of defendants, including the Explorers, the Salvation Army and the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
