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[eerie music playing]
-[birds chirping] -[boys talking indistinctly]
[somber music playing]
[man] The values of the Boy Scouts of America
were taking young men and giving them a role in life.
It was different. It was a guiding tool.
[Doug Kennedy] I thought Scouts was a great thing. I really did.
It was Norman Rockwell. It was Mom, Pop, and apple pie.
Memorial Day parades,
and the Scout troops would be holding the flag.
It was America and patriotism.
[Patrick Boyle] To be a Boy Scout meant something.
It grew into the biggest youth club in America,
and maybe the most famous youth club in the world.
[music flourishes]
Your Scout law commands you to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful,
friendly, courteous, kind, obedient,
cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent.
[Christopher Haywood] Pitching tents, making fires,
cooking things on an open fire, and just sitting around telling stories.
[Doug Kennedy] Learning how to fend for yourself,
learning to cook, learning to set up a camp,
learning to identify plants… [chuckling] …and poison ivy especially.
You go to summer camp, and you learn to shoot a rifle,
and you learn archery, and you learn how to build a rope bridge,
and you learn life-saving first aid.
[Christopher Hurley] Boy Scouts, for me, just represented the best of America.
But the Boy Scouts had this dirty little secret.
It was all just veneer
to mask what was a very dangerous organization.
[ominous music playing]
[anchorwoman] Today, the Boy Scouts of America,
one of the biggest youth organizations in the country,
filed for bankruptcy protection.
The Scouts face an onslaught of lawsuits
from men who claimed they were sexually abused,
sometimes going back decades, by scoutmasters and other leaders.
[male reporter] More than 82,000 alleged victims span generations.
[music intensifies]
[Drew Tessier] People need to understand what happened. What took place.
[female reporter] A day of reckoning for the Boy Scouts of America.
[male reporter] An American institution in turmoil.
The Boy Scouts of America filing for bankruptcy.
[Tim Kosnoff] This is history's largest case of child sexual abuse
connected to one organization.
Larger than any other youth-serving organization,
larger than the Catholic Church, larger than the Southern Baptist Church.
[man 2] They wanna know what happened. They want the truth to come out.
And they want to know who knew what,
when did they know it, and how did this happen to them?
[Anthony Mandich] They don't want to face the evil that lurks within.
There's a cancer in the Boy Scouts.
[Nussbaum] This is something I held on as a secret, even after everything.
Something I never told anybody.
Not even my own children.
[dramatic music playing]
I got a text from one of my children today.
They said, "I wanna let you know I'm very proud of what you're doing."
"And I know it's not easy,
but, uh, I'm proud of you."
[Kosnoff] This is a human rights movement we're talking about today.
A civil rights movement for children
against one of the biggest offenders in the world, the Boy Scouts of America.
I don't care if I bring the whole temple down
on everybody's heads.
I will not stand for this.
This is an abomination.
[dramatic music playing]
[music fades]
[birds chirping in distance]
I am Detective Mike,
former detective of the City of Plano Police Department.
I became a detective,
and I got on the SWAT team about the same time in '86.
Always investigated crimes against children.
[Johnson] Hello.
Hi.
[Johnson] So, a child- and family-friendly room like this is where
any police detective or an advocate for a victim, child or teen,
that has experienced any type of abuse or sexual abuse,
this is where we sit and talk to them, interview them.
This is huge, this whole area for all police departments.
Uh, that commitment to the, you know,
that victim-sensitive trauma-informed care, uh,
that we provide to families and victims after they've experienced,
what for many of them is arguably, the worst, uh, experiences of their life.
For 16 years, I did nothing but investigate child sexual abuse.
So I've interviewed a lot of kids, varying ages,
and interrogated a lot of perpetrators, talked to a lot of parents,
been to a lot of crime scenes,
as well as worked on some things federally and nationally
with two different administrations.
[interviewer] Before we get into what happened later,
I mean, just start with when you were first hired by the Boy Scouts.
You were the youth protection director at national headquarters.
Uh, why did you decide to take the job?
So I will, uh, you know, I always ask people when I get asked that,
"Do you want the truth, or what I was told to say?" [laughing]
I mean, just-- You know, so-- I'm gonna tell you the truth, all right?
-[interviewer] I actually wanna know both. -You wanna-- Okay.
I wanna tell you the truth. How's that? I can do the truth.
[gentle, intriguing music playing]
[Johnson] When I started in 2010
as youth protection director for the Boy Scouts of America,
I was excited.
I was pumped.
I was a little anxious because, you know, what is it?
This was the first position like this
for any major youth-serving organization, or any youth-serving organization ever,
especially somebody with my background and skill sets.
I thought I was going to work to keep kids safe in a major institution.
The Boy Scouts are, at the national level,
and even at the council level, all about the brand.
It's a beautiful brand.
Boy Scouts of America conjures up parades, and apple pie,
American flag, you know, and all that.
And they don't like anything too negative that's associated with the brand.
So I come in and I say, "Okay. We're a high-risk organization,"
just as a general discussion point, because it is.
"What can we do to keep kids safe,
given that we're a high-risk organization?"
You are a youth-serving organization.
You're the Boy Scouts of America youth-serving organization. All right?
You have no choice.
You have to be beyond reproach on something as very basic as that.
[interviewer] What were they telling you to say?
Oh, that Boy Scouts of America is safe.
That Boy Scouts of America is the gold standard.
That Boy Scouts of America has a rigorous application of screening process.
That the Boy Scouts of America conducts criminal background checks
of all of its leaders.
Uh, you know, that the youth protection program is better and by far
than any other, uh, youth-serving organization program.
[interviewer] They wanted you to project their image of safety.
-Market this image of safety. -That's not what you were seeing though.
That's totally not what I'm seeing.
I became aware that they weren't telling me everything.
They were withholding information.
[eerie music playing]
[papers rustling]
[Boyle] I kind of stumbled onto the story just out of pure curiosity
as a reporter.
I had read a news brief in the New York Times back in the '80s
about one Scout leader being convicted of abusing Scouts.
And I clipped the brief out and put it in my ideas file that every reporter has,
and I forgot about it.
Then years later, I was working in Washington
and read in my own newspaper about a lawsuit in Virginia
in which a boy, who had been molested by a Scout leader, had sued the Scouts.
And, as a part of that lawsuit,
the Boy Scouts had to turn over to this-- the lawyer for the boy
confidential files about people who had been kicked out of Scouting
for alleged child molestation.
And I said, "Wow."
I went over to Virginia naively
with one legal pad in my hand to look at the files.
I figured I'd spend a few hours there. And I began reading them and taking notes.
And I quickly realized there is a lot more information here than I even imagined.
I was blown away by opening these files.
Oh, this is from Scouting in 1923. I've never seen this.
So, these are pages from Scouting magazine in the 1920s
where the Scouts have actually written about people kicked out from Scouting.
"Red flag--" There's a headline here. "Red-flag this man."
"Warning." Wow.
The Confidential Files, as they're known,
really began back in England right at the beginning.
Soon after the Scouts were founded in England in 1908,
the Scouts there realized they had a problem
because Scouting has always attracted men who are attracted to boys.
The struggle for the company has been to keep them out and keep it quiet.
And these efforts started back in England
when they had to kick out the doctor
at the very first Boy Scout camp in the world.
In the United States, they created, what they called, the Red Flag List.
There was a Times story in 1935 where they talked about the Red Flag List.
This Red Flag List in the United States
eventually evolved into what they call the "Ineligible Volunteer File."
But in the Scouts they call it the Confidential Files,
and for very good reason because they intended to keep everything confidential.
Some people called it the "perversion files."
During that time, we didn't know how many files there were.
I had the 231 original files,
plus I supplemented it with my own information.
These files were so sensitive
that the Boy Scouts did everything they could to make sure
that they could not be seen by parents,
by police, by prosecutors, even by other Scout leaders.
They had it under lock and key in national headquarters.
And they knew how sensitive this was.
The Boy Scouts knew that for this product to sell well,
that they had to have the highest integrity among the Boy Scout leaders.
So, parents were convinced
that when you put your boy in the hands of the Boy Scouts,
you are handing them over to the most responsible men,
the most honest men, the men of the highest integrity.
So, not only was your boy safe,
but these men were great role models for your child.
I have to suspect part of it was also strategic.
They didn't want to open this up
because if they started talking very bluntly about sex abuse in Scouting,
it might scare parents, scare sponsors, and they didn't need that.
'Cause they were doing fine. The program was making money, lots of Scouts.
I was just stunned by the fact that I would talk to Boy Scout officials
about my discoveries in the files, and I was giving them news.
I knew things about abuse in Scouting that nobody in Scouting claimed to know.
I knew what your numbers were. I knew what the patterns were.
I knew where your vulnerabilities were.
They were naive about sex abuse in general,
but they had essentially a product defect that they were ignoring.
And it was that this organization was built in a way
that molesters could get in, abuse kids and get away with it.
[eerie music playing]
When I first did the story and said there were 400 cases,
people told me I was making a big thing out of nothing.
That, really, there's not that many cases.
I got a lot of angry letters from people saying,
"You're smearing the Boy Scouts over a problem that's minuscule."
People kept using that word.
"How dare you accuse the Scouts of this. You're trying to ruin this organization."
You really had to go out on a limb
to make a public accusation against the Boy Scouts
because you were accusing, usually, a respected community leader
of what many people would consider the worst crime imaginable.
But there is a truth there,
and even if it's an inconvenient truth, I'm gonna get at the truth.
And I ended up being one of the ways that these files became public.
Every file was stunning first because of the story that it tells.
But collectively, they told a different kind of story.
I'll give you an example.
It wasn't unusual for a leader to get into the Scouts after having been banned.
Thomas Hacker was based primarily in Illinois.
[ominous music playing]
[children's voices echo in distance]
[Mark Eaton] Our troop, we did a lot of campouts.
We did a lot of camping.
At the time, it was just, uh, a nice guy that was taking an interest in me
and wanted to get to know me.
He became a leader, and then ultimately became our scoutmaster of the troop.
He was deacon of the church.
He was very much so a authoritarian figure in my life growing up.
It took me until I was in my early 40s
to realize I was a victim, and I hadn't done something wrong.
[voice breaking] That somehow at 10, I should have known better.
Somehow, at about 11 or 12,
I should have been able to see what this guy was doing.
Somehow at 13 or 14, I should have said something.
[thunder rumbles]
The touching, it was pretty much every campout.
There's, you know, six to eight kids in there,
and everybody's pants down.
It was a tough conversation.
I really didn't tell my parents much.
I gave them enough of what they needed, but I didn't go into details.
Just feeling…
Like, dude, you-- you…
[sighs]
You took my childhood.
You took my… my growing up.
I was so angry.
I was never really good at controlling my temper.
And just being frustrated and…
punching holes in walls.
Eagle Scout is the highest rank in Boy Scouts.
It's a pretty big achievement.
And it's just this big ceremony, at times solemn.
You get dignitaries, state senators,
or the local mayor come in and give a speech.
-[interviewer] He's there watching this. -Mm-hmm.
How do you take this award ceremony and then try to tie it together
with this hidden-in-plain-sight type of abuse that's going on?
[sad music playing]
I want to take some of the stigma away from it, from boys being victims.
I don't care what anybody says, there's still a very bad stigma
about a boy being a victim of sexual abuse by another male.
I want to take that stigma away because it's not the boy's fault.
[reporter] A South Suburban scoutmaster is in jail tonight on $500,000 bond,
charged with sexually abusing three boys in his troop.
Thomas Hacker faces five counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault.
The boys were members of a scout troop at an Oak Lawn church.
Hacker began working as a scoutmaster for the troop eight years ago.
[Christopher Hurley] Hacker was, in fact, in the IV Files.
When he was discovered at the time,
he was the most prolific pedophile
in the history of… maybe of America, or of the world, honestly.
He-- He had molested hundreds of boys.
And they knew that.
And they knew he used their organization to do that.
[Boyle] He would abuse kids, get caught, say, "I'll get help."
"Please don't charge me with a crime. I'll go away." And he'd go away.
And he'd move to another town or move on to another youth group.
[Hurley] This was full sexual, oral, anal,
sexual abuse on dozens of occasions for many of them,
and in group settings.
The extent of notice that the Scouting organization had
as to his propensity to molest boys was off the charts.
I'd never taken the deposition of a serial pedophile,
and I didn't know what to expect.
My question to him is, "Why did you choose the Boy Scouts?"
And he said, "Because they made it so easy."
They did nothing. They-- They did nothing to put up barriers for him.
And he knew it, and he used it.
We represent 4,000 victims.
The thing I've learned, from now the bankruptcy
and all the other clients I represent, is that there are more Hackers out there.
There are more that have managed not to get caught.
It takes incredible courage for guys to come forward, and they've-- And…
I'm…
I'm… I'm proud of every single one of them.
It's not easy, and…
You know, you-- you worry…
You know, the burden, you know-- The burden I carry is, you know,
disa-- is possibly disappointing them, so I don't want that.
[birds chirping]
[Johnson] "Sexual abuse." Those two words are kind of PG.
It's easy to say.
People are uncomfortable with sexual abuse.
People don't wanna visualize that these young men, and now men,
that are on this lawsuit were having sex with men in their cars,
in tents, at their house.
I say these things,
and I'm not trying to say 'em to incite you,
but that's what sexual abuse is.
We're talking about these men
who have experienced or suffered X-rated activities
as children in the Scouting program, and who are they gonna talk to about it?
They're still grappling with their own internal experiences,
demons, some of them, with what happened.
My full name is Douglas Kennedy.
I go by Doug.
[melancholy music playing]
My father passed away from cancer when I was 13 months old.
Never knew him.
My mother never remarried.
And this was back in the day
when being a single parent wasn't as common as it was today.
There were a lot of days where we didn't really know
where the next meal was gonna come from, but we were proud.
Eventually, my mother, in the summertime,
got me involved with the YMCA and working at a YMCA day camp.
Around that same time,
I was pretty active in-- in the Boy Scouts.
It was meaningful to me in my life.
But the Scouting movement as a whole, it was fun,
and I thought it had the right mission.
I'm quoted in Boys' Life. "Set the table for lunch."
"'Hamburgers ready in three minutes,' Doug Kennedy shouted."
And my picture's there.
I can still see… the window.
There's a porch to the lodge.
Bare light bulb light shines through. I go to sleep like it's any other night.
[sad, eerie music playing]
And I woke up in the middle of the night,
and the camp director had…
pulled the sleeping bag back.
He had pulled my shorts down.
And…
his head was down in my crotch,
and his legs were up wrapped around my head.
And when I say "wrapped around my head," he was naked.
Wrapped around my head, and I-- I could not move.
He was bigger than me, wiry, strong for his size.
And I remember thinking, "What's going on?"
Like this is a joke or funny or something.
And then I realize that he has me in his mouth.
I'm trying to get his legs off from around my head,
and I can't do it.
It's always about power. It's a power dynamic.
He has the power over me, and he knows it on so many levels.
He's my employer.
He's the person who's putting food on the table, the person my mother trusts.
He's the person everybody else is gonna believe.
If I had said anything,
the solution would have been I would have been sent home.
You disassociate.
It's almost like you're looking at yourself.
It's part of a mechanism to say, "Something bad is happening to you."
"But let's get our head somewhere else."
You're separating from the physical part of this.
[voice breaking] But what happened to me…
just took something away.
It felt like forever.
It's a moment in time that's burned into my head.
[morose string music playing]
[Haywood] Christopher Haywood.
Grew up on the South Side of Chicago.
My abuse lasted nine years.
It would continue till I was 18.
Being told by him, "No one will believe you. You're a kid."
"And what I'll say, people will believe. They wouldn't believe you."
So, that type of thing has-- has stuck in my mind,
so even him making threats, you know, of hurting somebody close to me.
It could be my mother, my sisters.
Going to the point where he'd say "killing."
Just hearing that as a child, it messes with your psyche.
I just felt at the time just not to say nothing,
just to make sure everybody was all right.
[Tom Krumins] In my case, he was an older Scout
that had been bullying people.
I tried to say, "Can you leave? I don't want to be here."
And that's when he pulled out the knife.
I tried to push past him once, um…
He pressed the knife right here.
Barely pierced the skin, but that was enough.
I-- I knew I was powerless.
As he was assaulting me, he kept saying,
"You're nothing, and you're never gonna be nothing."
That shame became mine. And it's still there.
And when something goes wrong,
it confirms in my mind what I have always known to be true:
I am nothing, and I'm never gonna be nothing.
That's what the assault did.
My abuse happened about 200 yards away from my mother, my father,
and hundreds, if not thousands, of Scouts and parents.
It was that close.
The-- The weight of it was too high.
I couldn't handle it.
[sniffles]
In senior year of college, I'd climb to the top
of, uh, one of the research buildings on campus.
Um, it was a place I'd snuck up to a lot.
[chuckling] And it was kind of…
Uh, it had a great view of the city. And, um, while I was up there, I…
wanted to jump.
I tried to convince myself to do it, and I just couldn't get that--
I think that strength, honestly, to-- to do what I needed.
And so, I looked at my watch, which this is what I had on.
And it read 12:32.
And I tried to trick myself into doing it.
I said, "Okay, well, when this hits 12:33, I'm just gonna do it."
"Um, it's not gonna be my choice. It's just, snap, that's the moment."
And I took off the watch, and I was trying to work up the courage,
and, you know, bang my hand against the wall,
and I was trying to…
[inhales] …I don't know, find a way to do the thing I was too afraid to do.
And in the act of that, I broke the watch.
And it never got to 12:33.
[Johnson] Interesting story about that picture of me as a Cub Scout.
My mother died,
and my father had al-- had already passed away,
and we had to pack everything up
and put it into storage to get rid of the, you know, sell our house.
Years later, within a month of me going to work for the Boy Scouts of America,
I went to the storage room,
knew the quilts would be in this big cedar cabinet, opened it up,
pulled one of the quilts out,
and literally being protected by the quilt,
whoever put it in there, put it between--
was that picture which I'd never seen before.
So I felt like it was, you know, kind of a thing,
that this was something that was destined to be,
destined to happen.
I thought when I started with the Boy Scouts
that I was gonna get support and, "Mike, here's what you need to know."
"Boom, here's the stack. You need to start going through this."
[chuckling] "This is our history, this is what we do, and why we do it."
The desk was clear. Nothing.
So, I literally went to my then boss, VP level, Jim Terry,
and I said, "Is there any standard-of-care type documents?"
He says, "No, no, Mike. I'm not aware."
[intriguing music playing]
So, I reached out to a colleague of mine at the Center for Disease Control.
She works in the division of violence prevention.
I said, "Hey, is there a standard-of-care document for youth-serving organizations?"
She said, "Oh, yeah, Mike. Boy Scouts participated in it." I'm like, "What?"
So, she sends me the document I just referred to.
So as soon as I get it, I start reading through it.
I get to the back, the participant list.
And it literally-- I think the second or third name on there is James Terry,
Boy Scouts of America.
So, I take this doc--
[interviewer] This is what he's telling you they don't have.
Never heard of it. Like it doesn't-- You know, so I take that book.
Literally, it's a book. I take it to his office.
I'm like, "Uh, Jim, would you explain this to me?"
And he basically just tells me, "Well, I really didn't participate in it."
"It was a man by the name of Doug Smith. They just put my name on it."
I'm like, "Did you know it existed?" He goes, "Yeah, I knew it existed."
"Well, who is Doug Smith?"
He was a national staff person at the national headquarters
of Boy Scouts of America there in Irving, who got arrested in a child porn sting.
I'm like, "Excuse me? What?"
We prepared, uh, materials
to… to help, uh, local councils and local units,
uh, provide safe programs for children.
[reporter] What were the circumstances under which you ceased
working for the BSA?
[inhales] Uh… I… Uh…
I submitted my letter of retirement after the police had come to my house.
[dramatic music playing]
[Johnson] Federal child porn sting.
Went to prison.
Here I am, I'm the new youth protection director.
They never told me about this guy.
[music fades]
They were withholding information.
I go, "Wait a minute, how am I gonna protect kids in their organization
if I don't have access to the information about kids in their organization?"
So, I guess that's an organizational decision that they made.
Well, to me, to help me figure out what the policies, procedures,
the content needs to be, I need that information.
My frustrations in Scouting, I'm going into these meetings sometimes,
or sometimes I'm literally going to the general counsel,
because I'm reporting to him.
[tense, morose music playing]
I was the general counsel of the Boy Scouts of America.
Both youth protection and membership standards came under me
until some point during the bankruptcy, at which point we moved it over.
I came in as a kid.
Went through all Scouting. I'm an Eagle Scout.
When my son came of age,
he became a Scout leader and was a leader in a unit.
I would tell you that we're a microcosm of our entire society.
If we had a problem, our society had a problem,
many other institutions had the problem.
We just happened to be the one with the deep pocket right now.
And the one that's willing to make the social commitment
to try to make it right and to try to apologize,
to try to do everything we can to keep kids safe,
and to try to compensate for these victims.
But then to continue the mission.
And many of the survivors are very clear.
They want Scouting to continue because of the good it did.
And we want to continue to do that.
[interviewer] Michael Johnson was a youth protection director of the Boy Scouts.
He said that the organization is still not safe for boys or girls.
How do you respond to that?
Shocked.
Personally, very, very disappointed.
He never expressed that sentiment.
He approved and, on a number of occasions while he worked for the Boy Scouts,
championed our program and how effective our safe-- youth safety programs were.
He and I worked very closely together on developing many of our new, current,
modern youth protections, and we did not have many disagreements.
I remember him saying that he felt that we supported--
I supported the reforms that he was suggesting
more than he had felt anyone had done before.
[interviewer] He tells a different story. He basically says that he's frustrated
trying to put some of these youth protection programs in place,
and that he's getting resistance.
[sputters] All I can tell you is I was shocked.
[Johnson] I don't know how else to put it. He's lying.
I can put it-- I guess there's a softer term.
Uh… B-- Being deceptive, not telling the truth.
How-- Whatever term is comfortable, uh, you know, for people.
Uh, the fact is, especially in the last three or four years,
he and I were constantly, uh, battling.
Contentious on each various item
that I was trying to get through with Scouting.
Uh, I literally referred to it as the gauntlet.
The messaging he wants out there is,
is that Boy Scouts is like any other organization in America,
and that these guys could come from anywhere,
and there's nothing we can do to prevent them.
All of that is not true.
Boy Scouts is exceptional in the opportunities that it presents
to perpetrators to access children in no to very low supervised situations.
Name another youth-serving organization
that has overnight access to kids over multiple days.
Name another organization that a scoutmaster has the power
over whether or not this youth can become an Eagle Scout.
Now you back up a little bit and you think to yourself,
"How easy is it to get into Scouting?"
And so now you start to see where those weaknesses are.
It's removing those risk areas, known risk areas,
that helps you create this safer environment
for kids who participate in the Scouting programs.
[dog barks in distance]
You talk to a lot of these young men, they'll tell you,
"My parents dropped me off at his house."
We've had cases where the adult stayed the night at the kid's house.
[tense music playing]
[Boyle] Troop 137 in New Orleans was a nightmare for the Boy Scouts
in a very special way.
It was one of the few cases where you could say
a troop had actually become a sex ring.
Several men became leaders of a troop in New Orleans,
specifically to get access to boys to molest.
They literally recruited boys into this troop.
And they had sex parties at their houses.
They took pictures of the boys naked.
They traded pictures with other pedophiles around the country.
[Richard Windmann] I grew up in New Orleans back in the '70s.
My parents separated very early so,
uh, my brother and I lived with my mom.
Two men, they approached my mom.
They told her that they were in the, uh, neighborhood
looking for new Scouts for their new troop.
They agreed to pay for everything "because you're a single mom."
"So don't worry about the cost or anything."
Boy Scouts of America should never let a bunch of single men start a troop.
There were four primary leaders.
Tom Woodall,
Lewis Sialle,
Richard Halvorsen,
and Harry Cramer.
They take you out to eat.
They bring you to the trampoline park to help Mom out.
-[woman talking indistinctly] -[Windmann chuckles] Sea monkeys.
[sighs] My mom wouldn't buy me any for Christmas.
And so Harry Cramer, uh, said, you know,
"Uh, you can have sea monkeys, but they have to be at my house."
"You can't tell Mom."
[eerie music playing]
None of the scoutmasters had children of their own.
And, you know, I'm not old enough to be a Boy Scout.
There was a lot of red flags that should have been caught.
The boys came from single-parent homes.
They were all poor.
There was never merit badge work to do.
You know, we did campouts, but that was just, you know,
a convenient thing to do where you can rape a kid.
So, it appeared on the outside like we were actually a real troop,
but we weren't.
Men would fly from out of town, from all over.
Mostly Western Europe, but all over the United States as well.
And we were raped by them as well.
We were-- We were sold to them, you know, rented out, whatever you want to call it.
And, uh, they always took, uh, pictures and videos of us all the time.
They would bring you to hotels primarily in the French Quarter.
In fact, uh, my mom dropped me off at the hotels a couple of times.
[interviewer] What did she think was happening?
Just visiting a scoutmaster from out of town.
Especially when it's done to you by authority figures,
you don't trust anybody.
You're hurtin'.
You don't want to go to school the next day.
You cry when nobody can see you.
My mom, she brought me to a doctor.
He was an older gentleman.
[chuckling] Always had a cigarette in his mouth.
And I don't know why, but I trusted the doctor.
You know, he pulled up his chair, and he said, "What's goin' on?"
I-- I told him about the rape.
Um, he said, "Who's raping you?"
I said, "A lot of people are raping me in the Boy Scouts." [chuckles]
And he was like, "Get me their information."
"And I'll take care of it."
"Nobody will know it's you."
-[melancholy music playing] -[sirens wailing]
They raided the houses, got the kiddie porn, arrested them.
So, it hits the Nightly News.
[people clamoring]
The aggressive, cruel, crass nature
of these violations is such that these little minds
are going to be affected for a long, long time.
[Windmann] When I got older,
I was one of the first people to get a copy of the perversion files.
It was leaked to me.
And just reading through all of it
and what they knew was going on at the time,
and they did nothing about it,
it makes you angry.
[interviewer] Did you ever get an apology or attempt to make amends from the Scouts?
[Windmann] Never.
-[interviewer] Nothing? -Never.
Mm.
How do you feel about that?
Pissed off. Angry.
Angry. Very angry.
[interviewer] What failures do you think the Boy Scouts made
that could've contributed to the scope of that problem?
[McGowan] I think it's bigger than the Boy Scouts.
Remember, the Boy Scouts of America did not abuse these kids.
We had some bad people that got in.
-We read about-- -People under the banner of Boy Scouts…
-We have school-- -…or were volunteers at the Boy Scouts.
-Scoutmasters… -[McGowan] Sure.
…or people that were largely involved with the program.
-That's what this number represents. -[McGowan] Well, they're people.
Just like schoolteachers and everybody else. There are bad people.
There's no way to profile them ahead of time
and to identify people ahead of time.
All you can do is use a program like we do,
which is to keep kids as safe as we can and to continually improve that.
And to try to continually, you know, improve our efforts.
But nobody has a profile of a would-be abuser
that you can apply as a litmus test to keep someone out.
[Boyle] The Confidential Files do show you the risky situations
for the Scouts.
What situations are likely, or more likely,
to expose your boys to somebody
who wants to molest them, regardless of who that person is.
I went down to Texas to talk to the Boy Scouts down at headquarters.
I'm interviewing the guy whose name and stamp
is on the front page of just about every Confidential File.
His signature is right next to where they describe the incident
in a couple lines.
Joe Anglim says to me he's never read a Confidential File.
-Never read it? -Never read it.
I said, "I've got hundreds of files with your name on it."
He said, "But I don't read them."
I said, "Did you ever count your files or analyze them
to learn about sex abuse in Scouting?"
He says, "No." And I said, "Why not?"
He said, "Because nobody's told us we have a problem,
and that we have to do that."
I said, "How would you know you have a problem unless you read the files?"
And he said, "Because we know we don't have a problem,
because we have a great program,
and we don't have any reason to believe we have a problem."
"So we didn't look at the files and study them because nobody said we should,
and we didn't ask anybody to look at them because we didn't think we had a problem."
-That's the response. -That was the response.
[melancholy music playing]
[Johnson] One of the things they had in their marketing messaging
that used to drive me nuts is,
"The Boy Scouts has a rigorous application and screening process."
Like, that's bullshit.
And it's not true. That's never been true.
I said, "Why don't we at least use a government ID?"
You have to use it to buy groceries, right, show your ID.
You have to use it to get on the airplane. Show your ID.
What don't we at least check a government-based ID,
driver's license or passport
or state identif-- identification card to see and make sure?
And, uh, they refused to do that.
-They refused to do that? -Inconvenience and cost.
[interviewer] They didn't want to check a government ID
on scoutmasters or volunteers.
[Johnson] They didn't want to check a government ID
on scoutmasters or volunteers interacting with your children.
[interviewer] Because it was inconvenient.
And cost.
[interviewer] And whatever cost it'd take for that person's time to check the ID.
Yes.
Whether the information is to identify fugitives
or criminal history records.
[Boyle] The Boy Scouts stood out
in their opposition to the Child Protection Act.
Most of the big youth organizations supported it.
And it reflected the Boy Scouts' fear of two things.
One of which was spending more money, because they had a lot of volunteers.
And two, they didn't want to spend the money on-- on the fingerprint checks.
But also, the Scouts really kept resisting putting added requirements
on the local organizations in order to weed out child molesters.
Because they felt there was only so much they could do.
And because they always were in dire need of volunteers,
they didn't want to scare away volunteers.
[Johnson] I'll never forget, a chief Scout executive I was working under at the time
literally caught me in the hallway and said, "Well-- Well, Mike, you know,
we were told by our lawyers
and our risk management people, or whomever, that--
"Don't contact the parents if there's an allegation of child sex abuse."
I said, "Sir, well, I guess you need to make a decision."
"You can listen to them, or you can listen to me."
"I'll tell you this, I know what the hell I'm talking about."
[chuckling] One of the many big arguments I had with general counsel is
I insisted on anybody that's placed on the IV File,
perversion file, or volunteer screening database, whatever it's called,
for anything that has to do with sexual abuse of a child,
allegation, grooming, whatever, needs to be reported to law enforcement.
Well, he comes into my office, he was very upset.
"The law doesn't mandate that we report all these allegations of abuse
unless there's reasonable suspicion that there's sexual abuse."
[interviewer] We've found lots of examples where in these files, time and again,
the scoutmasters are told not to tell parents
or not to tell law enforcement about abuse.
And we have a lot of first-hand experience about the people telling us this too.
When mistakes were made, mistakes were made.
And if people did that, they were wrong, and we failed.
And I'm ho-- I know we're doing better, and I hope we'll continue to do better.
But the fact is, people sometimes have made mistakes.
[interviewer] Just to be clear, that's wrong.
If kids were repeatedly told not to tell authorities or parents…
-[McGowan] Absolutely wrong. -…that is wrong.
We train kids to do just the other, and have for the last 20 years or more.
[interviewer] Be clear what you train kids to do.
[McGowan] Resist. Report.
Know what the barriers to abuse are,
and to make sure that those barriers to abuse are respected
by the adult leaders they work with.
[interviewer] Report means go straight to law enforcement.
Well, for a Scout, it means go to a trusted adult.
Could be a parent, could be a leader.
[sputters] But they're trained to go to someone they're comfortable enough with
to tell the information to.
And from there, the trusted adult is responsible
for making the communication both to law enforcement and to the BSA.
[Johnson] The perpetrator who's sexually abusing the youth
or sexually harassing them or bothering them
is typically what was formerly a trusted adult.
My recommendation was to create a hotline,
uh, that kids could call on their own.
There's been some wonderful research that kids of today, especially,
really use a text and chat feature for anonymous reporting.
Because the fact is, while some kids will tell their parents,
some kids will tell what they identify as a trusted adult,
most kids want to kind of figure things out for themselves.
You know, they got these computers in their hands now,
uh, especially the older teens.
But when I took that proposal to Steve McGowan
and the then-vice president John Mosby,
it was, like, not "No," but "Hell no."
"We just want kids reporting to their trusted adults, to scoutmasters."
[Kennedy] The Boy Scouts, over the years, have had
what they call their youth protection policies.
They have evolved over time.
One of the cornerstones of their youth protection
is two-deep leadership.
No Scout is ever going to be alone with another person.
There's been a number of other changes that have happened over time,
but it obviously hasn't worked.
[Boyle] When they developed their protection training,
their education materials for kids,
they developed some really nice programs, uh, and videotapes
for the leaders and for the kids about sex abuse.
For a long time, they didn't require kids or leaders to go through that training.
I said, "Why don't you require it?" They said, "It's more work."
"But we'll make it available."
What's interesting about this is they'd tell parents and the media,
"Well, we developed this great child protection program
that goes out to the kids and the-- and the leaders."
And people assume everybody goes through it, but it wasn't true.
[Johnson] One of the things I used to get from our old general counsel was,
"Well, we have to be careful of defaming anybody's character."
And I said, "Well, have you ever-- Has the organization ever been sued
for making a report of child sex abuse?"
Guess what?
Zero.
We've never been sued.
And on top of that…
[chuckling] …I think we'd be in a better position if we did report.
I'd rather defend ourselves for trying to protect kids
than have it not reported and have to explain why we never told anybody.
What better way to protect the community
than to make sure to report it to law enforcement?
I am hardwired to protect my community.
That's what I did in law enforcement. That whole "protect and serve" thing?
I hope you can tell where I'm gonna stand on-- on that issue.
We're talking kids.
We're talking people's children.
Okay?
[Boyle] The early Scout movement was built largely on religion.
It is almost a religious movement, even though it's technically secular.
The Boy Scout program was set up in a way that was perfect for religions
to adopt it as their youth program.
And, in fact, religions became the foundation of Scouting.
You could be a Mormon, a Catholic,
you could be Jewish, you could be of Islamic faith.
When you've read a few hundred of the Confidential Files,
it becomes a little bit hard to be shocked anymore.
One of the cases that really shocked me was the case of Christopher Schultz.
[ominous organ music playing]
Christopher went to a local Catholic school where brother Edmund--
He was a Catholic brother, was a teacher.
Brother Edmund was also the head of the local Scout troop,
which Christopher belonged to.
So he was the scoutmaster, and he was the teacher.
[Schultz] It's like this bad intersection of crossroads is what we got sucked into.
And he was good at being able to pick out his prey and isolate,
and do whatever he was looking to do.
I was a-- a target,
but to be used as leverage for the real target, which was my brother.
And my brother was his-- uh, was his preferred, uh, victim.
[Boyle] He'd been at their house. They trusted him.
So, they go up to this camp over the weekend.
Brother Edmund commits some pretty serious
sadomasochistic sex acts on Christopher.
[Schultz] He started to, uh, break down and have panic attacks,
and he started to go through bouts of hallucinations,
auditory and visual, for the rest of that year.
He could see and hear Brother Edmund reminding him not to tell anybody,
you know, otherwise he was gonna kill him.
This is the first time I've gotten out of the car and walked this area.
And it-- it's hard.
It's a time that I wish I could forget and erase.
And it reminds me of a period of my life that I lost.
It's one of the last pictures of my brother and I.
That would have been probably May of '78, I think I was saying.
Uh, so I was in eighth grade.
So it would be, like, our eighth grade graduation.
Even though it's small, it's probably the last formal picture of my brother.
I was supposed to look after my little brother, to protect him.
[Boyle] Christopher Schultz epitomized
the worst thing that could happen to a family in an abuse case.
Not only was your son abused,
but he was so emotionally distraught that he took his own life.
Brother Edmund was kicked out of the church and fled the state.
What happened to the Schultzs was they were also ostracized
by part of their community, by people from the church.
In several of the cases in Scouting,
people say that people in the Scouting community called them
or saw them at meetings and said, "How dare you accuse the Scouts of this?"
"You're trying to ruin this organization."
[Schultz] We were 100% shunned.
I remember one of the parish priests coming to the house
when my father was at work, sitting down, talking to my mother,
trying to leverage and pressure her to drop all this stuff.
If we didn't drop it, "You're gonna be run out of town."
"And there's nothing I can do about it. I'm trying to help you."
"All you have to do is stop what you're doing."
"If you don't, bad stuff will happen to you and your family."
"Do you really want that to happen, Mrs. Schultz?"
The length certain people were going to, to try and get you to shut up
and-- and get this to go away to protect the Church.
To me, the hypocrisy of both organizations are what got me the angriest.
I hold them accountable.
There is blood on their hands.
[Boyle] Religious leaders were on the board of directors of the Scouts.
If you think of the Boy Scouts as a corporation,
these Church leaders that are on the board of directors
are essentially their investors.
[intriguing music playing]
[Johnson] All the boys in the Mormon church,
I'm not talking about just in one state,
nationally, in the United States, go through Scouting.
That is their youth ministry, whereas the other churches,
it was dependent on the Catholic Church's diocese
if they had a Scouting program,
or the Methodists, or Episcopalians, or what have you.
For the Mormons, all boys went through it.
So, that is a significant membership, as well as volunteer,
as well as money contribution and resource issue.
[Jon Conte] Scouts are an independent organization,
but felt that they had to honor the biases or perspectives of their sponsors.
And the Catholic Church, and the Mormon Church,
is historically homophobic.
[Randall Hoenig] In 1978, they officially put in their ban on homosexuals.
That was the first time the Boy Scouts stepped in
and put on a requirement like that.
The thought was it would end all these pedophile cases that were springing up.
[Kathryn Robb] Outside people will say who the perpetrator is.
"Oh, it's a gay problem." Right? Gays are pedophiles.
There's research that most perpetrators are straight men.
I also think homophobia plays a really big role
in why a lot of men can't come forward.
It plays into their shame and pain and struggle.
[Drew Tessier] My abuse took place when I was 12.
I came forward when I was 13.
Growing up in the '90s as an abuse victim, as a closeted homosexual,
when the organization was still very outwardly homophobic,
this is the worst thing that you could be as a man.
When I told a teacher about what happened, I was immediately told,
"You've done the right thing. This is a good thing."
"Now, this hasn't made you question your sexuality, has it?"
"Because, you know, uh, being gay is-- is a terrible sin."
The initial letter that my abuser, Dr. Crosley, wrote me was,
"Yes, I'm sorry."
"But this doesn't make you gay, and this doesn't make me gay."
I think it takes years to shed the shame that is, you know,
sort of heaped on you directly or indirectly your entire life.
I don't think there was a separation in people's minds
between pedophilia and homosexuality.
[Johnson] One of the first national meetings I went to,
I was walking with one of the assistant chief Scout execs,
who commented that homosexuals are pedophiles,
and that's our primary problem in Boy Scouts with youth protection.
And I said, "Uh, no, no." Yeah. And, like, he goes,
"Yeah, Mike. You need to understand that homosexuals are pedophiles."
I'm like, "No, they're not." And he's like, "Mike, no, yes, they are."
Understand, this is a VP-level assistant chief Scout executive saying this to me.
I'm like, "No, they're not." I said, "Who do you think--"
[chuckling] "I mean, you realize that's my whole world, okay?"
"It's interviewing victims and interrogating perpetrators."
"If they were, I would tell you. All right? But that's not the issue."
[interviewer] Here's someone at the top level conflating
homosexuality and pedophilia.
Not only at the very top level, he wasn't the only one.
This was a reoccurring theme.
[interviewer] More than one person told us in the organization,
even at the very top levels, homosexuality was equated with pedophilia.
Was that belief common among leadership in the Scouts,
that there was a connection here?
I can't speak to what they thought. But I think--
Well, you can attest to what the tone is inside the leadership
and what was being said.
-You were there at that-- at that time. -No, I never experienced that in my time.
I experienced it in my life for many years as I grew up in society,
and communities, and churches, and things like that.
That there were a number of common misperceptions.
But I never experienced that while I was in Scouting.
-Do you believe there's a link? -No.
Did the focus for so long on gay Scout leaders
lead the organization down the wrong path?
In other words, away from solving the problems of abuse?
I can't answer that. I don't know.
-Is that a distraction from the problem? -No. I don't think so.
-You don't think it was a distraction? -No.
[birds chirping]
[Johnson] I remember thinking
this organization is focused more on getting gays out
than protecting kids from child molesters.
They think getting gays out is protecting kids from child molesters,
and they're, like, going down the completely wrong path.
Then I learned about the Dale decision. [chuckles]
The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments today
over banning gays from being Boy Scout leaders.
The issue is a New Jersey Court's ruling
that it violates a state anti-discrimination law.
[reporter] Is not being a homosexual a core issue to being a Scout?
The message of the Boy Scouts is what kind of behavior boys should engage in,
and that's morally straight and clean behavior.
[interviewer] Why did Boy Scouts defend this so rigorously in the Dale decision
that went all the way to the Supreme Court?
-I wasn't there or part of the decision. -You were a lawyer and general counsel.
No, I can't tell you what happened in 1990, 2000, whenever.
Whichever year that decision was.
You have no thoughts on why they went to the Supreme Court
to defend-- to defend the right to discriminate against gay Scout leaders?
Well, I think that…
[chuckles] …it reflected the values of the organization at the time.
Which have changed, as have society's values.
Homosexuality was considered by the organization
to be inconsistent with the values of Scouting.
We have adapted, and we have embraced diversity.
We have brought girls in the program.
We have evolved, and we'll continue to evolve.
And in some ways, we are right alongside. In some ways, we may be a little behind.
In some ways, we may be a little bit forward.
It's a private organization.
Until the constituents of that organization
are ready for that change,
then it's very difficult to try to implement those kind of changes.
The people need to be brought along in time.
They need to be able to adjust to it. It's like any other changes that we have.
I'm the new youth protection director. As I was starting wanting to do some,
what I thought were very medium-level policies
and content training upgrades for youth protection,
I kept getting told that the Mormons may not like that.
Mormons don't like that.
And I told them, I said, "I came to work for the Boy Scouts of America."
"I came here to protect the kids, the boys and girls of the Boy Scouts."
"I am not working for the Mormon Church and the Catholic Church."
And I'll remember-- I'll never forget this, Jim Terry,
the same assistant chief Scout executive, told me,
"Mike, you need to understand something."
I'm like, "What is that, sir?" He says, "The Mormons are sacrosanct."
[suspenseful music playing]
[McGowan] At the time of the change, there was no pressure
being exerted on us at all, and--
-By the Mormons? -No.
No pressure from the Mormons to keep the gay ban in place.
-No. -Was that a concern by--?
Was it a concern? Well, sure it was a concern.
I mean, we were concerned about all of our constituents.
We're concerned about our stakeholders,
and-- and the organization continuing to be able to maintain that relationship.
But, uh, no, there was no-- There were no threats.
There was no gnashing of teeth.
[somber music playing]
[birds chirping]
[music fades]
[Boyle] Legally, the Scouts continually succeeded for decades
by basically hiding the abuse as best they could,
not even look at their own cases and playing hardball in court.
When they did go to court against a family, they'd ask the kid,
"You know, did you enjoy the sex with the adult?"
They would tell the juries,
"This kid was damaged goods by the time he came to us
because the kid had been emotionally troubled."
-[interviewer] Damaged goods? -Damaged goods.
Because one of the ironies of this is that, abuse experts will tell you,
that kids who are troubled in some way, emotionally troubled,
are particularly vulnerable to the attention of an adult
who is grooming them, and then, among other things,
starts luring them into sexual activity.
Lawyers would call me.
"Can I come see your files?" Lawyers had always been generous to me.
I consider these public record. So I said, "Sure, come by my house."
One of the attorneys who came to get the files was Tim Kosnoff.
[Kosnoff] I tracked Boyle down and he was living in D.C.
I said, "What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna hire a high-speed scanning service
to come and set two scanners up in that bedroom
and they're gonna scan all those files."
There were about 150,000 pages.
We litigated that up to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court said
the Boy Scouts had to produce an additional 3,200 files.
You'd read about the Boy Scouts going to trial somewhere,
and they usually got the snot kicked out of them.
[suspenseful string music playing]
One huge blunder came in Portland.
That was a case involving the Mormon Church.
The Mormons wisely settled that case.
But the Boy Scouts threw the dice in Oregon,
which was the worst place in the world for them to roll the dice
because Oregon has punitive damages.
[Boyle] The Portland lawsuit brought by Kerry Lewis was a watershed moment,
and it was really a big explosion in the face of the Boy Scouts.
[Mones] Kerry was moleste by Timur Dykes.
Timur Dykes was a Scout leader in a Mormon-sponsored troop.
There was a warning about him to the local bishop.
The bishop still allowed him to stay in the troop.
And he molested at some point, I believe,
15 to 17 of the 31 kids in the troop.
We wanted to put for the jury that Kerry Lewis was a victim
of not just Timur Dykes but of the Boy Scouts of America.
[music intensifies]
We wanted the jury to have a granular understanding
of what the Boy Scouts knew historically about the problem of sexual abuse.
[Kosnoff] The jury came back and awarded the plaintiff in that case $18 million.
That, of course, made a lot of headlines.
And then those lawyers got the court to order that these perversion files,
that they come into the public record as evidence in that trial.
And therefore, the public had a right of access to them.
[Kelly Clark] We are today releasing, pursuant to court order,
uh, about 1,200 files, uh,
kept by the Boy Scouts of America historically from 1965 to 1985,
that the Boy Scouts of America
has historically referred to as the "perversion files."
[intriguing music playing]
[Mones] Kerry Lewis became the voice of a lot of voiceless people.
The significance to the public is the same significance
as it was at trial to the jury, which is that they represent
a body of knowledge that the Boy Scouts of America had
that no other youth organization had at that time or-- or since.
[dramatic music playing]
I just don't believe the Boy Scouts understood,
really understood, the gravity of what it was.
The femoral artery was cut,
and they were slowly bleeding out, but they didn't see it that way.
The Boy Scouts had knew this stuff was going on
and just swept it under the rug, or didn't call the cops,
or didn't call social services
and let the lives of these boys just be torn asunder.
[male reporter] The Boy Scouts have resisted legal efforts
to make more of the files public.
Now, however, details have been put online,
listing the names of some 1,900 Scout leaders
suspected or convicted of abusing children.
Victims' rights attorney, Tim Kosnoff, posted the list.
The cat was pretty much out of the bag, involving the Boy Scouts of America.
They have abused their privilege and their position since the beginning
because they never told people
about the nature and extent of the problem.
They never told parents. They never warned Scouts.
So they became an organization which was lying to the American people,
to parents, and to Congress in their annual reports
about the actual risks of Scouting.
[Boyle] It's frankly hard for me to understand, even to this day,
how you could have all those files
about sex abuse in your organization and not think you had a problem.
And let's just give the best intentions.
The guys running the Boy Scouts had a very good program,
they believed in it, and didn't want to put it at risk
by scaring people unnecessarily about a small problem.
The question is, when do you decide a small problem isn't small?
[Hamilton] It's a lot like the Catholic Church with its secret archives.
Adults are keeping track of their potential liabilities.
They see that this is potentially problematic for them and their reputation.
The Boy Scouts represents itself as a place of honor.
And so, these files are the evidence
that could hurt their reputation as being honorable.
So the instinctual move was to just make sure they buried it,
because the institution is more important than the individual.
[Kosnoff] The only defenses that the Boy Scouts
and their insurance companies have had in all these years
is the statute of limitations,
where these regressive, predator-friendly laws
have closed the courthouse doors to victims at age 21.
A statute of limitations is just a deadline.
It's the arbitrary deadline
set for when you file a lawsuit or you prosecute.
We don't have a statute of limitations for murder.
We tend to have shorter statutes of limitations for contract disputes.
Child sex abuse in this universe is a lot more like murder
than it is like a contract
because the victim didn't understand what happened to them.
[tapping on keyboard]
Child sex abuse festers and lives on in the soul of the child for decades.
It's not a broken leg.
The more I worked on statute of limitations,
the more I saw that we were just suppressing the victims
across the United States, silencing them, and empowering the organizations.
When I started looking at this
in the midst of the Catholic sex abuse scandal,
I started to ask what would happen if you just said,
"Forget the statute of limitations. Let's just get rid of it."
So I started working on those issues.
Right now, we're in the midst of this vibrant social movement
in which survivors are coming forward and demanding justice.
And they changed the world with their stories, no question about it.
And lawmakers, even those who love the Boy Scouts,
or love the churches, or love the boarding schools,
those people are actually paying attention and siding with the children.
And so now, a third of the states have completely opened
the statute of limitations at some point.
[Michael Pfau] When the statute of limitations changed
in New York, New Jersey, and California,
three very, very populous states with lots of people,
lots of children, and lots of Scouts,
the Boy Scouts faced exposure that they'd never faced before.
[Hurley] The Boy Scouts concluded that they were gonna get inundated with claims,
which they were,
and they felt that the easiest way for them to manage that
would be bankruptcy.
[dramatic string music playing]
[male reporter] The clock is ticking for survivors of abuse
by Boy Scout leaders.
Monday is the deadline to file a proof of claim
before potentially losing that chance forever.
[Kennedy] When the bankruptcy occurred and claims started to get filed,
I was asked for a prediction, and I said…
[exhales] "I'm gonna say, on the high end, maybe 10,000 people are gonna come forth."
[phones ringing]
[Jason Amala] You start to see the numbers come in, and we're passing 20,000,
we're passing 30,000, we're passing 40,000, passing 50,000.
And it's like, "Oh my God."
[Hurley] We knew it was gonna be a big number,
but I have to say, I was amazed at how big that number got.
A staggering 82,000 alleged victims
have made sexual abuse claims against the Boy Scouts of America.
We've gone from 231 files about abusers, didn't know how many victims then,
to 82,000 victims, which is just mind-blowing.
[music fades]
[Kennedy] I think at the heart of the experience for a lot of survivors
is that notion of not being in control.
I wasn't in control when I was abused.
My abuser controlled that situation leading up to it, and during, and after.
So, anytime I can take back a little bit of control for what happened to me,
it's very, very powerful.
[dramatic, pensive music playing]
[Nussbaum] I'm not out to be a millionaire.
I'm not out to get a bunch of money.
I have a great retirement from the military.
I-- I don't need that.
What I'm hoping to get out
is that no child will ever be hurt again the way I was.
That has always been my goal, that has always been my number one thing,
was that the Boy Scouts not only are responsible,
take responsibility for what happened,
but they have a new campaign and a new challenge,
and that's to make sure this never happens again.
[Krumins] There isn't a single survivor that's in this for the money.
That is not the driving force for any of us.
We want to feel like our voices are heard.
We want to feel like there's an opportunity to heal.
[sad string music playing]
[John Sakowicz] I'm speaking on behalf of no other survivor or no other group,
but I will tell you unequivocally, I want to speak for the dead.
I wanna speak for those kids who did not survive,
those kids who were lost to suicide, alcohol, addiction, mutilation,
self-mutilation, self-harm.
I'm here to speak for my Pa-- friend, Patrick… um…
who I miss to this day.
[music continues]
The time has come for a full accounting of what has gone on in this organization,
which, in my opinion, is nothing less than an atrocity.
And it has to stop.
[Douglas Baird] Negotiations in a bankruptcy are often heated.
This particular case has been unusually and extremely difficult.
[intriguing music playing]
The Boy Scouts' case may be one of the most complicated
and structurally difficult bankruptcies ever.
In the simplest bankruptcy case, typically the debtor will have assets.
If it's a business, then that business will have assets.
It'll have airplanes, it'll have machinery.
If you think of a typical corporation,
figuring out its assets is just not that hard.
At-- At some fundamental level,
you can just sell the assets, turn it into cash.
It becomes much, much harder when what you have
is not one neat pile of assets, but many related organizations,
all of whom may or may not be legally responsible.
If, for example, you are victimized and you were in South Dakota,
not clear you should have any claim to assets
that are owned by a local organization in New York,
and vice versa.
It's not clear that you might all have rights against the national organization.
But how many assets does the national organization actually have?
Put simply, pooling together the assets in this case is enormously complicated.
Ultimately, we really should care about the victims
and whether they're actually getting their rights vindicated.
And in this complicated a process, with this many moving pieces,
it's hard to say that's actually happening.
[Hamilton] No one was thinking about child sex abuse
when Chapter 11 was put into place.
So, now you get a bad actor is the debtor,
and the whole legal scaffolding
that is now around the debtor is all about protecting the debtor.
All of a sudden, sex abuse victims in the thousands are now creditors.
They are legally equivalent to the roofer that wasn't paid yet.
And they're told they're now a herd,
and they're not going to have individual lawsuits.
We've drafted legislation to amend the bankruptcy code because of that.
I mean, it simply was never intended to be a warehouse for sex abuse survivors.
[Baird] You worry a lawyer will settle on the cheap.
Why litigate a case in full if, with a one-minute phone call,
I can get half that amount?
It's not great for the victim, but very good for the lawyer
because they're still getting 30% or 50% for doing almost no work.
That's what you need to worry about, the ways in which the lawyer's incentives
are gonna depart from the incentives of the victim.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy is not the place for child abuse.
[Hamilton] It's a legal proceeding that turns the victims into collateral damage,
just like they were as a kid.
And then you reach the settlement, you know, the end of the bankruptcy,
and what is the glory of that?
The offending institution gets to live on.
And they get to say,
"If you didn't come forward during the bankruptcy, you don't have a claim."
Bankruptcy is constructed for the powerful.
And the powerful win.
[interviewer] The Boy Scouts argued for a very long time
that sexual abuse was a minuscule problem.
This was a minuscule problem. This was a small thing.
Given the existence of the files, everything that we know now,
82,000 people coming forward, this is a lot of real individuals in pain.
That was a lie. That was a cover-up, right?
The Boy Scouts lied about that not being a problem.
Oh yeah, 82,000 over what period of time?
And we don't even know that that's the number.
But one is too many.
-[interviewer] But why should-- -One was too many.
[pensive string music playing]
We're a microcosm of the society that we're in.
Ninety-five percent of abuse happens in the home,
or with someone within the family.
What have you read lately in the news about kids that are being sexually abused?
It's happening in the schools, and it's happening in other places.
We believe one of the best ways we can do it,
in addition to all the things we're doing,
is to set up a basis by which you can track these people
and keep them from getting into organizations.
Because that's what we know they do do, is they seek access to youth.
Until we can prevent them from getting access to youth,
we will never be as far along the road in protecting these kids.
And that, to us, is the most important thing.
Is it absolutely, perfectly safe,
and you guarantee no one will ever have an accident,
no one will ever have an undesirable person doing something,
or trying to do something with them?
No, you create as many safeguards as you can.
There's no perfect plan, and there's no endless stream of money.
And no amount of money is gonna compensate any of these survivors,
any of these victims, for what happened to them.
No amount of apologies is ever going to erase,
and that's not what we're trying to do.
We're bringing them into our governance.
We're bringing them into our youth protection.
We're asking survivors that are willing to come out and come forward
and to monitor what we're doing because we are committed to this.
But nobody is more sorry,
and nobody thinks that the compensation these survivors get will ever be enough.
[interviewer] Kind of the way I see it is that trust is key to the Scouts.
I mean, I don't want to put my kids in the Scouts unless I trust them.
You can go ask-- go ask the leaders.
[interviewer] What-- What? I'm asking you. I'm asking you.
-[chuckles] -I'd go visit units.
I'd go look at the units.
[interviewer] Why should Americans trust the Scouts?
Why should we look at this and say, "They've got it"?
Look at what we're doing to keep kids safe.
Look at the protections that we're offering,
and then make up your own mind.
[music fades]
[Johnson] The whole 95% thing,
he talks about things like he's an expert on this,
which he's not even factually accurate or correct.
He's deflecting to general society,
and schools, and all that, and not focusing on-- I mean, listen.
The Boy Scouts of America is coming out of an 82,000-plus and counting
boys-to-men survivors of sexual abuse.
And he's deflecting to talk about other entities?
Boy Scouts wants society to think that sexual abuse
in the Boy Scouts of America is all in the past.
Look at the numbers,
because there are a lot more 40, 30, 20 years ago.
But what they're not telling you is it takes a man,
not as a boy, a man, at least 20 years--
And again, "if they tell anybody about it."
"Most men" only tell somebody who's, like,
their wife or a therapist, or somebody that's trusted to them,
but most of them never tell anybody that can do anything about it and stop it.
I want you to think about that for boys that are currently in Scouting right now.
Keep in mind, there's been no congressional
statewide investigation into what happened.
[Kennedy] The only way this isn't going to continue to happen
is if someone steps forward and says, "We need to investigate this."
Whether it's a congressperson, senator, president,
that's willing to have the courage to say--
Department of Justice, some other entity.
"Let's figure out what happened here
because by understanding it, we can prevent it."
And I use the word "courage" very, very specifically
because part of the Boy Scouts charter, that's authorized by Congress,
lays out they're responsible for teaching patriotism and courage.
So that's what we need on the behalf of our elected leaders right now,
to step in and say, "What happened?"
"Let's get an idea of what we can do to solve this."
[suspenseful music playing]
[interviewer] You came forward in a pretty spectacular way
and spoke out against the Boy Scouts.
Why'd you want to come forward?
To me, being silent knowing what I know is being complicit.
You talk to the people who "know me" know me,
they know I don't yield, I don't quit.
And I was working up to the day I left to keep Scouts safe,
even though I knew that it was, like, four steps forward, two steps back.
Part of my employment contract had a part in there that, to get my severance,
that I had to sign a form, a waiver with them.
And they said, "No, you can't talk to anybody about anything
that has anything to do with the Boy Scouts of America."
I don't do excuses. Either you do it, or you don't.
That's how my daddy raised me, you know? Either you do it, or you don't.
I went in the Boy Scouts of America to do a job.
I went in there to help the organization do a better job of keeping kids safe.
I was-- And I would say I had some successes,
even going up against the crap I was having to deal with.
Uh, but ultimately, I-- I failed.
[music building]
I'm here to tell you that the organization is still not safe for boys and girls.
I have investigated and protected children my whole life.
I am not gonna sit here and be quiet
while I know kids are still at risk of being sexually abused in Scouting.
So, if I am not saying anything, I am complicit.
That's not gonna happen.
I can't be complicit.
I said, "I'll walk away from it."
[music peaks, fades]
One of my epiphanies in life is I get to choose who defines me.
That's a big deal.
Today I will be introducing first Michael Johnson.
This call to action is not meant to end Scouting.
Anybody who knows me, you Scouters that are out there…
If you know me, you know that's not what this is about.
We must instead create the independent accountability
and oversight that is necessary for a safer Scouting program right now.
The organization, as it now stands, fails to meet this ideal.
It fails our nation, it fails our families,
it fails every Scout in the program.
[gentle music playing]
My good friend is a national survivor.
He's talked about his story.
He said, "Mike, let me explain something to you."
He said, "You show me a man that's been sexually abused,
I'll show you a lot of shame."
And I think about that. "Shame" is a big word for a man.
[voice breaking] And I told him, um…
And I said, "You know what? I don't like the idea of these men carrying any shame."
"If anybody ought to be carrying shame, it's the Boy Scouts of America."
To you survivors, and I feel strongly about speaking directly to you.
I've had the opportunity to meet numerous of you over the years,
while I was at Boy Scouts and since I've left.
[stifles sob]
[voice breaking] And then the Scouts…
that left Scouting…
[breathes heavily]
…because they didn't want to put up with
their sexual abuse-- their continued sexual abuse.
So, this is for each and every single one of you.
Because I never forgot you while I was there,
and I will never forget you and your experiences.
The survivors have been very kind.
Uh, you know, the guys…
[inhales] Um…
These men have validated what I did.
They're the courageous. They're the ones that are heroic.
[Haywood] What made me want to say something?
I got tired.
It was either now or never.
I can remember on the night, my mother was staying on 73rd and Coles.
And Carl lived 72nd and South Shore Drive, which is right around the corner.
I had just built up the courage in me,
and something in my-- in me said, "Leave. Leave."
He was there at the house. I ran out. And it's a high-rise building.
I didn't even take the elevator. I ran down the stairs. Left everything.
Just whatever I had on is what went with me.
And, you know, I ran in with this look on my face and the feeling over me.
[hopeful music playing]
So, I get to my mother's house.
She just keeps saying, "What happened? What happened?"
It just was building. It was-- It was building. And my blood was boiling.
The following day, I wind up telling her.
It felt like a lot of stuff was released.
I knew it was over after me leaving there that night,
that it was done.
I feel like now I can better share my story.
I felt justice could come my way.
-[dramatic string music playing] -[dog barks]
[Kennedy] I kept this bottled up until I was about 50,
and was going through some struggles.
Midlife crisis, I guess.
My wife and I, we had grown apart a little bit.
And she knew there was something else going on.
She knew that there was something I wasn't telling her.
And I told her.
Her initial reaction, I was so proud, was she was so angry.
She was so angry at what happened to me.
And-- And she said, you know, you know, "Goddamn Scouts."
My mother, the number of times I wanted to tell her,
"I just need to let you know something that happened to me,
and the reason why I became so distant at the end of high school and in college."
I mean, we never talked in college.
She eventually ended up getting lung cancer,
and the doctor called me in and said,
"Either you or me has to tell your mother she has inoperable lung cancer."
She ended up living three months.
[voice breaking] Um, we-- we shared a lot over those three months.
But-- But I never told her.
I never told her. [inhales]
[interviewer] When did you first tell somebody, come forward, talk about it?
Maybe, like, 15 years ago or something like that.
Like, when I was an adult already.
I never even considered telling anybody.
Maybe it's just because so many people did come forward or whatever.
For the most part, this right now is the first time, uh,
most people are gonna find out, you know?
I'm embarrassed of this shit.
[voice breaking] I really am. It embarrasses me. It's like…
It sucks, man. It just sucks.
It makes me so-- I have such anger problems.
I just get so mad, I feel like I just got cheated out of so much shit in my life
because of this shit, like, for real, just cheated out of it.
It's cathartic. I mean, really and truly.
I mean, it feels hurt, but it feels good too
because, you know, I don't want to have this feeling forever.
I don't want to have it anymore.
[music fades]
[Nussbaum] I just wish, uh…
I wish they were alive today, so I could tell them what happened to me.
You know, keeping that a secret for so long.
[sniffles]
I honestly think, uh…
I think my parents would-- My father would have been receptive
and understood.
He probably would have been angry. [chuckles]
Angry that I didn't tell him sooner.
It's just something you keep.
And I'll let you all know this, uh,
five people in the room, you're the first that ever heard that.
Why now?
[inhales] Because I just feel like I, uh, unloaded
a ton of rocks off my shoulders.
[waves crashing]
To know you're not alone, though, is a different story.
To know you're not in a fight alone.
A fight for what? To be normal. To feel normal.
This is the trophy award my father got for being a scoutmaster.
[chuckling] It's seen better days,
but it's also the thing that gives me that connection to him
more than anything else, and, uh…
This is…
This is why I'm speaking up, 'cause, uh…
It's what an Eagle would do.
[chuckling] I can't tell you how many times I look at this,
and I'll just hold it this same way and I'll cry.
Some of the wings you can look and see
there's kind of a haphazard glue job on it 'cause…
at some points in the past, I've gotten so angry at what this represents
that I've just chucked it at the wall and then… [sniffles]
…struggled to piece it together.
[gentle string music playing]
This bankruptcy isn't the end. This is just one step in the process.
[music continues]
[music fades]
[birds chirping]