An $800 million proposal from the Archdiocese of New York to settle more than 1,000 claims of clergy sex abuse is a step towards accountability but an imperfect resolution for the church's victims, said one accuser and several plaintiff advocates. The archdiocesan settlement, which the recently appointed Archbishop Ronald Hicks described as the culmination of "several months" of negotiations between the church and plaintiff representatives, comes amid a bitter, yearslong legal dispute pitting the archdiocese against its longtime insurer Chubb, which has refused to pay compensation to accusers and accused church leaders of intentionally enabling and concealing sexual abuse...

A bill to strengthen protections for child abuse victims is currently stalled on the Senate floor, despite easily passing every other step of the legislative process this session. House Bill 4227, also known as the Cindy Clemishire Act and Trey's Law, has received zero no votes at the Oklahoma State Capitol. This has led to growing confusion about why the Senate hasn't taken the legislation up. Right now it is a race against time to get it across the finish line. Christmas night 1982 was the first time Robert Morris sexually abused Cindy Clemishire. She was...

NYS Capital — Four women who say they're survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking ring appeared at the New York State Capitol on Monday, testifying at the NYS Senate Codes Committee meeting.  They told their stories, while advocating for the passage of legislation they saw would strengthen accountability and the timing in which an individual is able to report a crime. Bill S9960, or the Trafficking Survivor Recovery and Accountability Act is: An act to amend the penal law, in relation to establishing the crimes of benefiting from a sex trafficking venture and aggravated benefiting from a sex trafficking...

Proposed legislation, named after Virginia Giuffre, a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, also tackles jurisdiction Democrats in Congress were joined on Capitol Hill by survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse to introduce legislation to end the statute of limitations and restrictions on jurisdiction in civil sexual abuse cases. The move comes less than two weeks after the justice department released 3.5m pages of heavily redacted documents related to Epstein, as ordered by the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act. “When the truth of Jeffrey Epstein finally started to come out, when the world finally started to listen to their stories,...

Former Christian music pop star Stacie Orrico has filed suit against the music companies and child predator manager who stole her childhood. Ms. Orrico was discovered by the Christian music industry when at the age of 12 she won a singing competition in 1998.   By the age of 13, she was managed by Rocketown Management LLC and signed by EMI Christian Music Group, Inc. and Forefront communications Group. ------------------ The lawsuit alleges that between the ages of 13 and 17, Ms. Orrico was groomed, sexually assaulted and exploited by an industry representative.  And those multiple corporate entities responsible...

NBC News uncovered a 50-year pattern of sex abuse, silence and cover-up in the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. A children’s pastor was caught filming girls in a church bathroom in Arkansas. Elders suspended him for a few weeks. In Illinois, a preacher was accused of sexually abusing children. Church leaders sent him to therapy rather than call police. In California, a worship minister went to prison for molesting boys. His congregation threw him a party when he returned. All of these men remained in ministry in the Assemblies of God, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. All...

Boy Scouts, which this year rebranded as Scouting America, was facing nearly 300 abuse lawsuits when it filed for Chapter 11 in Delaware in February 2020. The bankruptcy came after several states passed laws allowing adults to file previously time-barred lawsuits against their childhood abusers and negligent institutions. The 115-year-old nonprofit said it anticipated at least 1,700 abuse claims when it entered Chapter 11, but an aggressive blitz of law firm advertising and publicity brought an avalanche of claims. Within a few months, the number of alleged victims topped more than 80,000, though not all the claims would end...

Jess Michaels & Jennifer Freeman join The Lead

With support from World Without Exploitation, Liz Stein and more than 20 survivors led a powerful call on Capitol Hill for the release of the Epstein files and real accountability. Earlier this summer, I sat with Liz Stein at a kitchen table in Brooklyn. A survivor of abuse by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, she was exhausted, and she was angry. A storm of media coverage of the Department of Justice’s interview of Maxwell left her surrounded by photos of her abusers, who had been enabled by the system so many times. When news came that Maxwell had been transferred...

The family of Virginia Giuffre — one of the women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sex trafficking and who died by suicide earlier this year — said Thursday that she would have wanted documents related to the disgraced financier to be made public, as the Trump administration faces mounting pressure around the case. Amanda Roberts, Giuffre’s sister-in-law, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on “The Source” that in one of their last conversations, Giuffre called for the release of the documents. “She wanted the world to know what they’ve done to her and so many other survivors, and she had...