Dating back to at least the 1980s, Jens Binderup Jensen volunteered with Boy Scout troops and church youth groups around Metro Vancouver, a lawsuit alleges, providing him access to kids attending day camps and field trips, even overnight outings, some of which took them across the U.S. border into Washington state.

Jensen pleaded guilty in provincial court in Langley in 1994, at the age of 47, to 11 counts of sexual assaulting young boys over many years, local media reported at the time. His victims were said to be his nephews, the sons of Jensen’s three nieces.

But the trail of wreckage Jensen left behind in B.C. extended to boys far beyond his family circle, the lawsuit alleges.

In the pending lawsuit, a former victim known in documents only as S.C. says he first met Jensen in the early 1980s through the Beaver Scouts when he was five and that the grooming and abuse lasted through the mid-1990s. He spent the ensuing decades struggling with drug abuse, committing petty crimes and assaults, going in and out of prison and enduring an epic battle with his physical and mental health.

Now 46 years old, S.C. says many of the other boys around Jensen back then are either in jail, lost to the streets, or dead.

After turning his life around through years of personal work and intense psychological counselling, S.C. is finally ready to confront Jensen.

Those who allegedly enabled Jensen are also named in a lawsuit filed in the Supreme Court of British Columbia this fall: Scouts Canada, the United Church, the Vancouver school district (some of the Scout activities took place on school property), plus several hotel chains where Jensen worked and where he allegedly brought the boys to be abused.