Description
This objection is a response to a motion the Mormon church filed on May 29, 2025 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, which oversaw the Boy Scouts of America’s (BSA’s) $2.4 billion bankruptcy reorganization.
In its motion, the church argued that Richard Kent James’s abuse of John Doe was all Scouting-related (and therefore resolved by the BSA bankruptcy settlement), and asked judge Laurie Silverstein to force Doe to dismiss his Maryland lawsuit with prejudice.
The church’s motion in May was sealed. The only way we (Floodlit.org) know what it said is via Doe’s response (via his attorneys Joseph Rhoades and Robert Pfister), and the only way we know what Doe said is because we dug like hell to find it. We’ll get to that in a minute.
On July 14, 2025, James was deposed. He said, “I wouldn’t have known [Doe] if not for scouting” and reversed his story from 2002, insisting, “My abuse of [Doe] happened with scouting. That’s the only reason I knew [Doe].”
On July 21, 2025, Doe’s attorneys filed an objection to the church’s motion, calling it “deeply disingenuous” and accusing the church of “piec[ing] together snippets of the record to construct a curated version of the facts” to make it sound as though Doe never alleged that any of James’s sexual abuse of him took place in a non-Scouting setting.
Doe accused the church of excluding all but the first page of James’s 20-page BSA Ineligible Volunteer file (or “perversion file”) in its May motion in order to leave out a 2001 news article revealing that the original criminal charges against James resulted from allegations that he abused Doe not only at Marriott’s home, but also on scout trips while working for the church as Doe’s scout leader.
Calling the church’s logic “perverse,” Doe’s attorneys wrote, “In 2022, TCJC at least was offering to pay an additional $250 million to be shielded from claims […] like Doe’s. But the Court rejected the settlement agreement and TCJC kept its $250 million. To accept its argument now would be to give it for free something that the Court was not willing to let it buy for $250 million in 2022.”
In 2022, the church attempted to include Doe in proposing to pay $250 million to be released from liability for ALL claims of sex abuse that involved Scouting in any way, and attempted to define “Scouting” as inclusive of virtually every Church-related activity.
That year, Judge Silverstein rejected the church’s proposal, saying it went too far in attempting to gain protection from abuse claims that were only loosely tied to scouting activities.
Doe’s filing and its six attached exhibits cannot be downloaded on the BSA bankruptcy court docket website, despite not being listed as sealed. Floodlit reviewed the entire docket – over 13,000 documents – as far as we can tell Doe’s objection is the only docket item that is censored from the public eye.
After extended investigative efforts, Floodlit.org obtained Doe’s filing and attachments. We want the public to have them, and will make them available on our website.
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