For more than a century, tens of millions of American younths have been members of the Boy Scouts of America, pledging to serve God and country and always helping others, while keeping themselves “physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight,” as dictated in the iconic Boy Scout oath. Through the decades, their platinum ranks have included the best and the brightest, among them Bill Clinton, Steven Spielberg and Hank Aaron, to name just a few.
At the same time, the Scouting organization — originally founded by Englishman Robert Baden-Powell, now celebrating its 115th anniversary — has become wealthy and powerful, with real estate holdings alone estimated in the billions of dollars. The Boy Scouts are American icons, often documented by no less than Norman Rockwell himself. His carefully crafted images — showing uniformed Scouts sporting their colorful kerchiefs and hard-earned merit badges while hiking and camping — conveyed a message of Scouting as a beacon of virtue, a maker of upstanding men.
At least until 2012, when a Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Kim Christensen, exploded a century of secrecy, revealing that more than 82,000 former Scouts had been sexually abused by their troop leaders.
“Known within Scouting as the ‘perversion files,’ the records detail a striking pattern of sexual abuse by troop leaders and volunteers and cover-up by local and national Boy Scouts officials and a long long-standing institutional penchant for secrecy,” writes Christensen in his riveting, posthumously published exposé, “On My Honor, The Secret History of the Boy Scouts of America” (Grand Central).
The perversion files — a secret blacklist of predatory Scout leaders, 127 in all, and known only to three people — contained letters from hundreds of boys who’d revealed to their parents that they’d been sexually abused by their scoutmasters. And the boys named names.
The allegations were then forwarded to Boy Scouts of America headquarters, in North Brunswick, NJ. But nothing was done. According to Christensen, Scout executives hid the horrific accusations in a locked metal file cabinet — along with “hundreds of similarly heinous accounts of child sexual abuse for decades.”
And they would stay locked away with Scout officials taking no punitive action. They would assert it was to protect the reputations of the boys, when, in fact, according to the author, it was to preserve the image of the Boy Scouts, a brand that generated millions of dollars from dues-paying parents as well as the support of religious and business organizations.
“From 1971 to 1993, it was a peak generation of sexual abuse in Scouting,” writes Christensen.
But the scandal that had been growing for years was about to blow wide open, thanks to the author’s 10-year probe.
Christensen discovered that there were no background checks on potential Scout leaders, on men who often turned out to have criminal histories of sexual molestation. “The BSA registered some 230 men with prior arrests or convictions for sex crimes against children” — men who abused some 400 scouts, writes the author. Many of these leaders were eventually found guilty of abuse. When the organization finally instituted fingerprint checks in 1994, it only included new volunteers.
The author details many horrific abuse cases, but a few are particularly heinous. There’s assistant scoutmaster Timur Dykes, a convicted child molester who confessed to molesting boys in a Portland Scout troop, using his two pet ferrets and a snake to lure the young boys to his home.
Dykes confessed to molesting 16 of the 30 boys in his troop, and was charged with a misdemeanor sex offense and placed on probation, but never stopped hosting sleepovers for the boys of Troop 719.
In another case documented by the author, Alaskan Scout leader Air Force Sgt. Kenneth Burns Jr. was kicked out of a pack for sleeping nude with Cub Scouts and showing them pornography. He was accused of molesting a hundred boys and convicted of a sex crime in Utah in 2007.
Rodger Beatty molested boys in his Scout troop in Newport, RI. He was able to quietly leave Scouting and re-sign under false pretenses to evade criminal consequences. Christensen writes that some predators were caught, and some resurfaced in other troops by changing their names slightly and continued sexually abusing scouts.
Beatty spread out mattresses on his living room floor during sleepovers and then crept back in to attack the scouts one by one.
The most prolific known abuser of young scouts was Thomas Hacker, who was serving a 100-year prison term for molesting more than 100 boys from 1961 to the late 1980s when he died in prison. “He was a monster” as well as a conman and master manipulator, writes the author.
Hacker molested one boy for three years more than 1,000 times and threatened to kill his parents if they were told of the abuse. Hacker only lost interest when the boy turned 13.
Today, its longevity is far from guaranteed. Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy protection in February 2020. At the time, the organization’s assets totaled an impressive $1.2 billion — consisting of cash, stocks, bonds, real estate and an art collection of Norman Rockwell paintings. But there were still 275 cases pending in courts and 1,400 claims yet to be filed as lawsuits.
And those lawsuits were pricey, one totaling $89 million in a case against serial-predator Hacker, who “helped grease the skids for the 110-year-old organization’s slide into bankruptcy,” writes Christensen. New legislation allowing abuse victims to sue up until the age of 55 further imperiled the BSA’s long-term outlook.
More than three years after the BSA filed for bankruptcy, thousands of claimants have yet to be paid. Insurers have argued that the very existence of the “perversion files” was proof that the BSA was aware of the rampant abuse and did nothing to protect the youthful membership — further solidifying the BSA’s culpability. The move has also helped spawn a mini industry of BSA-chasing attorneys.
“By the fall of 2020, sexual abuse in the Boy Scout had become the new mesothelioma,” writes the author, “mirroring the previous high-profile mass tort lawsuit efforts for asbestos exposure, weed killers, prescription drugs, talcum powder, and hernia mesh implants.”
Call centers hooked up potential clients with lawyers willing to represent them on contingency and taking a hefty 40% of any settlement.
Claimants were urged to write to the judge who would determine the payout. They were letters from Hell — “a compilation of heartbreak and human wreckage strewn across generations and all fifty states,” writes the author.
With Scouting membership decimated, its reputation battered and millions of dollars still needing to be paid, the author poses some tough questions as scouting faces an uncertain future. True, background checks have been heavily improved and iconic Scouting guides now contain chapters aimed at preventing inappropriate contact between adults and children. But with “heartbreak and human wreckage strewn across generations and all 50 states — the question is not simply ‘Can the Boy Scouts survive?’ But ‘should it?’ ”
