After sex-abuse litigation pushed the Boy Scouts of America into bankruptcy last year, Michigan’s attorney general watched as the number of victims stepping forward climbed to 84,000, dwarfing similar allegations against the Catholic Church, the Wall Street Journal reported. In January, the Michigan State Police notified Dana Nessel’s office that 1,700 of those sex-abuse claims were in the state. Her office said it now thinks that up to 3,000 victims were abused in the state. “I certainly didn’t understand the scale of it as it pertained to Michigan,” said Ms. Nessel. “I think it’s a moral imperative that when we have this kind of information that we not sweep it under the rug.” Earlier this month, Ms. Nessel announced the first statewide criminal investigation into the Boy Scouts. It comes as the Boy Scouts near a civil settlement with lawyers representing the bulk of abuse victims as the youth group aims to end the largest bankruptcy case ever filed over childhood abuse. Ms. Nessel’s investigation is potentially damaging for the future of the Boy Scouts, which had hoped that filing for bankruptcy would ease a civil settlement with survivors and move the organization past its prior failures to protect children from predators. Instead, the chapter 11 case brought into the open roughly 84,000 claims, supplying a wealth of documentation that law enforcement never had before.
