Boy Scouts Hit With $1.4 Million Plus Another $25 Million (Maybe)

According to the Associated Press, an Oregon jury has awarded a 38-year-old man $1.4 million for being molested by a Scoutmaster back in the 1980s. The Boy Scouts may be liable for another $25 million in punitive damages, something to be decided in a separate phase of the trial. This case should be carefully considered by all employers.

Any employer can be sued for negligent hiring, negligent supervision, negligent retention and related claims if an employee commits a heinous act against a third party (e.g., customer, client, tenant, vendor, scout, parishioner, etc.). Although the employee isn’t acting within the scope of his employment, the employer can still be liable if it knew or should have known about the employee’s evil propensities (17 molestation incidents by the Scoutmaster) but hired or kept him anyway. The Oregon jury’s damages award shows how most people react to this kind of case.

The thing that may have been most damning in this case is that the Boy Scouts kept “perversion files” at its national headquarters. The organization argued that it kept these files to keep potential pedophiles out of scouting, but the victim contended that the result of these secret files was the protection of child molesters.

If you have employees who have regular contact with the public, particularly away from the office, you’re vulnerable to this kind of lawsuit. That’s why background checks are important for certain jobs. That’s why if you become aware of  alleged bad behavior on the part of an employee, you investigate it and take appropriate action.

One more thing. Be careful with secret files. An employer has every right to protect proprietary information, but if you label something secret and it can be used to show you had information but didn’t use it as intended, the word “secret” will come back to haunt you.