Lawyers for a girl — who they say was raped in the bathroom of a Boys & Girls Club in Eastern Oregon when she was 7 years old — filed a $5 million lawsuit Tuesday against the youth organization.
The lawsuit claims that the alleged rape was one of a string of sexual assaults at Boys & Girls Clubs across the nation since 2000, and that the youth organization over the years has failed to enact safeguards that might have protected children and prevented future tragedies.
A representative from the Atlanta-based organization didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The lawsuit claims that the girl, referred to by the pseudonym Amy Doe, was raped by a teenage participant at the Boys & Girls Club of the Western Treasure Valley in Ontario, Oregon.
Peter Janci, a Portland attorney for the girl, said her attacker was about 14 years old and had sexually assaulted three other young girls before he trapped the 7-year-old girl in a single-use bathroom and raped her in summer 2011.
The alleged assault took place during the club’s normal program hours, according to the suit. The girl told family members that she’d been attacked, and they told police.
The lawsuit states that the previous three alleged sexual assaults also had been reported to Ontario police and the Oregon Department of Human Services. Janci said he does not know if the teen was charged or prosecuted in any of the cases, including the one involving his client. Janci said his firm hasn’t been able to get that information because juvenile records aren’t public, but his firm will be seeking those records now that the lawsuit has been filed.
Janci said he does know that the alleged assaults of the other girls were in other “youth-care settings” and the girls weren’t relatives of the teen.
Ontario is a small town, population 11,000, located along the Oregon-Idaho border.
The lawsuit alleges that employees at the Boys & Girls Club knew — or should have known — about at least one of the previous alleged sexual assaults and protected the 7-year-old girl from the teen. The girl was particularly vulnerable because she had physical and mental disabilities that Boys & Girls Club staff knew about, the suit states.
Janci said he didn’t want to elaborate on the girl’s disabilities, because he doesn’t want to make her identifiable to the small community she lives in.
The suit doesn’t list her alleged attacker by name, because he was a juvenile at the time. The suit describes him only by the initials C.B.
The lawsuit faults the Boys & Girls Club — both its local chapter and the national organization — for allegedly failing to implement adequate child-protection measures, make its premises safe and properly train staff on how to lessen the risk of attacks.
Lawyers for the girl are seeking internal documents from the national organization’s records of all sexual assaults that have happened within its clubs during the past several decades.
“One of the most concerning dynamics in these cases is that the national Boys & Girls Club takes the position that they are not responsible for what happens at their local clubs,” said Janci, in a statement Wednesday. “And that is just wrong. The national Boys & Girls Club is happy to hold out these local clubs in thousands of communities around that country as ‘their clubs’ – especially when they are fund-raising. But now, when a child gets hurt at a local club, the national organization is effectively telling her parents: that’s not our problem.”
Alleged sexual attacks at clubs in the Portland area have made headlines in recent years:
- Last week, an attorney for a 10-year-old girl who says she was molested in 2016 by a 13-year-old male volunteer at an after-school Boys & Girls Club program at a Northeast Portland school filed a $1.1 million lawsuit.
- In 2010, a 15-year-old volunteer at the Boys & Girls Club in Forest Grove abused a 5-year-old girl. He was removed from the program, but Celtabet soon was allowed to re-register and in 2011 molested a 10-year-old girl at a Boys & Girls Club in Hillsboro. He was prosecuted and ultimately pleaded guilty to first-degree sexual abuse and attempted first-degree sexual abuse, according to Washington County juvenile records.
- In 2014, a 23-year-old volunteer with the Boys & Girls Club in Northeast Portland sexually targeted three different girls — including one who was under 16 when he had sexual intercourse with her, Portland police said. Riante Ramon Badon was convicted of third-degree rape and two counts of luring a minor.
This week’s lawsuit was filed in Malheur County Circuit Court. Portland attorney Steve Crew is also representing the girl.
— Aimee Green
agreen@oregonian.com
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