Man Awarded $5 Million After Suffering Sexual Abuse from Relative

A Tompkins County man has been awarded a multi-million dollar judgment as part of a civil lawsuit over sexual abuse he suffered in the late 1970s at the hands of a relative. The case was filed under the Child Victims Act (CVA), a 2019 law that extended the statute of limitations (and reopened a window for accusations to be filed) for people who were sexually abused as minors to file civil lawsuits against the people or institutions that committed or facilitated the abuse. 

The Ithaca Voice is not identifying the plaintiff, who now lives in Ithaca, in this case by name because it deals with child sexual abuse — he will instead be referred to by the pseudonym “Jason.” After two long years of litigation in Broome County Supreme Court, Jason was awarded a victory of $5 million — $2.5 million for past and future compensatory damages and $2.5 million for punitive damages. The case was filed in Broome County because the abuse took place there, and was one of 10,000 lawsuits filed during the reopened window created by the CVA. 

“While plaintiff is now happily married, gainfully employed, actively engaged in therapy and sober for approximately five years due to his persistence in bettering himself, these achievements do not temper or attenuate the long-standing impacts of the horrific abuse he sustained,” wrote Supreme Court Judge Christopher P. Baker in the judgment document, dated Dec. 1, 2022. “This court has previously described how awarding damages for childhood sexual abuse is, by nature, an imprecise art. No sum of money can undo the trauma that sexual abuse visits upon its survivors.”

Read the source article at ithacavoice.com