u/Ok_Emu_3140

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Mr. Vara, Ms. McCollum, the Department of Justice, the U.S. Trustee Program, Trustee Barbara Houser, and everyone responsible for oversight of the Scouting Settlement Trust:

Survivors are tired of being managed, redirected, delayed, and talked around.

This process was created to compensate people who were sexually abused as children.

Instead, many survivors have been forced into another battle—this time against silence, bureaucracy, unanswered emails, unexplained payment holds, changing lawyers, disappearing contacts, vague portal messages, and a system that too often leaves the survivor knowing less about his own claim than everybody else involved.

My case is one example.

In 2024, attorneys at Slater Slater Schulman told me that a problem affecting my settlement would be corrected through the Trust process. I was given a timeframe that led me to believe the correction would be handled and that payment would follow.

By October 2024, I was expecting that process to be moving toward a substantial payment.

Instead, the lights went out.

Communication from my lawyers essentially disappeared.

I repeatedly tried to find out what was happening.

The Trust kept directing me back to my attorneys.

My attorneys were not giving me meaningful answers.

People associated with my representation changed or disappeared from communication.

And I was left asking the same basic question:

WHAT HAPPENED TO MY CLAIM?

Think about that.

A survivor is told to ask his lawyer.

The lawyer will not provide meaningful answers.

The survivor goes back to the Trust.

The Trust sends him back to the lawyer.

Around and around it goes while months turn into years.

I later learned of serious scrutiny surrounding claims associated with SSS. That raised an obvious question for me:

What did the Trust know, when did it know it, and what information was being given or not given—to the individual survivors whose cases were affected?

That is not an accusation that somebody committed a crime.

It is a demand for an answer.

If Trust officials knew that issues involving a law firm or groups of claims could materially affect individual survivors, then survivors deserve to know what was happening.

If the Trust did not know, say so.

If it did know, explain what it knew and when.

If information could not legally be disclosed at the time, explain that too.

But stop leaving survivors to reconstruct their own cases from Reddit posts, court filings, portal changes, rumors, screenshots, and unanswered emails.

Eventually I terminated SSS and proceeded pro se because I had lost confidence that anybody else was going to fight for answers about my own claim.

Read that again.

A childhood sexual-abuse survivor enters a massive court-supervised settlement, hires lawyers, receives an award, is told that a correction is coming, and waits for the process to work—and eventually concludes that the only person he can depend on to investigate what happened is himself.

That should concern every person responsible for overseeing this system.

And please stop saying there is little information to provide.

There is plenty of information survivors could be given.

Tell us how many survivor claims remain unpaid.

Tell us how many are being delayed because of attorney liens.

Tell us how many are being delayed because of disputes involving law firms.

Tell us how many survivors have been waiting more than six months.

More than a year.

More than two years.

NOW 7 YEARS!

Tell us how much money has been distributed.

Tell us how much remains available.

Tell us how much is presently tied up in disputes.

Tell us how many attorney-related complaints have been received.

Tell us how many claims have required additional review.

Tell us how many affected survivors were actually notified.

And tell us how many survivors were simply instructed to keep contacting attorneys who were not answering them.

Those are not impossible questions.

They are basic accountability questions.

Publish a quarterly report.

Money received.

Money distributed.

Claims paid.

Claims are waiting.

Attorney disputes.

Liens.

Major unresolved issues.

Expected next steps.

Actual timelines.

No filler.

No public-relations language.

No vague assurances that everything is being handled.

Give survivors numbers, dates, and facts.

And when attorneys tell a court that an issue has been "resolved," survivors deserve to understand exactly what that means.

Resolved between the lawyers?

Resolved administratively?

Resolved for the Trust?

Or resolved for the survivor who is still sitting at home waiting for his money and wondering what the hell happened?

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Mr. Vara and Ms. McCollum:

Please do not measure the success of this system only by whether lawyers and administrators say a problem has been resolved.

Measure it by what is happening to the survivors themselves.

Can they get an answer?

Do they know why their payment is delayed?

Do they know who is representing them?

Do they know whether an attorney lien is blocking payment?

Do they know what document is missing?

Do they know who has responsibility for fixing the problem?

And most importantly:

Do they know when they are going to be paid?

Survivors were children when powerful adults and institutions failed them the first time.

We are adults now.

Do not put us through another system built on silence.

Do not tell us to be patient indefinitely.

Do not bounce us between organizations.

Do not send us back to lawyers who will not answer us.

Do not make a survivor become a bankruptcy investigator just to understand his own settlement.

This trust exists because an institution catastrophically failed children.

Everyone administering it should understand better than almost anyone what institutional silence does to a victim.

That is why transparency matters so much here.

Andrew R. Vara. Hannah J. McCollum. Barbara Houser.

Survivors are not asking you to tell us what we want to hear.

Tell us what happened.

Tell us who had responsibility.

Tell us what information existed.

Tell us what changed.

Tell us what remains unresolved.

And tell the affected survivors what is being done about their individual cases.

Dates.

Numbers.

Records.

Timelines.

Accountability.

That is what transparency looks like.

We already spent decades carrying the consequences of adults who kept quiet.

Look, when people from the SSS tell you you have to retract everything you said about what the SSS firm has done, IR, or something else behind the scenes, we are going on. And lucky in NY your alliwed to record all of your phone calls for proof.

We should not have to fight another wall of silence inside the very system that was created to compensate us for what that first silence cost.

We survived the abuse.

We survived decades of silence.

We survived the bankruptcy.

Now stop making survivors fight simply to understand what happened to their settlement.

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How many BSA survivors have DIED since filing their claims and how many died before receiving a single dollar of the compensation they were awarded? How many were in their 70s, 80s, or older, and does the Trust track whether survivors died by suicide, heart attack, stroke, cancer, or other causes while their claims remained unresolved? If those numbers exist, release them; if they do not exist, explain why nobody thought the deaths of survivors were important enough to count. These men survived childhood sexual abuse, carried it for decades, finally came forward, and then entered a process that has lasted almost 7 years so before everyone talks about percentages, liens, legal fees, procedures, and paperwork, tell us how many survivors died waiting. That number not another statistic about claims processed is part of the human cost of this settlement, and survivors and the public deserve to know it.. AND WE NEED THOSE ANSWERS DAMN QUICK. Blink again and this nightmare will be approaching TEN YEARS ten years of survivors aging, waiting, fighting over paperwork, liens, procedures games with how to get paid by check it wire transfer and unanswered questions while some will never live to see the end of it. Nobody should claim the process literally caused a person's death without evidence, but the extraordinary stress and human toll deserve serious investigation TODAY, not years from now. How many survivors have died waiting, and why isn't that number front and center? Is “DIED WAITING” the new merit badge survivors get after surviving the Scouts, surviving the bankruptcy, and then running out of time waiting for justice? Cause a lot here and other venues have said I have enough and there gone man . Gone! This shit has to stop.

How is it possible that roughly 14,000 survivors may already have determinations on their claims and still have not received a single nickel, while tens of thousands of others have already received payments, taken vacations, paid bills, or finally had a little financial breathing room?

I have heard that 14,000 figure from more than one place, and if it is accurate, somebody needs to explain exactly what is happening.

These are not numbers on a spreadsheet.

These are survivors.

People who waited decades to be heard. People who went through the claims process, submitted painful evidence, answered questions, waited through bankruptcy proceedings, waited for determinations—and then were apparently told to keep waiting some more.

Meanwhile, others have already received distributions and have at least been able to begin moving forward with their lives.

There may be legitimate legal, lien, release, documentation, or administrative reasons why certain claims have not been paid yet. But if thousands of survivors already have determinations and remain unpaid, the public deserves a clear accounting:

How many determined claims remain unpaid?

Why are they unpaid?

How long have they been sitting there?

How much money is currently being withheld from survivors who already received determinations?

And most importantly:

What is being done to get that money into survivors’ hands?

After everything these people have already endured, silence and endless waiting are not acceptable answers.

If the number really is around 14,000, that deserves serious attention.

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My name is John Doe

I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse in the Boy Scouts of America and a pro se claimant in the Boy Scouts of America Settlement Trust.

Like thousands of survivors, I waited decades to tell my story. I believed that once I found the courage to come forward, justice would finally begin.

Instead, I entered another nightmare.

I was shuffled from attorney to attorney. I repeated the worst moments of my childhood over and over again. I watched years disappear. Phone calls went unanswered. Emails were ignored. I was left wondering whether anyone remembered I even existed.

Then I received an award letter.

For one brief moment, I thought it was over.

It wasn't.

Nearly nine months later, I am still waiting.

What kind of system tells a survivor, "You have been awarded compensation," and then leaves him waiting indefinitely while legal disputes and bureaucracy consume what little time he has left?

While all of this was happening, I died.

My heart stopped. Emergency responders shocked me back to life. I survived, but I lost part of my brain forever. I now live with permanent cognitive damage. Every day I wake up wondering whether I'll live long enough to see this process end.

I'm not the only one.

Many survivors have died waiting In Fact Thousands to one factual counter. Others have suffered strokes, heart attacks, cancer, dementia, homelessness, and crushing depression. Every delay matters when your claimants are in their seventies and eighties.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, America watched public officials answer difficult questions under oath. Dr. Anthony Fauci repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment, and it became national news.

Now I have a question of my own.

If attorneys from Slater Slater Schulman are ever required to testify under oath about how thousands of survivor claims were handled, how many difficult questions will they have to answer?

That is not an accusation. It is a question every survivor deserves to have answered.

Survivors deserve transparency.

Survivors deserve accountability.

Survivors deserve to know why so many of us felt abandoned after placing our trust in people who promised to help us.

This is not just about legal fees.

It is about human lives.

It is about elderly survivors running out of time.

It is about people who survived childhood abuse only to spend their final years trapped in another system that often feels indifferent to their suffering.

History will not remember how many motions were filed or how many forms were completed.

It will remember whether America kept its promise to the men who finally found the courage to speak.

I am asking the American people to pay attention.

Not because I want sympathy.

Because I want justice.

No survivor should receive an award letter and then spend month after month wondering whether he will die before he is ever paid.

Justice delayed for elderly survivors is often justice denied.

Please don't let us become forgotten again.

John Doe

Boy Scouts of America Survivor

Pro Se Claimant