ANDREW R. VARA & HANNAH J. McCOLLUM—SURVIVORS DESERVE ANSWERS, NOT ANOTHER WALL OF SILENCE
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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.