$100 Million CVA Verdict: Largest in New York History for Childhood Sexual Abuse
After trial: Awarded against an individual defendant and essentially uncollectable; the total includes $50 million in punitive damages.
Won by Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria.
An Erie County jury awarded $100 million to a woman sexually abused over four years beginning at age 12, the largest Child Victims Act verdict in New York State history.
What happened
For four years, beginning when she was 12 years old, a Buffalo woman was repeatedly sexually abused by Joseph King, a man her family trusted as a close friend. The abuse continued until she was 16. By the time she reached adulthood, she had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and faced relationship difficulties that a clinical therapist testified would persist throughout her life.
New York's Child Victims Act, passed in 2019, opened a lookback window allowing survivors of past abuse to sue regardless of when the abuse occurred. The law gave people like this survivor a path to court that had previously been closed by the statute of limitations. Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria attorney Robert Corp filed suit on her behalf under that window.
At trial, Corp presented testimony from the survivor and from a clinical therapist who laid out the lasting psychological toll of the abuse. The jury heard four years of documented harm that began in childhood and rippled into every aspect of the woman's adult life.
On May 1, 2023, the jury returned a verdict of $100 million: $30 million for past damages, $20 million for future damages, and $50 million in punitive damages. Corp called it the largest verdict in New York State history under the Child Victims Act.
No reduction or remittitur of the award has been reported as of the date of this publication.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria
All Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria proven verdicts →A Monroe County jury ordered former Rochester Catholic priest Foster Rogers to pay $95 million to a man he sexually assaulted in 1979, when the victim was 15 years old, in one of the largest Child Victims Act verdicts in New York history.
An Erie County jury awarded $65 million to a woman who was sexually abused over seven years as a child by former Buffalo YMCA counselor James B. Jackson, in one of the largest verdicts under New York's Child Victims Act.
An Erie County jury awarded $30 million to a man who was sexually abused as a child by Rev. Douglas D. Thore, a Lutheran pastor in Marilla, NY, in what was reported as the largest Child Victims Act verdict in Western New York at the time.
An Erie County jury awarded $25 million to a man sexually abused by his Boy Scout troop leader in Cheektowaga during the early 1970s, in what presiding Judge Mark Grisanti described as the first jury verdict reached under New York's Child Victims Act.
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