Missionary Oblates Held Liable for Ignoring Abuse Reports at Seattle School, $8 Million Reduced to $6.4 Million
After trial: The jury's $8 million award was reduced to $6.4 million after 20 percent of the fault was allocated to the Seattle Archdiocese and the Dominican Sisters. We found no report of an appeal, and we could not confirm whether the judgment was paid.
In July 2012 a King County jury found the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate liable for ignoring a former student's reports that a teacher and principal sexually abused him at St. Benedict School in Seattle in the early 1960s. The jury awarded $8 million, then assigned 20 percent of the fault to the Seattle Archdiocese and the Dominican Sisters. That left the Oblates owing $6.4 million.
What happened
In July 2012, a King County Superior Court jury in Seattle found the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate responsible for failing to act on a boy's reports that he was being sexually abused at St. Benedict Catholic School. The jury awarded $8 million. After it assigned 20 percent of the fault to the Seattle Archdiocese and the Dominican Sisters, the amount owed by the Oblates came to $6.4 million.
The plaintiff was a student at St. Benedict in the Wallingford neighborhood in the early 1960s. Between 1961 and 1964, he was abused repeatedly by Daniel Adamson, a teacher at the school who was later made its principal. According to reporting on the case, the abuse took place at Adamson's home, at the school, at the church and in motels. At Adamson's house, the teacher once kicked him in the groin so hard that he was hospitalized and spent several weeks recovering at home. He said he had put a stop to the abuse by his sophomore year of high school.
The case turned on what the adults around him did with what they were told. The plaintiff testified that he told priests about the abuse, first in confession and later in detail to his pastor, who answered that he was a liar. Two other former students testified that they too had reported Adamson's conduct to Rev. Henry Conrad, an Oblate priest, and that Conrad told them to stay quiet. Adamson faced no consequences. He was promoted to principal and remained in the job until he died in the mid-1970s.
The plaintiff, by then in his early sixties, brought suit decades later. Michael T. Pfau of Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala represented him. The Archdiocese of Seattle, which owned the school, settled before trial. The Oblates, the religious order that staffed the parish and employed Conrad, went to trial.
Jurors heard the former students' accounts of reporting the abuse and the response they received. They found the Oblates liable and returned the $8 million award. Because Washington law makes each defendant answerable for its own share of fault, the jury's allocation of 20 percent to the Archdiocese and the Dominican Sisters came off the total, and the judgment against the Oblates was $6.4 million.
News coverage at the time described the $8 million figure as one of the largest awards in a sexual abuse case in state history. We found no record of an appeal or of a payment.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala (PCVA)
All Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala (PCVA) proven verdicts →A King County jury awarded $165 million to eight former Sky Valley Education Center employees, including the estate of one deceased plaintiff, after finding Pharmacia LLC liable for selling PCB-containing fluorescent light ballasts without adequate warning.
A Pierce County jury awarded William Tisdale $91 million after he was beaten with an aluminum baseball bat outside an APRO-owned Union 76 convenience store in Parkland, Washington, leaving him with multiple skull fractures and permanent cognitive damage.
A King County jury awarded $72 million to two former Sky Valley Education Center students who developed chronic neurological injuries after years of PCB exposure from aging fluorescent light fixtures manufactured by Monsanto.
A Thurston County jury awarded $57 million to roughly 22,000 live-in home-care providers after finding that Washington's Department of Social and Health Services unlawfully cut their pay through an automatic 15 percent reduction in authorized care hours.
Related sexual abuse verdicts
A Riverside County jury awarded $2.28 billion on April 25, 2023, to a woman identified as Jane Doe who was sexually abused by her stepfather from age 5 until she was 14, at the family's Lake Elsinore home and at events and property of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stepfather, who had pleaded guilty in 1997 to lewd acts with a child under 14 and served three years in state prison, admitted the abuse at deposition, then skipped the first day of jury selection and withdrew his answer rather than face a bench warrant. The church settled for $1 million and the mother for $200,000 before trial. The verdict, $836 million in compensatory damages and $1.44 billion in punitive damages after three days of deliberation, is one of the largest ever returned for a single survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
A St. Charles County judge entered a $300 million bench-trial judgment for a child, identified only as G.T., who was physically and sexually abused between the ages of three and five while in the care of Susan and James McLaurie, though one defendant died before the suit was filed and the only known insurance was a $303,000 policy.
A St. Charles County jury awarded $247.3 million to six women sexually assaulted by an unlicensed massage therapist at Oasis Foot Spa & Massage in St. Peters, finding the spa and its owner liable for hiring him without any background check and ignoring an early complaint. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full in 2024.
A Rio Arriba County jury held Acadia Healthcare and its New Mexico foster care subsidiaries responsible for placing an 8-year-old girl with a foster father who raped her repeatedly, returning one of the largest single-plaintiff sexual abuse verdicts in the country.