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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that. See? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode we're speaking. With Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees, it wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're pushing. OK, reporting all of that, Chris. Every little bit of that goes into the episode. I'm Robert Evans. Are you? Hi. This is behind the ******** with Matt Lieb. Yep, I I'm back. How are you feeling? Learning all this fun stuff about the Boy Scouts of America? Ohh, I'm. You know, remember earlier when I was saying I always felt like I missed out and not being a Boy Scout? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm a I'm a feeling that that was that was God. Just looking out for me because this is going to get dark. It is. It's so ****** **. Like, again, not to like, center my own experience like in this, but it is weird to me that, like, again, I, I know I've, I've spent all of this time writing 20 pages on how ****** ** the Boy Scouts are. I personally have like nothing but positive memories of my time in the scouts. And it was, it was weird. Like, I didn't start to recognize because there was, we're not talking about a lot of the other stuff that's ****** ** about the Boy Scouts. Like, everyone knows, like they for decades would not let you be gay or trans or whatnot. And the boys that would be kicked out if you came out, you couldn't be an atheist. You had, you didn't have to be a specific religion, but you had to. You had to acknowledge the existence of a higher power. There's like other stuff that they've been attacked for, and part of the reason why I'm not really focusing on that is that, like, that's bad. That is not something. That would render an organization founded in 1910 fundamentally unsalvageable, right? A lot of organizations that old had weird attitudes to, bad attitudes towards gay people, even racist attitudes and can change over time. Be like, well yeah, the people who founded us believe these things. The fundamentals of our organization are good. Teaching people how to camp. We're we we've we've grown that all. I think that the Boy Scouts could have grown past you know, the the the anti LGBT thing and they have started accepting kids who are. Are gay and trans. I think they could have grown past the restriction to just boys because now they do accept girls. They could have grown past a number of the problematic things, but you cannot grow past is enabling the rape of 10s of thousands of boys that that cannot be redeemed. That's the thing. Yeah, that seems systemic. Yeah, it's one of it's it's one of those things. Like, yeah, an organization founded in 1910, people who made it probably had some weird beliefs on race and gender and like, yeah, you can, you can. The organization, I think, can move past that as long as it acknowledges the flaws of its past. It it it confronts them head on, which I'm not saying the Boy Scouts did like. They they delayed way too long, right? Right, reforming on that stuff, but. I think that we're like the thing that makes them unsalvageable. The reason I think the Boy Scouts just needs to be destroyed as an organization is, is the mass rape of children. Like, that's. Yeah. You can't there's no no getting past that. No that's there's no moving on there. That's a fair. That's a fair problem. Yeah. Yeah. If not for the mass rape of children, I feel like it would be, you know, an organization that could make do some reform move past its past. Yeah. Sure. But it's that little thing where there was a mastery of children that the 10s of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands of boys raped. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And and that's also creating a cycle of abuse and predation due to the nature of the, you know, early childhood sexual violence like that alone probably grounds. Yeah, they should destroy their organization. I don't feel differently about the Catholic Church, in fairness. It is weird, like I can say, because then I grew up very conservative. As I said it said a number of times, if I had been like 16 in 2014, I might have wound up like Alt right for a while. I was really right wing right. One of like the first cracks in the armor is when I was not sure if I was 17 or 18. I think it was my senior year of high school. It was an academic decathlon, which is like a nerd thing. And we had our own little like classroom and if you were on the team you could hang out in that classroom in between classes or during lunch. Which as a nerdy kid who just wanted to read his Warhammer books, that was nice to do. And so I'm in there one day with another kid on the team who was in the Boy Scouts. We were in different troops, but he was, he was and he was. I think I had actually quit the because I quit the Boy Scouts at like 1615 or 16. He was still in the Boy Scouts and was like either 18 or almost 18 and was very close to getting his eagle. And, you know, he and I were friends. We were sitting in the classroom one day and kind of in the middle of just sort of like we're both reading separate books quietly, alone in this room. He just looks up at me and tells me that he's gay. And this is the first person I ever met who like, I knew was gay, who would like that, that I like had talked to me about it. Right. Yeah. And I said, oh, OK and and he immediately after that because it just like, I think he just had to tell somebody just burst out of him. Sure. Immediately after that, he said, please don't tell anybody. Like, I the most important thing in the world to me is finishing my Eagle Scout is like getting my Eagle Scout like, damn. And they won't let me. And that was that was like a for me a moment of like, that's really ****** ** actually, that this kids. This kid who clearly loves the Boy Scouts is dedicated to, like, what this organization stands for is terrified of being kicked out for just like, something like, it was just very obvious in that moment. Like, Oh yeah, that's clearly not a choice. Like the way he told me about it was just like this. He had to let somebody know, is this thing that was, I don't know, that was a moment for me. And like, a, A, just a I know that that's when I first started to think really critically about the Boy Scouts as an organization because again, I grew up in this right wing. You know bubble, I guess. I think it's it's like that one way or another for a lot of people. Like, you live in this kind of ideological bubble until you, like, meet someone who's you care about, whose life experience contradicts the things that you just never thought about before. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, I'm wrong about some really important ****. Yeah, like, yeah. Sometimes it just takes that that, you know, having an actual one-on-one or just a human experience to get you outside of, like, kind of the the strict dogmatism of your, like, inherited ideology where you're just like, you know, of course, I'm a libertarian. My dad's a libertarian, and he raised me to be libertarian, you know, and then and then you, you know, you live life and you meet people who you know in which the government was actually a necessary entity in their life. And you're like. Ah, ****. Like, you know, people who just grow up in a bubble. I think as soon as they have that, you know, bubble bursts a little bit, then they can kind of move past whatever, you know, dogmatic ideology they have. Yep. Yep. It is that thing where, like, the Republican politicians who have like a life experience that doesn't fit in with conservatism are like the ones who have these very public like John McCain's Arch Republican and everything but torture because he was tortured. Right, and was very consistently like, no, we can't. This is not OK looking. Dick Cheney. Arch Republican and everything but gay rights because his daughter is gay and he's like, yeah. It's just, yeah. I mean that's just how people are, I guess. So the Boy Scouts of America began operating what they called an ineligible volunteer file system in 1919. So Baden Powell still alive when they this is like, they they they. And this is not just even prime, this is not primarily about sexual assault. This is obviously you've got this growing organization, a bunch of men join it. And for one reason or another, they do not meet the standards that the BSA does have for adult volunteers. So they're not screening people, but people who do the the job and are bad at it and I think most of these people again. They're not molesting kids. They're like, they get some kid killed on a hike or some **** right? Like, they're they're irresponsible. You know, like, there's a lot of ways to be bad at being a scout master. You know? You're taking kids into the woods. A number of things can go awry. Yeah. Yeah. Usually pedophilia isn't the first problem when you're stranded alone in the woods with an adult. Yeah, you would think of. Yeah. And I think most of the men in the ineligible volunteer files had not purposefully harmed a child. They had just, like, ****** ** in some way. Probably some way that's, like, still deplorable, but, like, not. They're not trying to harm anybody. A subset, though, of the ineligible volunteer list are men who had been caught or at least accused of molesting the children in their care. This subset of the ineligible volunteer system were dubbed the P files or perversion files. Yeah, that's that's the P word. Yeah. I thought they would go with pedophile pederast. I mean, it's a lot of rape. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this starts in, like, the 20 problematic. Files. I'm sorry. Yeah, the problem. So when Baden Powell is alive, they they do, like, attempt to. And again, they don't attempt to by screening people before him, but they do attempt to be like, oh, we should. If a guy gets kicked out for ****** a kid, we should probably put his name in a file somewhere, right? Like we should we should probably write this down, huh? Which is the minimum, you know? Minimum, like the barest minimum. I just wanna remember his name. That's it. You have a list of the guys who ****** the kids in our care? Yeah. If I could also get their phone numbers just so we could. Talk and just strategize. See if they have photos. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Do you want to go to the lake? No. Baden Powell. So in 1975 the list was computerized, but there still existed a hard copy and there is still one today which reportedly fills 15 file cabinets at the BSA headquarters in Irving, TX. Only a handful of men at the very top of the organization can access them and the BSA the Boy Scouts of America. So you're right. I should note when we talk about this, this is all focused on the BSA, which is not technically the organization Baden Powell founded because it's very decentralized. So there's like the different countries, they're different, like. Organizations, right? Effectively right kind of corporations almost. And they're all kind of like linked and related to each other and they do jam like people get together from different countries. But I mean the BSA is made in the image of what Baden Powell talks about. I'm sure there is a lot on like abuses in like England and in great in the UK and in like other countries. The, the the vast majority of the, the, the, the, the the documentation, documentation on abuse within the Boy Scouts is within the BSA. So that's what we're focusing on here today. So for decades, the files were either entirely unknown or at most a rumor to those outside the organization. They would occasionally make appearances, though. By the Time Lord Baden Powell died in 1941, there had already been multiple cases of child molesters who had been caught and convicted for what they've done as Boy Scout leaders. This pattern continued up to the present day, and when those cases would end in criminal charges and trials, files on the perpetrator would often be admitted into evidence, usually under seal. This most frequently happened in the latter half of the 20th and early 21st century. When boys and groups of boys began to allege that what had happened to them, the abuse they had suffered was not an isolated incident, but was instead the result of a pattern of abuse within the organization. The files contain often harrowing first-hand accounts from victims, like this interview with the 10 year old Scout in 1972, the victim of a sexual assault by Georgia troop leader Samuel Max Dubois. Junior quote I was crying and I reached around and hit Max in the face and said I was going to quit the troop and tell my daddy. Then we heard the others. Coming back and Max said. Put your pants back on. Yeah, that's like one of the less harrowing ones. I'm not going to, I'm not going to read in detail, but we will discuss what happened. Like, I'm not going to read detailed accounts of kids getting molested here. Thank you. But you do need to know, like, what broadly occurred, you know, cases that is important. The PDF files, at least, were something, so it's better than certainly doing nothing at all. But as a barrier to the assault of boys and care of the Boy Scouts of America, they were incredibly porous. To illustrate this, let's start with an illustrative case of abuse among the Boy Scouts from a little more than a generation after Baden Powell's death, Stephen Field was a troop leader in Southern California. The BSA started investigating him in 1971 after a scout in Santa Monica reported that he'd been sexually abused by field a troop. Committee which included parents, BSA officials and a psychiatrist. So that's good, right? You're bringing like, not just parents, but a professional in that's a positive way to look at things, right? I feel this feels like the doctor thing from last episode. I don't trust it. No, I don't. Quite. OK, so this this committee is convened and they look at the evidence and they conclude that the story was true. This kid had been abused, would field, had done with sexual abuse. Their investigation in fact found not only did he abuse this kid, but he had a pattern of what could credibly be called criminally sexual behavior, including forcing his Boy Scouts to play strip poker and run around naked after losing games. Which is not ever like there's there's that's not even like a Gray area. Yeah, yeah. Strip poker is not really inside the Boy Scouts milieu, you know? Yeah. And also, like, running around naked is not part of it. That's never, you know, you can play well poker. I mean, it kind of was from the start, actually, but it shouldn't have been. Ohh, just finding new and clever ways to get kids to run around naked. Yeah. I mean, what it is when we talk about, like, naked, swimming, running around naked, like, I believe very strongly that, like, it nudities. There's nothing wrong or inherently sexual about nudity. It shouldn't be like, this thing where the idea that, like, people are doing things naked is, like, lascivious. But clearly Baden, Powell and a number like the men and, like, found it lascivious. And so that's a problem. Like, yeah, it ended up being one of their favorite things. So yeah. That's an issue. That's gonna be an issue, you know? Yeah. So they find out this guy not only molests this kid, but he has a history of very, like, criminal. I I suspect it is illegal to make children play strip poker. Like, I think that is a cry. Yeah, not a lawnmower. But that seems crimeny. I don't know the exact like number letter statute, but like, yeah, that seems not legal. That seems like like a thing you would you that seems like a thing we don't allow. Like I have to think that's against some law. It's gotta be in there somewhere. Yeah. Probably has a limiting to the delinquency of a minor or something. I don't know whatever, some something not right about that. But the Boy Scouts don't report him to the police. They don't report him to anyone. In fact, they remove him. They kick him out of the Boy Scouts, but the only report they make about this is from a regional Boy Scouts employee who fills out a form on field and sends it to headquarters, and that form is placed in the P files. So that's all that happens. National officials told the regional official that this meant that fields would never be able to work in or volunteer for the Boy Scouts again. And yet, from a report in the Los Angeles Times, quote, he was involved with several Southern California troops over the next 17 years, according to his file. Contacted recently by the Times, Field explained that after he failed a lie detector test required by the Santa Monica Troop Committee, he was encouraged to transfer to another troop in the city where he served as scout master for four years. God, they said. He fails a lie detector and they're like, you just gotta go to another true, bro. My God, what the ****? Just do what they do at the corner liquor store when someone has ******* you know, put a mixture of him up on the wall. Put a picture on the wall. Just say not that guy, right? That's it's so easy, dude. Oh my God, your job is protecting children. Show at least as much care as a liquor store clerk over a bounced check. What the ****? So the ******* field tells the the Los Angeles Times, they said it had all been cleared up with the scouts. Like, I don't. How do you clear this out in Valencia? He joined his brother in Law's troop, but left after a parent intercepted a love letter he had written to a scout. The file shows. At one point, the file says Field was caught watching *********** with naked scouts in his Jacuzzi. Jesus **** I know someone stopped this guy. 17 years of this. Come on, 17 years. This isn't like, yeah, you know, 20 years later, he changed his name and his identity and moved across the country, and he just stuck his way into it. No, he just shows up. One group is like, yeah, you failed the I promise not to molest kids. Part of the lie detector here. Go to this other group, bring your Jacuzzi with you. You're out of the Silmar chapter. Yeah. Of the scouts. And then just, you know what Glendale's recruiting. Oh my God, super ****** ** like again. There were, at its height like 7,000,000 boys in the Boy Scouts. Ohh, some of them were all. And I'm not being callous here. It is inevitable in any population of seven million boys, some of them will get molested by adults, right? The fact that this is a thing that happens is not inherently the fall of the Boy Scouts. But as this example shows, they are criminally irresponsible in taking any attempts to stop it. That's the problem. It's not that, like there are some bad apples. It's that they're kind of like the cops. They just like they enable the bad apple. Yeah, it's like they literally. Of a basket of like with a with a foundation of poison. And they're going on. Some of these apples are bad. It's like you are. You poisoned the ******* best. Yeah, you poured cyanide into an apple basket and then you ****** in it. This is directly your fault. Yeah. Now, among other things, that story is why I think Jacuzzi ownership should require a license. But beside that's that's another two parter. Now, despite the fact that this guy had repeatedly engaged, well, I think we can agree it's pretty outrageous. And public abuse of children. Yeah, BSA national office. Didn't realize he'd snuck back into the organization until 1988. Again, almost 20 years. And they only realized this because another local scouting official reported that. Steve. Field, who was at that point chairman of a local troop committee, had been arrested for ************ in front of a child. So he doesn't get kicked out by the Boy Scouts. He gets arrested by the cops and a local scout is like, oh hey, you guys should know this guy. Turns out he was a child molester. This local official doesn't know this guy is a record, but he sends this in to report this guy and the people who run the PDF files are like, oh, Steve Field is the same as Steven Field. How could we have known? Cause in genius criminal mind. God, they're just like, the cop comes and goes like, oh, this. You know this guy, he's got arrested, you know, for ************. And they're like, oh, you mean creepy Steve? Ohh, creepy Steve the ******. Steve the ****** is ******. Yeah. Yeah. Ohh, God in heaven. Oh, he been doing that and he's been doing that for a while. He's why we call him creepy Steve. Yeah. Ohh, wacky Steve. Don't leave him alone with your kids anyway. He's in charge with the kids. So for what it's worth, once the Sheriff's Department actually got involved with Steve's case, which should have fallen into their lap around 20 years earlier, they launched a serious investigation. And again, all of the police aside, one of the things they have a better record of taking seriously, although not a perfect one, because a lot of cops are child molesters. Generally, detectives who find out like, kids are being raped are like, well, this is probably important. It's like, yeah, it's just the thing. Even if you're a ******* cop, most people you hear a child is being abused and you're like, well, yeah, we got to. Right. ******* do something about this. Yeah, yeah. Most cops, you know, obviously a cab, but not a, you know, catch all. Cops do not deliberately enable child molestation. Yeah, yeah. Whatever that acronym spells out, they hear about this guy. And generally this is the case, like, 20 years in, like, with these abusive adults. And that's when finally **** happens. This guy gets arrested and it's because, like, the the BSA can't hide it anymore, right? Child *********** was found in Fields's home. Photos he taken of nude boys, nude Boy Scouts as far back as 15 years ago are found. And when the cops realized this guy has been praying on Boy Scouts for more than a decade, they asked the National Office. You could have a file on this guy, and the BSA sends the P file for for fields to or for field to them, but they send it along with the request. And here's the acab part. Because the cops abide by this request, we hope you will use this information with discretion, since we have tried to maintain our files that they cannot be subpoenaed in any legal action. Wow. If again, if you're. Of cops are better people than they are. If you're a decent person. My first question would be this guy raped kids. Why don't you want this subpoenaed? Like, why? Why, why, why, why? Why? And why are you not, like, throwing your doors open to to this? Like, why? Why not? Let this be? He's ****** kids. Like, God. I mean, so the the cops they abided by. Yeah, just an arbitrary like, ohh, if you could do us a favor and like, they're probably all Boy Scouts. Ohh, **** a lot of cops. ******* half of Congress people were Boy Scout or they have congressmen or whatever. Like a huge percentage. Like, yeah, all, almost all of our recent presidents have been either Boy Scouts or Eagle Scouts. Like, it actually does mean a lot to a lot of it. So like there's a story that could have gone badly for my childhood when I was a kid, I think like 13 or 14, I would go every Saturday, I would go with my friends to a hobby store and we would play Warhammer. And then we at one point started wanting to play D&D, which I started playing in the scouts. And like the people who we found to play with us were, this guy was like 19. At the time, he just graduated high school, was in college. And a dude who was almost 30 who's, like, an engineer. And that dude invites us all, like, well, on Saturday night, since the hobby shop closes, like, 5, just come over to my house and we'll all play D&D until, like, midnight. And, like, my parents hear this and they're like, OK, well, that's a little quiet. He's like, yeah, almost 30. Like, this concerns us. And this other guy's an adult, too. But both of them were Eagle Scouts. So my parents were like, OK, yeah. And it was like, they were like, there was fine. Like, nothing. Like those people were huge positive influences on me. Like, I don't want like, I'm. They were both very positive parts, all right, but you. But like, that's why my parents trusted them as they were. There's an intrinsic, intrinsic trust in like, ohh, these people are part of this organization that I have nothing. But yeah, my dad was an Eagle Scout, you know, right. Yeah. So anyway, just culturally, this, I think this is part of why the cops play ball with the BSA for so long. And don't make more of an issue about this is that like, a lot of them are probably boys get someone, probably ******* trip leaders, you know? Yeah. Yeah. You know, there were a bunch of, like cop kids and stuff in Boy Scouts when I was in the scouts, obviously. But I mean, it's it's kids getting ******. It's like, that's why, yes. Yeah. But the I think from the cops pursuit is like, well, we're getting this guy and we don't want to, we don't want to tarnish because they're cops. Like, they protect organizations from ******. They're like, cops are often horrified at things other cops do. They just cover it up because they believe in the institution? I think so. I think they're they're they're willing to do that for the Boy Scouts, but they have so much room. It's just it's like, it's one of those things. It's like, not just defending it. Like, yeah, I'm just explaining the thought process. What I think is just thinking about it. It's like, if I'm a cop and I'm like, OK, I'm gonna, I'm gonna back up all these cops no matter ******* what? And then someone throws out another organization, like, ohh yeah, and this is like the rape organization. Like, alright, I have room in my moral compass for one more organization to defend. It is worth noting that at this point, they're not thinking about this as the rape organization. This is this. We don't want to let another. This is already terrible. Don't wanna also defame this beautiful organization and you know, there's a lot of good at the same time. Yeah, it is not until I think the first really big academic quality work on sexual abuse within the Boy Scouts is that book we've been quoting from scouts honor, which will have LinkedIn. The, the whole book is available online right now. It was published in 1994 by a guy named Patrick Boyle and it was, I mean it. It was. I don't think it did super well at the time. Obviously. I think he got a lot of **** for publishing it, but it is not a fun read. You of the heroes in this story, one of them has to be Patrick Boyle for being in 1994. Like, people need to know that this is a systemic problem. And totally. It was not until three or four years ago that it became mainstream knowledge. How systemic the problem was. He's. Well, yeah. The curve. Yeah. Because I, I, I I started hearing about this stuff with the, you know, Boy Scout Teen 18. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And the the fact that this book came out in 93 is crazy to me. Yeah. Yeah. And you know what else is ahead of the curve? This the products, the products and services that support this podcast way ahead of the curve the Patrick Boyles of their day. Good say OK. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. 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Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind. Betterhelp.com/behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. We're back. So fields or field gets arrested for abusing 213 year old boys and sentenced to 12 years in prison when the LA Times found him because he's out of prison by the time these LA Times articles are very recent. We'll talk about why, and I'm reading from a bunch of different LA Times articles because they have done, as far as I can find, the best journalistic reporting on on abuse within the Boy Scouts. But when they find this guy, right, because he's he's out of prison now. He's working. I think he's a ******* lawyer or something. No. Might have been in finance. I forget exactly. But they find him he's like out in free and like working. And they interviewed him and he admitted to abusing the kids he'd been convicted of abusing, but the night allegations that he'd abused and the other kids, even though. Absolutely, yeah, of course other kids. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The Times informed him that he'd been on a blacklist since 1971 in the Boy Scouts and hit when they said, like, did you know the Boy Scouts had a file blacklisting you? He sold them like, no, I had no idea. That that's surprising because I was able to stay in the Boy Scouts for like, 20 additional years. Yeah, I was in. I was in the Boy Scouts. Yeah. The child molester told them, it's like a no fly list. If your name is on the No fly list, you shouldn't be able to get on a plane. Like, the the pedophile is baffled by how easy it was for him to get back into the Boy Scouts. But like, yeah, they really shouldn't have allowed this. Yeah, you're not wrong, pedophile. But like, yeah, yeah, you're not wrong. Yeah, this is a problem. Yeah. He was like a miscarriage of justice. Yeah. As the guy who raped those kids, you have adequate accurately identified the issue. Yeah. Or molested like I don't know. Like, so yeah. And it is that really like that goes to show how ****** ** the BSA is because when the pedophile your organization allowed to repeatedly harmed children in your care throw shade on you for your irresponsibility and letting him in, that's that's a that's an epic **** **. Like you have failed so comprehensively I don't have a word for it. Yeah, that's a there's a signal there. Yeah, probably reading. Yeah. That Times article goes on to tell the story of Scout Master Alan C Dunlap of Fresno, CA, who was arrested in 1973 on suspicion of having abused several children. Dunlap pled guilty to four counts of molestation and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. The scouts created yet another pee file on him. 13 years later, in 1986, Dunlap was out of the hospital and registered as a scout volunteer in Bryan, TX. God, it isn't it. Yeah, you're gonna be saying that. About my friend. It does not appear that anyone even checked the blacklist before registering him, which gets at the chief problem with the whole system. The BSA actually did a pretty good job of documenting guys who had been caught or accused of sexual assault, right? They're very thorough in like wind stuff gets in. They they do put it all in this file, but there's still no it can. Remember, Baden Powell doesn't want there to be a big barrier to entry. There's for most of this. The 60s, seventies, 80s. There's no real screening process in most again, as we said, like that one. Our troop had, like, they they chose to do like a polygraph test, which polygraphs are problematic. And obviously they just sent him to another troop. So like it did there, there are, there are, though it's worth noting, individual because it's very decentralized organization. Some troops do have really good, like, you know, policies in order to screen people. But nationally there's nothing. And this blacklist, only a handful of people at the top have access to it, and they don't run every name through it. Like, there's no right you when a guy joins a Scout troop in ******* Texas, they don't. Or in *******. Like, I don't know the main they don't send his name into the national file to scan it. They do nothing. They only find out afterwards. So it's useless. It's ******* you. Other than like as documentation that a lot of guys are repeatedly molesting kids in the Boy Scouts. It's it's just a fun way to get a nice list going. But there's nothing you can possibly do, nothing to protect children or very close the the boys goes like, well, no, there's actually this X number of of men that we stopped because they were in the blacklist and someone recognized that. Not to say it never happened, but like, clearly. It was not an effective protecting system and they knew it at the time. So yeah, of course. So after this guy gets you know this, this dude is arrested and kicked out of the scouts in 73 after abusing some children. 13 years later he becomes a scout volunteer in Bryan, TX and he immediately gets back to sexually assaulting children. He was eventually caught and pled guilty to abusing a 9 year old Cub Scout. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison. A local official learned this and called the national BSA office to report Dunlap so he could be added to the P files and the National Office realized they already had a file on the guy. Probably different. They added it. Here's what they do. Actually, it's even worse than that. They just add a note to his file. 4 words. Convicted again, dash child molestation. God, Jesus Christ. Come on. Come on, guys. Adendum he done it again? He done it again. We might have a problem here, Cletus. Uh, this is all pretty bad, but it gets worse and worse. Both of those, actually, the LA Times writes. Quote in some instances, the Boy Scouts of America chose to give alleged molesters a second chance. In a 1992 deposition, Ernst, then keeper of the national file, testified that alleged abusers were given probation, which required periodic updates on the person's behavior. Only if evidence of molestation was, quote, extremely weak. An individual's confidential file was generally. Destroyed after probation was completed, but the files sometimes survived when the men went on to abuse again. Several of those cases suggest the initial evidence of abuse was strong. Again, the BSA policy is air on the side of believing the child molester when he denies having molested a kid. God, my ******* God. Yeah, and I'm sure there you could find there's there have to be statistically millions of people, a couple of cases of kids who lied because they were angry at it. I'm sure it happened statistically. Be happy, but thousand like 100 minimum. Hundreds and hundreds and all, and probably like by some accounts thousands of cases of people molesting kids repeatedly within the Boy Scouts like. There. But again, they air on the side of protecting the adult, not children. And their entire job should be to protect these children, right? I mean, that's literally what they're their job is. It's like teaching them how to fend for themselves. And they're *******. I mean, again, my my scout master who was a, I mean, he was a great scout master. He did something horrible for Raytheon that we don't know entirely. What, like all a bunch of the guys who taught me how to camp roll Raytheon engineers. It's like Plano, like, that's yeah. But anyway, he, like, his attitude was my only job is to stop kids. And dying. So like, you go out there, he'll teach you to. He would teach us anything we wanted to learn, he would help us learn. But he didn't do anything for you. So if you were miserable for days, if you ****** ** if your **** got soaked, if you like, let your tent on fire. Like, hey, you can camp out under the stars or whatever. Like my only job is to stop you from dying is it's about self-reliance. But still very he took safety, like our physical health very seriously. And that's not what the the Boy Scouts are protecting the adults about. The children like the organization nationally. And again, I had a lot of great Scout leaders who, while they may have been war criminals, always put the safety of the kids in in the in the Boy Scouts. American kids. I didn't know what Raytheon was at the time. Not the Iraqi kids. Yeah. I mean, good God only knows what they were actually like working on. But yeah, you can only care about so many kids, Robert. Yeah, you can. Look. So for an example of how the Boy Scouts would protect and give second chances to child molesters, let's talk about Mark F Bumgarner. He was a 21 year old assistant scout master in North Carolina. In September 1978, he was at Camp Sheel, helping to manage a camp with several other adult leaders. Late one night, after most scouts and adults had went to bed, he struck up a conversation with another boy. I think they're just like sitting around a campfire and they talk. For a while, everybody else goes to sleep, and quite suddenly, when they're alone, Bumgardner sticks his hand into the boy's pants and fondles his genitals. The boy tells him to stop. So Bumgarner says the cartilage in your penis is similar to your nose, and I can break it. Jesus. ****. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I mean, like, I try not to get on the whole, like, you know, vengeance side of things, but just shoot that guy. Yeah, just yeah, just shoot that guy. Just shoot that guy. Yeah, we don't need that guy. Kill that dude. But just kill that guy is all. That is just like, you know, sometimes you fantasize about a righteous kill, you know? Yeah. Yeah, that would be one. Yeah. Just just little, little, little shallow grave in the woods, you know? Just. Making all that guy needs the the the just the planet just benefits a little bit from this one murder. I think when you threaten to break a child's penis when your hand if he tells about you molesting him, you don't deserve to live anymore. You don't deserve that. That's that's the that's the end of your right to exist, I argue is my opinion. I know it's funny because like before this podcast I never thought there were levels of pedophilia in which I would. That's that's a high one, right? Yeah, that's one is like, ohh he's like, I mean, yeah pedophilia is. Evil. But he's like evil and evil. Yeah. He's. I think he's pedophiles are disgusted by that. Like, yeah, because yeah, yeah. Anyway, like that he that's like the worst level probably of pedophilia that that I can imagine. Is that that kind of thing? Yeah, that's that's the top of the pedophile pyramid. So after this horrifying experience, the kid went to his father, who reported this to the Boy Scouts rather than to the police. The BSA investigated the matter, and, after what the National office described as considerable discussion, decided that Bumgarner deserved a second chance. Because again, this is the second would be. It would be still bad, but different if it was like, well, he was caught, you know, massaging a boy in his Jacuzzi and the boys shirt was off and like, whatever, like that's bad to to to let that go on. He threatened to break a child's penis. He molested a kid. How do you give a second chance to that? Jesus ******* yeah. The reason why is because. Bumgarner was an Eagle Scout and the son of the pastor whose church sponsored the troop. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, there it is. So he kept working for the Boy Scouts, spending time in close proximity with children absolutely unmonitored. He was arrested several months later for sexually abusing 2 scouts during a camp out. He pled guilty and was expelled by the National office, who added yet another name to the P files six years later. Oh yeah, you thought this was done. You thought we were done with Bumgarner? Come on. Six years later, Bumgarner gets out of jail and back into the Boy Scouts. He moves from North Carolina to Virginia, and he becomes Assistant District commissioner to the Fairfax Boy Scouts. This was 1984. It was two years later, 1986, before the national organization realized that this pedophile had gotten back in. They couldn't find it out on their own. They didn't get convicted. Convicted pedophile? Yeah. And they only find out that he's gotten back in because he gets convicted again. He gets caught sexually battering. Two boys and sentenced to six years in prison. Just like, well, just this. How could we have known? How could we have known every single time? Yeah, this is the Los Angeles Times continues. Probation was also given to Floyd David Slusher, a 19 year old staffer at a Boy Scout camp in Germany who was caught up using a scout in 1972 and sent home to the United States. Even after he was caught, they had to physically restrain him from attempting to visit the scout he was molesting. Scouts official wrote to headquarters, a file was opened, but Slusher was allowed to continue working with scouts again. Another Boy Scout leader was like, this guy is such ******* pedophile that we had to physically stop him from going after this kid after we caught him. Like, he's like a cartoon of a pedophile. Yeah, yeah, Family Guy. Scouts are like, this guy deserves a second chance. Yeah, like, when did this second chance program start existing like this? So here, like, oh, they gave a second chance. You assume it's something like, ohh. He, like, showed them some weird pictures, and they decided there was plausible, which, again, is not OK. But no. Right. These guys are like, this is ******** ****. These are convicted ******* pedo child rapists. Yeah. And they're just like, yeah, I feel like we give him a second chance. We had to see, we had to physically restrain the guy from doing more molestation. Yeah, like, come on, let me go. They're like, what year was romantic? So Slusher also shouldn't let a guy named. I should do damn near anything. Absolutely. OK. Named. That's not an OK name. So he's allowed to keep working with the Scouts, and he goes on to molest at least eight boys in a Boulder, Co troop, threatening to kill them if they told anybody, according to the Boulder County Sheriff's Department. Yeah, wow. Yeah, yeah. The detective in Boulder County wrote. Quote, almost every Boy Scout in Troop 75 and Troop 73 has been approached sexually by Slusher on one time or another, adding that the victims are too numerous to interview. Like, I can't interview all the kids he molested because like, I don't have that kind of time. Cool. The Boulder police don't have the time to talk to all of this. Guys victims. We're not authorizing any OT right now so we can investigate this single person. I mean, in fairness, they probably had plenty to put him away and he he pleads guilty to one account of sexually assaulting a child. The Boy Scouts continued the practice of offering probation and suspension to prominent men accused of abuse until 1988. As the result of a high profile abuse case in San Mateo, CA, Richard Stengler was the adult head of a Sea Scouts unit, which is kind of like a for older boys closer to adulthood, like elite, like, you're doing like boat **** right? Like it's doing cool stuff. It's it actually was the thing I wanted to do, but Texas is not as easy to do that kind of thing. So the Boy Scout Navy. Yeah. The Boy Scout Navy. Yeah. The Seahawks. The Boy Scouts. Yeah. You gotta that's always a red flag whenever your organization starts to see or and they have a Navy. It's especially a red flag. Or the Navy. Yeah. I think all the Marines in the audience would agree with that. Yeah. So, like, you know, there's the goop cruise like that. Yeah. You know, it's like with the Boy Scouts take to see probably an issue, you know, someone says, you know, good people don't take to sea. By the way, I'm crowdfunding to buy a yacht for all of my followers to live on. We're gonna sail around the ocean. We're going to look for gold. It's international waters. Anything? International waters, baby, any. There's no laws in international waters. Make our own society, our own civilization. Stop it, Sophie. Come on. Come on. Come on. Be sick. Billboarding. All right, well, you're no fun. Here's some ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. 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Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SP. RE aker.com, get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. We're back. I'm just sad. Sophie won't let me. Won't let me. Hubbard. Nope. Alright, well OK, so this guy Richard Stengler in 1971 is the the head of a Sea Scouts unit and in 71 he gets charged with tying up and groping 3 boys. This was the thing I alluded to in the first episode with the the restraints. Is that like a knot? Did you get a merit badge for how good? Yeah, I mean it's unfortunate to say this, but a Boy Scout troop leader is probably in the the most able to tie up a boy because he's probably pretty good at. That's that, yeah. Really makes that merit badge a lot darker. It does. It does. It's not great. It's not great. So he gets convicted and sent in 71 and sentenced to three years of probation, which I might argue the court system failed there too, because I think tying up and groping boys probably more than three years probation longer for like smoke pot. For like pot. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, the scouts suspended him during this. But they didn't kick him out when his probation. Ended a local scout executive and a number of parents lobbied for his suspension to be lifted, so clearly this guy had some sort of charisma. Was good at like convincing parents. I don't know what he ******* told them. Maybe like it was a merit badge thing gone wrong. But parents lobby for this guy, which is wow settling. I mean, this is not again, we this is not an unheard of kind of situation like this. This occurs in other organizations and whatnot. Sure. It's just like, I mean, yeah, it's really to me, the Catholic Church, you know, not, I'm not excusing would be one of them. Yeah, but but but I understand a little bit more having like basically the the guy who talks to God being an important figure in your life and. Yeah, and like like standing up for the organization and the church and maybe even a specific priest in the church who's been accused of something because you're like that dude talks to God. Who am I to question that guy? These are ******* volunteer. Scout master. These are doing like cosplay and teaching you how to whittle and they're just like, no, but he's a good dude. Yeah, he's he's he's ******* good dude. Like it. I mean, there's actually a just a tremendous amount in common with like the Boy Scouts and how this works and like. And the Catholic Church. Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. All right. Jesus Christ, let's get back into this. So, so this guy, after tying up and molesting several boys, there's three years probation, and when it ends, he gets successfully reinstituted to the Boy Scouts. The local scout officer who lobbied for him being brought back in wrote quote. I feel quite confident that no further problems will arise. Just ******* just on organization of marks. Everyone is a ******* mark. Yeah. 14 years later, in 1989, a parent reported that Stinger had padlocked her 11 year old boy in a harness and watched as he hung in the air during a boat trip. So that's good, that's fine. The BSA called the police, and the police go to Stinger's home and they search it and they find dozens of restraints and an enormous cache of child ***********. Naked photos that he took of boys that he had blindfolded and like tied to things, at least one is a picture of a. Naked 6 year old boy that he blindfolded and tied to a bed like profound child abuse on a yeah. And again, they catch him 14 years later. He's doing this the whole time. That's what the photos showed that he'd been the whole time. He gets back in, he's just he's tying up and molesting kids. So wait, so they call they called the cops when he what did he do to the kid? He like, tied him up. He. Yeah, he. I don't even know if this was sexual or if he was just like being * ****. Probably both. But he'd like padlocked an 11 year old boy in a harness. They hung him in the air during a boat trip. So his mom is just like, that's physical of. I don't think she called it an asexual issue. Was just like, that's assault. That's when they called the cops. There was, I mean, his mom calls the cops like it. To her credit, this is probably the first she's aware anything's wrong. And she immediately like, yeah, we need to deal with this ****. And the cops search his house and find out that he has been tying up and restraining him molesting kids for 14 years and has tons of pictures of it. She's so this guy is like both, like sexual abuser and just a literal *******. Cyclopath yeah, yeah, this guy's not that. There's not bits of both, but dangerous day. ******* ****. So when all this dropped, more than 24 former and current scouts came forward to report that they had been abused by Stinger. Some had been victimized as early as 1958. Up until 2015, the Chief Scout executive, effectively the head of Boy Scouts, was a guy named Wayne Brock. Wayne got that August position in 2012 after a four year stint as the deputy Chief Scout Executive before he held this national position in 1987. Wayne was the local Boy Scouts executive for the state of Georgia. That year, a scout master at a camp in his domain was accused of molesting a boy in a sleeping bag. Wayne followed procedure which at the time meant documenting the allegation and sending that documentation on to Texas. The leaders name and crimes were added to the confidential files. The Scout master was expelled, but the police were not informed. He left town. Brock was promoted again and again and eventually wound up running the Boy Scouts as a different Los Angeles Times article. ” as he and his recent predecessors rose through the ranks of scouting, they handled at least 120 cases of suspected sexual abuse dating from the mid 1970s, according to a times analysis of constant Confidential Boy Scout files. As district executives, it was their job to gather evidence and witness statements, determine whether to recommend a leaders expulsion and report their findings to headquarters, which made the final decision. In the process, the officials had a front row seat on cases in which Scouting's abuse prevention policies failed, although the officials may have followed scout. Policy and violated no laws. The files in several cases indicate that they did not inform authorities or their communities of suspected child molesters who were expelled from the organization. So this is the guy who runs the Boy Scouts, right? This guy's history, which isn't, you know, he's not a molester himself, but he has a, shall we say, imperfect history of dealing with cases where kids are molested and they all, all of their last names are just read. We got Stinger, we got Brock. We got slusher. Yep. Yep. Like, problems. I mean, just like they sound like a really scary A-Team. Yeah. So this is the guy who runs the Boy Scouts. And his predecessor, the guy who had headed the BSA before him, was a guy named Robert Mazzuca, and before Robert another scaring me. I know, I know. And before he ran the Boy Scouts, Mizuka spent 20 years as a regional scout executive in California and Pennsylvania. He dealt with numerous cases of child sexual abuse by adults and scouting. One of these was the case of David Cooley, an assistant scout master in Pittsburgh who was expelled in 1997 after police found videos that he'd made of himself having sex with children. Cooley was eventually sentenced to 54. Years in prison. When the case broke, it came out that Mizuka had earlier been arrested and convicted in 1987 for molesting a boy in South Carolina. He'd been allowed to volunteer in scouting and molest kids after that because the Boy Scouts did not require background checks at that point. And this brings us to a particularly dark part of the story. Oh, are we going to get dark now? We're finally going to get Dark, man. Good. Yeah. So? If you'll remember back at the very start of this story, back at the very start of Scouting, Robert Baden Powell had rejected the idea that scouting volunteers should be filtered under the justification that this would reduce the number of adults who volunteered and slow expansion. Now, at that time, even though kids were being molested, child sexual abuse was not a widely understood phenomenon. By the 1980s, this had changed. A number of high profile cases of abuse of children had led several other leading youth groups to his Institute criminal background checks for their adult. Volunteers. Criminal background checks first became widely possible in 1985, and in 1986 the Big Brothers Big Sisters Organization made this a requirement for volunteers, and the boys and Girls Club did the same thing in the same year. 1986 was soon as this becomes possible, responsible organizations who take care of kids are like, well, of course we should do criminal background checks on our adult volunteers, obviously. Yeah, that just makes sense. The Boy Scouts don't do this. Scouting officials claimed that background checks would be too expensive and would scare away. Volunteers too expensive. Again, it's it would have cost 10s of 1,000,000. They made hundreds of 1,000,000. Yeah, I was gonna say the ******* Boy Scouts, they they don't have the money. Cash OHS. Yeah, they everyone's a volunteer or pays. So they said that they also argued that doing so would it best provide a false sense of security. Just read how many stories of guys with criminal records getting back in the Boy Scouts. They're like, listen, it's gonna happen one way or another. Let me let me promise you, even with criminal background checks, we're not gonna stop kids from adults from molesting kids. Don't like that's just gonna do it. It's still gonna happen. Look, but here's the boys feel better job is to help pedophiles scout for boys. Yeah, that's the name of the organization. Ohh, man. Ohh. God, be prepared as a motto. That means be prepared to get molested. Yeah, you be you. Be prepared for what the adults in this organization are gonna do to you. She's oh, so the Boy Scouts didn't just refuse to require criminal background checks for their volunteers, they poured huge amounts of money into lobbying local governments because states start to be like, well, we as a state want to require FBI background checks for youth volunteers, for organizations anywhere in the state. And the the BSA lobbies local elected leaders to stop these laws. It's it's. I don't, I don't understand, like at that. But now at that point, you just you're delayed. Directly enabling it. This isn't bad at all. Like, is this like a an Epstein thing? Like is this like, **** is going on with you people? Because at this point it sounds on purpose. I can't even. Yeah, I don't know how much logical reason. Yeah, I think someone just cause like this is the way it's always been. I think some of it might, some of it is probably that there are pedophiles in the organization who are, are, are want this and some of it might be, well, ****. If we do this, people will find out how many adults have been molesting kids in the Boy Scouts. Yeah, and that that that. Not gonna be good for us. Burn the PDF file or whatever. Yeah, what the ****? I mean, yeah. *** ****. So the BSA did not ultimately start requiring criminal background checks for volunteers that you wanna guess what year 2003, 2008? Get the **** we have the Internet. Yeah, by this point, hundreds and possibly thousands of men with criminal histories of child molestation, we're allowed into the Boy Scouts. Most of these men went on to abuse more children from the very earliest days after the decision not to require background checks. This was recognized as a problem from yet another Los Angeles Times article. In 1989, a Scout Committee chairman and St. Paul, MN decried the organization's half hearted screening in a letter to headquarters. BSA is only creating an illusion of performing what they claim. Hey, Russell, Sias wrote to scout chief executive bin Love. It becomes quite clear that BSA is more concerned with passing the buck than in accepting responsibility for those who are its adult leaders. That same year, a Las Vegas scout master with a criminal history of exposing himself to boys was arrested for sexually abusing a 12 year old scout. One parent said casinos did a better job of screening workers. Honestly, yeah, yeah, the parent wrote to scouting officials. The black eye which scouting has suffered in this could easily have been avoided if the Council had taken the simple expedient of doing a background investigation. Yup. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't. I just don't. I don't understand it at this point. It's just it wasn't the money. They didn't want to pay the money at that time. Some that has to be some of it because of what we're about to talk about, because it gets worse. We have not hit bottom yet. Matt, are you excited? I'm just like my if my blood pressure goes any higher, my ******* die. Yes, we have. We have. Ohh boy. So. While the Boy Scouts are giving child molesters probation, covering up abuse, refusing background checks that yadda yadda yadda, children keep coming forward to tell their stories, and by the 90s again, this book comes out 93. It's getting more known right that this is a problem the organization has, and as a result, once it becomes clear to people, at least pay attention that, like this might be a systemic issue. Some parents of kids who get molested try to sue the organization, claiming a pattern of abuse enabled by the very structure of the BSA itself, confronted with these threats in the form of children and. Trusted to the BSA and abused by men that organization had refused to properly vet, the Boy Scouts viciously attacked the victims and their families. In one case, two boys in Michigan alleged that they had been molested quote hundreds of times by a troop leader. The BSA denied any responsibility and instead in court blamed their widowed mother. They claimed she had failed quote to provide adequate supervision over the volunteer they had approved. Wow yeah, your fault. Your kids got molested. You weren't watching hard. Stuff over the guy that his whole job, according to the ethos of our organization, is to help. Like single moms raise their kids. You didn't. It's your fault that, yeah, you should have done a background check on. You should have done a background check. Why did you do that? Yeah, don't you screen. Come on. And it gets worse from the LA Times quote. In 2002, Gerald Schwartz, a 42 year old former scout master in New York, admitted to abusing a boy in his troop in the 1990s after being secretly recorded saying he did something very, very wrong. And apologizing to the boy, Schwartz pleaded guilty to four counts of ****** and was sent to prison. Despite the conviction and the victim's testimony that Schwartz raped me and forced me to perform oral sex on him, the scouts, in a motion to dismiss the subsequent lawsuit, contended that the sex was consensual. What the ****? Yep. Wow. Yeah. We gotta burn it down. This is real. We gotta burn this **** down. This is not this is not salvageable. This is not salvageable. Holy ****. Yeah. Yeah. That's bad. That's the worst. These guys are. You know what's so much worse than I thought it was? I thought, yeah, it really is. This is. I'm. I'm not. I'm not. Pro Scout no more. No, no. This is definitely turned me around. Honestly? The night. Yeah. ****. I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. In the 1980s in Oregon, one man alleged that scouting troop leader Timur ***** was allowed to continue his leadership position after he admitted to molesting 17 boys and this kid molested them after that, yeah, it took decades for one of the boys victimized by ***** to seek legal recourse. But when he did, at a trial in 2010, regional BSA official Eugene Grant blamed his parents for letting their children go to ******* apartment to work on May. Merit badges and attend the scouting sleepover, which maybe there's some questionable parenting calls being made here, but you let him into your organization and let him stay after he molested 17 boys. And and also, like, you know, it's like you. You were saying it's like you trust you trust him. He's an Eagle Scout, right? Yeah, ******* a. But the Boy Scouts representative said in court his parents should have known better. I think it's criminal. You let him stay in the scouts after he admitted to molesting 17 boys and the parents are the criminals. What the **** is wrong with you, these guys? We gotta. Yeah, I don't understand. I'm not gonna say anything. Say that in a court of law and not immediately rushed into fire. Yeah. I mean, just like, yeah, murder is wrong, right? Yeah, kind of in some cases. I'm not trying to say publicly right now. Anything that's gonna get me in trouble. But I feel like sometimes murder is good. Is that. Yeah. Yeah. That's a reasonable thing to feel, hearing this story like. They they said these words out loud and the fact that no one was just like, yeah, oh, I gotta kill this guy. Like he stands. The value of breakings that's a bricken. That's like, somebody should just be like, OK, I gotta hit this guy with a ******* brick. Hit in the face of the brick. Yeah, you don't get to say that and not get hit in the face with the brick. Holy ****. That's that's brick in words. Very easy to brick that guy. Thankfully, the Oregon jury rejected his line of argument and found the Scouts liable for almost $20 million. The damages nice. This is the case. This is why we all like know in mass about the problem. Now this case breaks open the floodgates of abuse claims against the Boy Scouts and it's during this case part of the discovery in this like 1200 of the P files are revealed and and put into the public record because they're trying to show like there's a pattern of abuse. Right. These guys keep getting in and and abuse and the the Boy Scouts let them in again. This is what led to all of the Los Angeles Times articles we quoted so far because once these things are made public because if it's introduced into like a legal case. That way, it's like anyone can see that record. So they start combing through this stuff and it the other they start doing like, other stuff gets released. It's it's the this is the blood in the water, you know? Yeah. Journalists start finding out other details of sordid Boy Scout sexual abuse history and more victims start coming forward, an avalanche begins. One issue that confronted many victims is the fact that some states had very strict laws regarding the statute of limitation for sex crimes. So, like a lot of these guys, they were abused in, like, the 50s, you know, and like now as an adult. He's like, and these stories are heartbreaking. Some of these men are like, I was never, I was abused in, like, the 50s, the 60s. I was never able to, like, have a relationship that I was coming. I've never been able to feel intimate with anybody like this. Yeah. There's cases of people who commit suicide. One guy totally whether we're molested. And he's like, yeah, my brother became addicted to drugs and died of an overdose. And like that, he never recovered from this, you know? Yeah. It's, I mean, anyone who knows a victim of childhood sexual abuse knows how deep, like, uniquely evil. I'm gonna act. It is to inflict upon somebody and. Yeah. And and how. Yeah. The stories are just *******. So when these guys start realizing I'm not alone, people will believe me now. And also maybe if I speak up, this will help to protect other kids, you know, so they start to come forward. But in a lot of states they can't bring charges against the people who victimize them or the Boy Scouts because of the statute of limitations. So many states when they realize how many of these kids are out there to their credit, a bunch of state. Lawmakers put forward bills to expand the statute of limitations and allow charges to be pressed further away from the time of the abuse to be like, well, **** maybe we didn't really. We didn't make these laws considering everything that was happening and like, it's we need to, we need to allow these people a chance to get justice. The Boy Scouts spend a fortune and lawyers and lobbying fighting these bills wherever they crop up, once again devoting huge financial resources which they'd said were not worth spending on background checks, to try and make it harder for boys victimized by BSA officials to seek justice. From the Washington Post quote. The group retained lobbyists in Georgia and New York, where lawmakers say such action helped stall proposals that included look back windows, allowing adults to take legal action over decades old claims. It has hired lobbyists in Michigan, where similar proposals are being debated. The Bills would give adults who were abused as children a second chance to file suit if they missed their first opportunity under state law. Opponents of the state proposals, including the Boy Scouts and Catholic Archdiocese, argued that open-ended lookback periods violate due process and would put groups in the tough position of defending themselves in cases. In the distant past, I love like the people or Boy Scouts and the Catholic Church coming together, that, yeah, coming together just like a ******* rapey Voltron. Yeah, trying to be like, this is just wrong and this is. I want to belabor a bit on the the argument they're making, which is that this is unfair because it puts us in the position of defending our organization from actions that other. We weren't in charge of the Boy Scouts on this app. This was 50 years ago. Yeah, completely different group of men who were in charge, like how can we be held responsible today for the actions of two generations, you know, leaders from 2 generations ago. Yeah, I don't think this is a good argument. For one thing, as we have discussed, the historical record shows that the BSA's attitude towards sex abusers and the ways in which you enable them and defend them has not wavered since the days of Robert Baden Powell from Baden Powell's time to the ******* 2000s, the Boy Scouts are doing basically the same **** for another, the same officials who led the BSA. In the late aughts had been the ones in the 70s and 80s, furthering the height and ignore policies that enabled sexual abuse of children. In April of 2019, an expert who had been working with the BSA estimated that as many as 7819 adult volunteers and staff members had sexually abused boys. Over the course of the BSA's history, he suggested they were responsible for harming as many as 12,254 victims. That's the BSA's expert right now. If that were it, if that were the extent of the problem, this would be a huge problem. But it turns out that was a drastic underestimation a little over a year later in November of 2020. After a series of lawsuits and settlements, more than 100,000 alleged victims had come forward to claim they had been sexually assaulted as children in the Boy Scouts. So that's 100,000 who have said I was a victim, I was assaulted in this case. Yeah. And this is in the last year. **** yeah. The Boy Scouts have filed for bankruptcy, claiming to be devastated by the allegations. There's a number of ****** ** things in the fallout of this, one of the most, the worst things. So the Boy Scouts were stewards of a huge amount of of wildlands, right, for campgrounds and stuff and they were like that they would take care of. They've sold a bunch of that to developers. A lot of that **** these like this, like. Steam wow. Wild's been turned into, like, housing developments and **** because the Boy Scouts went broke trying to defending themselves from all the rape that their members did. It's it's just like a comprehensively bleak story. Oh my God, they can't even redeem themselves and make them, like, public lands. They're just. I mean, we gotta sell it to pay for lawyers to attack these kids. Hey, if I can't touch kids on this land, then I'm gonna ******* build condos on it. Yeah. **** you. Wow, the story of the Boy Scouts. Say that it was. Yeah. Ohh my good God, dude. I mean, it's like, yeah, usually when I, you know, the name of the show behind the ******** it's like usually it's like the the plural is because you have many episodes covering specific ********. This is one. It was just like one ******* at the beginning, and then just an endless slew of ******** and. And it's too many bad. I think I've I'm on ******* overload and yeah, I wanna I wanna do some righteous murder. Let's do a righteous kill together, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Let's go. Sophie, can you can we can we like get get like a write off some some money for murder tools is that. We do that probably not, but I'll ask. Well, what about about so that we could go to international waters. Yeah. In international waters it's legal. So stop trying to pull Hubbard. But come on. Right. It'll be like sea org but like but yeah but good. A good sea org. I think that people just have done it right. Good sea org. There could not yet. Sophie, you have a very closed mind towards sea orgs. And I don't think that's fair to all the good sea orgs. Yeah, yeah. Like, like the, I don't know, the Surfers Navy. Yeah, they've probably chill. Yeah. Come on. Hmm. No, I don't think it's gonna happen. I mean, you know. We we can do it on land, I guess. But the point is, is I'm currently furious and I'm disassociating, so I've had a really good time. Yeah. So so you had a good time on my show? Well, I'm sure everyone's dissociating now, so have a good time staring into the distance. And. Yeah, and just kind of like the thinking, my dark thoughts. Yeah, have a have a good time losing touch with your corporeal body as the rage within you becomes transcendent. Yeah, it'll be good. That's that's a it's a type of drug rage. It is a type of drug rager hall. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just gonna get some Regina Hall on right now. I need a Xanax. Yeah. Rage out with your page out. I don't know. I don't know. Boy, Matt, you got any plug cables to plug? Yeah, I do. Sopranos podcast. Pod yourself a gun. Check it out. We're about to start season 6. By the time this comes out, we'll season 6. Episode one will be out. It's a it's a great show. Film drunk fraudcast, that's us. But same guys talking about movies, right? I wanted, wanted to dedicate this to my my childhood friend, Johnny Aaron. You know, you listen to this show, Johnny Aaron, you're a you're a good, you're a good man. Sorry, was the molestation one, but this is a rough episode to get a shout out there. But, you know, ******* hey, you can't all be winners, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me back. Thanks for coming back and also sorry. Umm. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break her handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app Apple was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? 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