In a statement about the new allegations, Scouts BSA said, “Any incident of child abuse is one too many, and nothing is more important than the safety and protection of children in our Scouting programs.” 

Kosnoff and his colleagues said a bankruptcy filing would have a chilling effect on victims’ ability to expose predators who are a threat to their communities. The number of victims who have signed on since last month is evidence for the Seattle-based attorney that many more have yet to step forward.

“That’s proof that we’ve barely scratched the surface,” Kosnoff said. He added that FBI research has shown that each “perpetrator has over 100 victims over a lifetime of offending.” 

Kenneth Rothweiler, a partner at one of the three firms, Eisenberg Rothweiler,said that only a handful of the new allegations are related to previously identified perpetrators. About 90%, he said, are new.  

A few of the victims are young, still underage or in their 20s, but many have held their secrets close for decades.

James Kretschmer and Kendall Kimber are among those making their allegations public for the first time. The two men, in their 50s and 60s, said they experienced abuse by their Scout leaders in the 1970s. They described a culture of shame and secrecy that kept them silent. That worry has not been erased over the years.

Kimber said he was abused by a leader who offered to help him prepare for the Order of the Arrow, an honor society within the Boy Scouts that he was invited to join. At the leader’s house, Kimber said, the man forced him to perform oral sex. 

“He did that while he was talking to his mother on the phone,” Kimber said. “He had nothing about the Boy Scouts or about what I was doing on his mind.” 

Kimber said he never went back to the man’s house and eventually quit the Scouts. He said he didn’t tell anyone about his experience until much later, when he learned his brothers were abused by the same man. One committed suicide, which Kimber said was tied in part to the abuse.   

“I probably would have gotten kicked out” for coming forward at the time, Kimber said.

Kretschmer said he was abused by a Scout leader who was his psychologist through the Air Force base where his dad was stationed. He was a kid with attention issues, he said, which were less understood at the time.

“Nobody would have listened to me,” Kretschmer said. “The problem is, then you think, ‘Is it something I did? What was I doing, was it my fault? If I hadn’t done whatever, he wouldn’t have done that.’ It took me years and years to realize it wasn’t that little child’s fault. It was the adult who had control.” 

Both men said they are speaking out now to help prevent future abuse. 

“There are thousands of kids who may not have ever had this happen to them if people would have stood up and said, ‘No, no, no, we’re not tolerating this, we’re not allowing this to happen,’ ” Kretschmer said. ” ‘There may be a little bit of mud on our face right now, but it’s the children that are important.’ “

The Boy Scouts have been dogged by abuse allegations since a landmark case in 2010 that ended with an $18.5 million damage award and the release of more than 20,000 confidential documents, dubbed the “perversion files.” 

Those records revealed that the 100-year-old organization had long kept track of suspected and known abusers – banning more than 1,000 leaders and volunteers between 1965 to 1985. But the records also showed the Scouts had rarely, if ever, reported those individuals to police. 

Much like USA Gymnastics and the Catholic Church, the Scouts have been accused of covering up the abuse. The Scouting organization faces 200 lawsuits that its insurance companies threatened to stop covering. USA Gymnastics filed for bankruptcy protection in December, following the lead of more than a dozen church dioceses.

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The Boy Scouts joined institutions such as Michigan State University in lobbying against efforts to extend statutes of limitations, proposed in the wake of the Larry Nassar case and #MeToo movement, that would allow victims of sexual abuse more time to come forward and seek damages.  

In response to those proposals,“organizations like BSA and the Catholic Church are now taking legal maneuvers to try to prevent victims from bringing these cases,” Rothweiler said.