Patrick Boyle, my friend and the original pioneer in breaking the BSA sex abuse story way back in the 1990’s, has written here a thoughtful history of the "Story" of the BSA’s Perversion files. He is right that the story gets bigger and bigger each time it breaks. I suspect the reason is that, as time has unfolded over the last twenty years, the public has become increasingly intolerant of institutional child sexual abuse, and the idea that it happened thousands of times inside of America’s most trusted institution, is simply incomprehensible to people. And so each time there is a new disclosure about these files–such as the LA Times recent article from Sunday that BSA often covered up and hid allegations of abuse, even from law enforcement–the press and the public simply explode over it. I have previously written extensively about the Perversion Files, and the Kerry Lewis case out of which they were produced.
All this will play out again in just a few weeks, when our office–for the first time anywhere–publicly releases and posts online nearly 20,000 pages of these Perversion files for the public to see and understand. Stay tuned for more.