A California man suing the Boy Scouts of America over sexual abuse suffered at the hands of a volunteer Scout leader was so scarred by the incident that he once threw up outside a Taco Bell when he saw someone who looked like the man, he testified in the opening day of a civil trial.
The 20-year-old man, who was 13 when he was molested in 2007, told jurors Monday that shortly after the abuse he secretly taped the Scout leader making a partial confession because it was “a 13-year-old’s word against a Scout leader, an adult.”
Then, he dropped out of baseball — which had been his passion for seven years — stopped hanging out with friends and eventually enrolled in a home school program after the Scout leader began showing up in a parked car outside his high school.
“I felt scared. I felt like he was coming after me. I remember just hiding until his car went by (and) I felt kind of sick, he said. “One of the times I threw up just seeing his car.”
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“I think this is a case in which the one instance of sexual abuse against (the plaintiff) could not have been prevented, and it wasn’t prevented,” he said. “But the training program may have helped prevent the second or the third instance of sexual abuse.”
The current lawsuit alleges that Stein, now 37, pulled down the plaintiff’s pants when he was 13 and fondled him while the two worked in the Christmas tree lot.
Stein pleaded no contest to felony child endangerment in 2009 and was sentenced to probation. He served time in prison after authorities discovered photos of naked children on his cellphone.
