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Feb. 20, 2025 | By: Clara Bates - Missouri Independent
By Clara Bates - Missouri Independent
The Missouri House on Thursday approved a proposal to extend the civil statute of limitations for survivors of childhood sexual abuse.
Filed by state Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, the bill would extend the amount of time survivors have to file civil action against a perpetrator. Survivors would have until age 41 to file civil action, rather than age 31.
Seitz’s bill was inspired by sexual abuse allegations at Kanakuk Kamps, in the Branson area.
The legislation that contained Seitz’s bill passed out of the House on Thursday 92 to 42, with 24 voting present. The opposition, from Democrats and Republicans alike, was due to parts of the bill unrelated to the childhood sexual abuse piece.
It now heads to the Senate for consideration.
In 2023, the bill didn’t receive a vote in the House until May, when session was nearly over, and never got to a committee hearing in the Senate. Last year, the bill never came to a vote in the House.
Seitz’s bill hasn’t had a committee hearing this year but was passed out of committee unanimously in the last two years.
Opposition in previous years has come primarily from insurance companies raising concerns about being exposed to liability.
The legislation was tacked on as an amendment to another bill filed by state Rep. Matthew Overcast, a Republican from Ava.
“This amendment is not the perfect fix,” Seitz said during debate on the House floor earlier this week. “It’s a start. And it gives victims time and hope…I ask this body to, once again, in a bipartisan manner, do what’s right and help those who were harmed as children.”
The underlying bill relates to statutes of limitations for personal injury claims, which are governed by a separate legal framework than childhood sexual abuse claims.
Overcast’s bill reduces Missouri’s statute of limitations for personal injury claims from five years down to two years, meaning individuals would have less time to file a lawsuit after an injury.
Overcast said it would help the state compete economically and help small businesses protect themselves against frivolous lawsuits.
“It’s good, sound legal policy,” Overcast said Thursday. “It promotes the economic viability of our state, puts us in a place to compete with our neighboring border states who are well below our current five year statute of limitations.”
Missouri’s statute of limitations for personal injury claims is higher than all but two states, Maine and North Dakota.
Opponents said the change would stymie access to justice for those who are injured and seeking redress.
“This is designed to protect insurance companies, not you,” said state Rep. David Tyson Smith, a Democrat from Columbia. “If you get injured, you need that time, five years is not overly generous.”
Several lawmakers said they support the amendment to extend the statute of limitations for childhood sex abuse survivors but not the underlying bill to reduce the statute of limitations for personal injury.
“The problem I have with this is the amendment is so good,” Smith said. “I may have to vote ‘present’ on this because of the great amendment that’s on this.
“And I know that, probably, there’s a strategy behind that.”
The bill was heard immediately after the House approved legislation to protect a pesticide maker from charges that it didn’t warn customers that one of its most popular products causes cancer, which state Rep. Raychel Proudie pointed out.
“When someone hurts you, you should certainly be able to seek justice. Justice is something that we should be entitled to,” said Proudie, a Ferguson Democrat. “Reducing that here is kind of breathtaking.”
State Rep. Michael Davis, a Republican from Belton, said the two components of the bill are inconsistent.
“I’m wondering, how can it be both that it’s good to lower the statute of limitations for personal injury,” he said, “but it’s also, on the other side, good to be doubling the statute of limitations for the child offenses, which do not start running until they become an adult?”
Overcast replied that he doesn’t “see them both in the same lens.”
“I’m looking at this through economic vitality for the state perspective,” Overcast said, adding that lowering the statute of limitations for personal injury claims will incentivize people to bring claims earlier.
“We’re trying to pass smart policy in this state that allows businesses to grow without burdening access to justice, and this bill does that,” Overcast said.
When state Democratic state Rep. LaKeySha Bosley asked Seitz whether there were other possible avenues for his bill, he said “this may be the last time this year.”
Seitz urged members to vote for the bill and said once it is in the Senate’s hands, “it will be changed in some way, hopefully making it more palatable for all sides.”
He added: “Let us not make perfect the enemy of the good. This is the vehicle in which we can give these adult children a chance.”
According to the nonprofit child protection advocacy group Child USA, Missouri is currently one of 18 states with the age cap set at 34 years old or younger — which the group ranks as the worst states in terms of statutes of limitations for child sex abuse survivors.
At Seitz’s bill’s initial hearing in 2023, former Kanakuk Kamps camper Evan Hoffpauir testified about the impact of Missouri’s statute of limitations on him.
For more than a decade, Hoffpauir believed the camp director who sexually abused him at the Branson-area Kanakuk Kamps had acted alone.
As a child growing up in Branson, he was involved with Kanakuk’s youth ministries, and said he was abused by Kanakuk director Pete Newman from 1999 to 2003. Newman pleaded guilty in 2010 to seven counts of sexual abuse, and the prosecutor said Newman’s victim count might be in the hundreds.
Newman is currently serving two life sentences plus 30 years in prison.
Kanakuk leadership maintains that they had no advanced knowledge of his behavior, and Newman was a “master of deception.”
Initially, Hoffpauir believed them.
“[Leadership] stated they fired Newman as soon as they were aware of his abusive behaviors, and that he acted alone,” Hoffpauir said at that hearing. “And I believed this narrative for over a decade.”
But when he came to believe camp leadership was responsible, too, it was too late: But by the time new evidence was uncovered through national media investigations, Hoffpauir was too old to file a civil suit against the camp and its leadership.
“As I sought out legal action in an effort to hold my enablers accountable, I was crushed to find out I was a few years past Missouri’s statute of limitations,” Hoffpauir said.
“The law was telling me there was nothing to be done about it,” he added, “and the clock had run out on me.”
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