More than 200 people across 30 states say that they were sexually abused as children by people with ties to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, which serves more than 4 million children as the nation's largest youth development nonprofit.
Boys & Girls Clubs' employees, volunteers, and even other minors all abused 250 children, who were sometimes as young as 6, according to an investigation by Hearst Connecticut Media published Thursday. In some cases, administrators didn't report the abuse to law enforcement, didn't run adequate background checks on staffers now accused of abusing children, or didn't follow the Boys & Girls Clubs' safety guidelines.
Some of the 95 civil and criminal cases filed over the alleged abuse stretch back to the '70s; others are still ongoing as of this week.
One of the most egregious cases discovered by Hearst involves a California man named Paul "Dwayne" Kilgore. A civil lawsuit alleges that a fifth-grade boy tried to report Kilgore, in both 2007 and 2010, for recently sexually abusing him. But Boys & Girls Club of Sonoma Valley employees didn't tell police. In 2012, the club's leadership found Kilgore had slept naked with children in a bed on an overnight trip, but once again, no one told police.
