As a Girl Scout growing up in upstate New York, Alice Weiss-Russell says she lived with a dark secret: The husband of her troop leader was sexually abusing her in the bathroom of a church basement where scout meetings were held in the 1980s.
Weiss-Russell has detailed her alleged ordeal in a new lawsuit filed against Girl Scouts of the USA, part of a flurry of child sex-abuse cases in New York using a “look back window” for making civil claims against abusers.
“For me, it gives me a chance to be heard because I didn’t have that chance when I was young and hold the Girl Scouts accountable for what happened to me,” Weiss-Russell told The Associated Press in a phone interview on Tuesday. The AP does not typically identify people who say they are victims of sex crimes unless they grant permission.
The lawsuit against The Rockefeller University centers on allegations against a researcher at its hospital, Dr. Reginald Archibald, that began surfacing a decade after his 2007 death.
The abuse consisted of Archibald “photographing his child patients in sexually suggestive and lewd positions … and masturbating his male and female child patients,” says the suit filed by attorneys with the Marsh Law Firm. It alleges he once took a patient to his cabin in Canada, where he “where he drugged and penetrated the child.”
A message was left Thursday with The Rockefeller University and its hospital.
Weiss-Russell’s suit, also filed by The Marsh Law Firm along with Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala, stands out because it appears to be one of the first of its kind against the Girl Scouts, said her lawyer, Jennifer Freeman