Michael T. Pfau
Survivor Accountability · Trial and Appeal · Records Transparency
Three Girls
On July 27, 2012, Michael T. Pfau filed a complaint in Pierce County Superior Court for three girls who had been thirteen, fourteen and fifteen when pimps sold them through advertisements on Backpage.com, the classified site that carried most of the country's online sex advertising, and who had been raped by the men who answered. Backpage moved to dismiss under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the federal law that shields websites from liability for what their users post, and nearly every court in the country had accepted that argument. The complaint Pfau wrote, with Jason Amala and Erik Bauer, alleged something else: that Backpage's posting rules and content requirements were written to help pimps disguise the ages of the children they were selling and to keep the advertisements up. The trial court denied the motion, and on September 3, 2015, the Washington Supreme Court, in an opinion by Justice Steven González with Justice Charles Wiggins concurring and Justice Sheryl Gordon McCloud dissenting, agreed that the girls had alleged facts which, if proved, would show that Backpage helped develop the advertisements rather than merely hosting them, and that Section 230 gave no immunity for that. J.S. v. Village Voice Media Holdings was the first appellate decision in the country to let a case against Backpage go forward, and it came before Congress amended Section 230 for trafficking cases in 2018 and the FBI seized the site that April. The case was set for trial in October 2017 and settled on October 3, 2017, on confidential terms. "Backpage tried to have our case thrown out by claiming it was immune under the CDA," Pfau said afterward. "They went so far as to claim they had a system for preventing sex trafficking of minors. The Washington courts were the first in the country to rule that we should have a chance to test what the website was claiming. In the end, we believe we showed their system was designed to promote sex trafficking, not prevent it."
Hundreds of Survivors
Pfau has sued the Catholic Church in Washington since 2002 and has represented more than 350 survivors of abuse by its clergy: hundreds from the Archdiocese of Seattle, about ninety from the Diocese of Spokane, fewer from Yakima. When the Diocese of Spokane went into bankruptcy, seventy-four of his clients shared a $31 million settlement; when the Oregon Province of the Jesuits did the same, seventy of his clients shared $40 million; the Archdiocese of Seattle paid $12.1 million in one group of cases, and another case against a Catholic priest settled for $10.15 million. Juries have returned $7.5 million against a YMCA and $4.2 million against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his abuse cases, and a school district paid $3.9 million. The records were always the harder fight. In July 2023 the attorney general's office asked Washington's three dioceses for their files on abuse allegations, and on May 9, 2024, Attorney General Bob Ferguson announced an investigation into how the church had handled those allegations and asked the King County Superior Court to enforce a subpoena for the Archdiocese of Seattle's records on the incidents, the priests involved, their transfers and the trust fund that paid victims. "We need a public accounting of childhood abuse," Ferguson said. Pfau welcomed the investigation publicly: the personnel files, assignment histories, internal correspondence and prior complaints, he said, would show what church officials knew, when they learned it and what they did. The superior court refused to enforce the subpoena in 2024. On March 3, 2026, a unanimous panel of the Washington Court of Appeals reversed, holding that the archdiocese could claim no blanket religious exemption and that "the AGO's subpoena is supported by statutory authorization," and sent the case back to the superior court to decide what the archdiocese must produce, with the privacy of the survivors and the church's religious liberty both to be weighed in drawing the line. The archdiocese had said in 2024 that it had been "generally cooperating" and had "no concern about sharing them with the Attorney General lawfully and fairly"; the files it will now have to open are the ones Pfau has been asking for in individual cases for more than two decades.
Fifteen Percent
Rekhter v. Department of Social and Health Services was about a rule that cut the pay of people who cared for disabled relatives in their own homes. From 2003 to 2007 the state's "shared living rule" reduced the hours of care it would pay for when the caregiver lived with the Medicaid client, by an average of fifteen percent, on the theory that a housemate would have done some of the work anyway. The Washington Supreme Court struck the automatic reduction down in 2007, and the providers sued for the pay they had lost. Pfau was among the lawyers who tried the case for the class in Thurston County; the jury awarded about $57.1 million in contract damages, and the judgment carried about $38.7 million in prejudgment interest. The state appealed, and on April 3, 2014, the Supreme Court affirmed, five to four, on the ground that the jury had found the department had violated the duty of good faith and fair dealing in its contracts with the providers. The state paid the providers $79 million, the damages and the interest that had run after judgment.
Pfau is a partner at Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala in Seattle, the firm that bears his name, and has tried more than fifty cases in a career of more than thirty years. He graduated magna cum laude from Boston College in 1987, a Scholar of the College in philosophy and psychology and a member of the Order of the Cross and Crown, and from the University of Michigan Law School in 1991, where he reached the semifinals of the moot court competition. He is admitted in Washington, New York and Illinois and before the Supreme Court of the United States. The Backpage case and the church cases were built the same way: a client whose account had to stand on its own, and a website, a diocese or a state agency whose own records had to be made to speak.
