Paul A. Mones
Child Sexual Abuse · Institutional Trials · Survivor Trusts
The files represent the largest and most comprehensive data collection system on child sexual abuse maintained by any youth organization in the nation.
The Cabinet That Reached the Jury
A church, school, or youth organization may keep a filing cabinet it never expected a jury to open. For more than four decades, Paul A. Mones has represented people whose cases forced courts, juries, and claims administrators to confront what those cabinets contain. His career runs the full arc of institutional-abuse litigation in America: standing beside a single survivor before a jury, using defendants’ internal records to prove what they knew, bringing those records into daylight, and representing claimants in the national process created when the Boy Scouts could no longer answer its cases one at a time. In every setting, he has turned the defendants’ own files into evidence.
Defending Children at the Edge of the System
Mones learned to read systems from the bottom up. After earning his undergraduate degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and his law degree from the University of North Carolina, he went to work as a staff lawyer for West Virginia Legal Services and directed a juvenile-justice program in Morgantown. Then he took on the clients almost no one else would touch: severely abused children accused of killing their abusive parents. Between 1981 and 1993 he defended or consulted on more than two hundred parricide cases, building a national practice in a category of case that forced courts to see family violence whole. His 1991 book, When a Child Kills, grew from that work, and in 1993 the American Bar Association honored him with its Livingston Hall Juvenile Justice Award. He later wrote Stalking Justice, the account of the first murder investigation in America solved through DNA testing.
When Mones turned from defending abused children to representing survivors of sexual abuse in civil cases, he pursued the responsibility of the churches, schools, and youth organizations that had seen warning signs. Alongside proof of the perpetrator's conduct, he sought evidence of what those organizations knew and how they responded.
A Verdict on Long Island
In 2007, Mones helped try a case for two former students abused by a music minister associated with a Catholic parish and school in the Diocese of Rockville Centre. The trial team presented evidence of the minister's employment, supervision, notice of abuse, access to students, and the diocese's response to establish the diocese's responsibility alongside the perpetrator's acts. The jury awarded approximately $11.4 million.
Files in the Jury Room
In 2010, Mones joined Kelly Clark on the trial team representing a former scout, Kerry Lewis, in an Oregon case against the Boy Scouts of America. Discovery compelled production of the Boy Scouts’ internal “ineligible volunteer” files from 1965 through 1985 — 1,247 of them, each concerning an alleged perpetrator, admitted into evidence over the Scouts’ objection. The files went into the jury room with the jurors who weighed them, a written record of what the Boy Scouts knew about the men it had registered as leaders and how it responded.
The jury awarded $1.4 million in compensatory damages and $18.5 million in punitive damages, a total near $19.9 million. Mones and the team then fought to make the records public over the Boy Scouts’ opposition. The dispute reached the Oregon Supreme Court, which left in place the trial judge’s discretionary order releasing the files with the names of victims and reporters redacted. In October 2012, thousands of pages became public — shielding survivors’ privacy while showing, in the Boy Scouts’ own memoranda, how it had documented reports about its volunteers for decades. The release placed the organization’s decades of internal reporting before the public.
The National Ledger
The litigation the files made possible eventually left individual courtrooms. Facing an accumulation of abuse claims, the Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy protection in 2020, and the reorganization created a settlement trust of approximately $2.46 billion for tens of thousands of claims. Mones represented hundreds of survivors in the proceeding and now serves as one of seven lawyers on the Settlement Trust Advisory Committee, a governance role inside the machinery that will distribute the fund. Challenges to the plan ran their course; in January 2026 the United States Supreme Court declined to review the decisions leaving it in place.
For survivors seeking payment from the trust, counsel must document abuse, organizational affiliation, jurisdiction, limitations issues, injury, and valuation within one centralized administrative process. Mones's work carries the individual account and supporting evidence into that process so that each claim can be assessed on its own facts.
What the Papers Prove
Mones practices from Los Angeles with a national docket devoted to survivors of childhood sexual abuse. At Rockville Centre, he helped establish the diocese's responsibility for its own conduct. In Oregon, his trial team put the Boy Scouts' archive before a jury and fought to release it to the public. His trust work now applies that experience with abuse evidence and organizational records to the claims of survivors seeking compensation through the bankruptcy process.
Compensation for individual survivors, disclosure of long-hidden files, a working claims path through a national trust: each began with papers their custodians assumed no one would ever read. Mones built a career on reading them — and on making sure that, in the end, everyone else could read them too.