Pa. lawmakers who survived child sexual abuse push for long-sought amendment before leaving office

State Rep. Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, speaks before signing a package of three bills, which mirror three of the Grand Jury’s recommendations on addressing the statute of limitations for victims of child sexual abuse, inside Muhlenberg High School on Tuesday, November 26, 2019 (Commonwealth Media Services photo).

After a 2011 grand jury investigation revealed the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia had covered up the sexual abuse of dozens of young parishioners by priests, lawmakers in Harrisburg took steps to give those who remained silent about their victimization a shot at justice.

More than 13 years later, survivors are still waiting.

Two members of the state legislature, Rep. Mark Rozzi (D-Berks) and Rep. Jim Gregory (R-Blair/Huntingdon), are among survivors of child sexual abuse. They have pushed for legislation which would give adult survivors a two-year window to sue their childhood abusers.

But both will leave the General Assembly later this year, likely before the goal comes to fruition.

Rozzi is retiring to focus on his mental health. Gregory lost his May primary. And with budget negotiations a seeming final opportunity to seek a win, the clock is ticking.

“Many who are abused don’t talk about it for decades,” Gregory said during an interview at his state Capitol office, “and expanding that window gives them the opportunity to come forward.”

Advocates have pressured lawmakers toward an expansion of the state statute of limitations for more than 18 years since the first Philadelphia grand jury report. Subsequent state grand juries revealed sexual abuse of children by clergy in Pennsylvania’s seven other Catholic dioceses.

Rozzi has been pushing for the window since being elected to the state House in 2013. Gregory has been aiding the effort for the last five years.

A long, frustrating road

The journey to get the two-year window approved in any form has been a bumpy ride spanning over a decade. During his 12 years in office, Rozzi has witnessed sexual abuse reform bills he introduced stall, fail and fall to technical error.

Rozzi was first elected to the state House in 2012. In 2013, he introduced a bill that would have given adult survivors of childhood sexual assault a two-year window to sue. The legislation never left the House Judiciary Committee.

He attempted a more ambitious bill that would completely suspend the civil statute of limitations for those who had not yet reached 50 years old in 2014. It met the same fate, as did his 2015 and 2017 proposals.

In 2018, Josh Shapiro, who was then Pennsylvania attorney general, unveiled the results of the state’s 40th grand jury report, which investigated six Pennsylvania dioceses for sexual abuse against children. The report contained credible allegations against over 300 priests.

Rozzi endured sexual abuse at the hands of a priest at the age of 13. Two years before the grand jury report, Rozzi proposed a resolution calling for a similar investigation into Roman Catholic dioceses in the state.

“Put yourself in my position,” Rozzi said in an interview with the Capital-Star. “You’re 13, you’re in the shower, and you get raped by a priest. You don’t even know what the statute of limitations is.”

Rozzi and Gregory finally spearheaded a major success for child sexual abuse reform in 2019. That November, Wolf signed a bill into law giving survivors of abuse until the age of 55 to take civil action and abolished the statute of limitations in criminal cases for child sex abuse. New survivors abused between the ages of 18 and 23 were given until the age of 30 to sue for damages.

Then, in 2019, Rozzi began procedures to pursue the two-year window as an amendment to the state Constitution. To make it to the ballot, one chamber must introduce a joint resolution proposing the amendment, which must pass by a majority vote in both the House and Senate in two consecutive sessions.

After years of faltering as a bill, the two-year window seemed like it might make it through to the people for a vote on the 2021 ballot.

Except there was a technical error.

After passing through both chambers in 2019, the Office of Legislative Affairs was to notify the Department of State so that it could advertise the proposed amendment in two newspapers in every county. Publication is required to begin three months before the November election.

When officials with the Department of State discovered through an AP news story  in January 2021 that the two-year window proposal had passed through the House for a second time, they realized the Office of Legislative Affairs never told them about the first time. No advertisements were ever published.

With one more successful vote in the state Senate, the amendment would have been on the ballot. But the error made it an impossibility for at least another two years.

The Department of State launched an investigation, according to former Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar. The department reviewed emails, summaries, calendars and “every document you could possibly imagine.”

Boockvar resigned following the mistake. She described the incident as “heartbreaking on every level.”

“We knew that if I didn’t resign, the legislature would have basically halted anything from getting done,” Boockvar said in an interview with the Capital-Star. “It would’ve become the focus of everything, and the last thing I wanted to do was add another layer of the legislature not allowing what needed to happen to go forth.”

Following the state department’s floundering, Rozzi would have to begin the process all over again. 

“The only thing I would’ve done differently,” Rozzi said. “I wouldn’t have trusted the state department.”

Boockvar said that she was confident that the proposal would quickly pass through both chambers again to get it back on the ballot. A nearly identical error occurred in Iowa in January 2019 regarding an amendment to expand gun rights, and the state’s legislature was only temporarily delayed.

“It’s already rectified in Iowa,” Boockvar said. The amendment protecting “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” won on the ballot in November 2022.

But Pennsylvania, unlike Iowa, has a divided legislature, the only one in the country. And the state Senate has attempted to fuse the two-year window amendment with voter ID requirements and regulatory reforms.

“They’ve been politicizing victims lives by combining it not just with unrelated issues, which is not supposed to happen in Pennsylvania at all,” Boockvar said, “but they’re combining it with unrelated, controversial, politicized issues that they know full well don’t have popular support, and that’s reprehensible.”

The proposed amendment has awaited movement in a Senate committee since June 5 after the House returned the Senate’s proposal stripped of its additions.

Senate Republicans did not reply directly to a series of questions from the Capital-Star but spokesperson Kate Flessner said in an emailed statement that it was “unfortunate the House has chosen to put politics ahead of survivors because of their unwillingness to allow voters to have a voice on voter photo identification,” a position the caucus has previously stated.

Unless the two-year window passes the legislature in the form of a statute rather than an amendment, Gregory and Rozzi will not be in the General Assembly to see it through. ChildUSA, a nonprofit focused on child sexual abuse reform, supports passing the window via statute rather than an amendment on the ballot, according to founder and chief executive officer Marci Hamilton.

Boockvar said it is her understanding that the governor’s administration and the attorney general believed the two-year window could be passed and signed as statutes, just as three other bills reacting to the 2018 grand jury report — Acts 87, 88 and 89 of 2019 — had been. 

State Senate Republicans argued in 2018 that the two-year window could not succeed as a statute because a retroactive change to state law would breach a clause in the state Constitution, making the amendment route the only way to get justice.

“One of the most important things I’ve learned here is the more you want something here, the more it gets used against you,” Gregory said. “I wanted this so bad, so bad.”

Blame to go around

Whereas some blame the divided legislature for the two-year window’s failure, others criticize another source.

“It comes down to two words actually. It’s very easy to see why none of this legislation passed,” Rozzi said. “F— — lobbyists.”

Rozzi said that he blames lobbying by the Pennsylvania Catholic Conference and the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania. Gregory said a representative of the Insurance Federation attempted to dissuade him from the effort.

“My response at that time was, ‘I appreciate those sentiments, but I can’t stop fighting for victims of sexual abuse because I know, as a victim myself, the ripple effects of the secondary trauma that victims perpetrate,’” he said. “Their loved ones, their relationships, because I did it to my family.”

Survivors of sexual abuse are at increased risk for self-injurious behaviors, substance abuse, and mental health and sexual disorders, according to a 2017 ChildUSA report.

Shaun Dougherty, interim executive director of the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, said that on more than one occasion, he and insurance lobbyists have been the only spectators in the Senate gallery.

Dougherty, also a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, explained that he believes too many Pennsylvania legislators allow lobbyists to influence their vote on sexual abuse reform.

“The bills get written in the Capitol,” he said. “They get cooked out at the bar.”

Long and Nyquist Associates, which lobbies on behalf of the Catholic Conference, directed questions from the Capital-Star to the Catholic Conference. The Catholic Conference declined an interview.

Jonathan Greer, president and chief executive of the Insurance Federation of Pennsylvania, said its lobbying efforts respond to the unexpected risk accompanying otherwise time-barred claims.

“Once the statute of limitations has come and gone, there is no more risk to insure,” Greer said. “Retroactive liability is something that we have concern about in any context.”

Hope for the future

Rozzi and Gregory will leave the legislature at the end of this year when newly elected officials fill their seats. Both said they would continue their advocacy efforts.

“I’ll certainly continue to pray for victims of sexual abuse. I look forward to continuing advocacy for them after I’m not here,” Gregory said. “But I’ll continue to pray that sometime someone in the Senate will hear what they need to hear to say, ‘you know what? Maybe it’s finally time to do this.’”

Sexual abuse was the leading category of substantiated child abuse in 2021, according to Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services

“I’ve heard some senators say, ‘You need to get over it, you can’t remember what happened,’” Rozzi said. “My response to them is, ‘I don’t want to hear a f— — word out of your mouth. Stop saying that we can’t remember. Stop saying to get over it. We’re not getting over it.’”

Gregory said it would be difficult for other legislators to take on the mantle with “the same amount of passion” that he and Rozzi showed.

Even so, Rozzi and Gregory were assured that new representatives would pick up the fight to get the two-year window legislation onto Shapiro’s desk or onto the ballot.

“You’ve got a lot of members that are angry and pissed that this isn’t getting done,” Rozzi said.

They, and Dougherty, would rather it happen sooner.

“I am confident that there are people in the House who are willing to take this charge up,” Dougherty said, “but I am going to fight like hell to get it done first.”

Rep. La’Tasha Mayes (D-Philadelphia), a survivor herself, spoke in favor of Rozzi’s 2023 two-year window legislation on the House floor in February. Rep. Maureen Madden (D-Monroe) also spoke out.

Mayes said in an interview with the Capital-Star that legislators and Capitol staff confided in her about their own survivor stories after her remarks. 

“If you’re going to take on a far-reaching, life-changing issue such as this, you have to put 100% into it,” Mayes said. “But I wouldn’t want to be premature that it’s going to be me. Who wants to and is able to lead the charge on this issue in the way that it deserves?

Mayes cited her equal commitment to Black maternal health, childcare and reproductive rights as keeping her from fully taking on the two-year window legislation. She said it is an issue requiring “singular” attention.

As budget negotiations pick up speed in Harrisburg next week, advocates hope that the two-year window will find its way, at long last, into dealings.

Shapiro’s office did not return a request for comment before press time.

Gregory is hopeful that what he and Rozzi started has opened the door for others — even non-survivors — to take action.

“I will take away from this experience an amazing sense of fulfillment for what Mark and I accomplished by simply getting it as far as we did,” Gregory said. “We’ll set an example for any future representatives and senators that have a desire to take this on.”

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