Susan Barfield:
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining another episode of The Leverage Report. Super excited, Todd, to have you here with us. Joined today, by Todd Mathews, who is a partner at Bailey Glasser. And Todd, I’m thankful that you’re taking the time to connect with us about such an important topic as the Maryland sexual abuse cases. And really, before we dive in, because I have questions that I want to know, but tell us, I always want to know the why. Why did you get into law? Why did you pursue that career?
Todd Mathews:
Sure. So great question, Susan. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Anytime I get to talk, I try and take the opportunity. And your question of why, well, the answer to that will explain it. So growing up, I spent a tremendous amount of time in the church. Whenever I went off to college, I went to be a Southern Baptist preacher. That’s what I was wanting to do with the focus of, the reason I wanted to do it was one, I could speak in front of crowds pretty easily, and two, I wanted to help people.
Helping people was kind of always has been my focus, my desire, and just trying to help people have a better life. And so for a variety of reasons that, quite frankly, we’ll get into here in a minute, I decided to pursue a different path. And so being a trial lawyer was something that I thought would be very natural and very easy transition and still allow me to do what I wanted to do, which was help people.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah. Any early influences?
Todd Mathews:
So early influence would be life in general. I can point to, I didn’t grow up in a home full of lawyers. I knew one lawyer growing up. He was my Sunday school teacher. I enjoyed spending time with him because it intrigued me, but it wasn’t as if I grew up thinking I really want to be this trial lawyer when I grow up. But just life in general, just injustice. You can’t tell from the camera, but I’m not a small person by any means. And you may remember the movie The Blind Side with Michael Oher, where they say the reason he was such a good football player was because he had this protective instinct and this protective desire, and that’s what made him so good at protecting the blind side of the quarterback.
And I just have always had that way about me because of challenges of life. And anytime I’ve seen an injustice, somebody who can’t speak up for themselves, somebody who’s being taken advantage, I’ve just always had a desire and a need to stand up for them. And so it really melds well with being somebody who represents injured folks.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah. Yeah. And we’re going to spend some time talking a little bit about how you’re standing up and protecting these folks that have been impacted, unfortunately by the system. And so we can start talking a little bit, and I’d love for you to give our listeners a background about the Maryland Child Victims Act of 2023.
Todd Mathews:
Yeah. So the act was passed back last spring. And what it did in essence was it did away completely with the statute of limitations for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. And when that is said, it’s generally thought of with the clergy abuse cases, the scout abuse cases that we’ve seen in the news. What we looked at was, there’s a lot of kids that go into the state systems, not just Maryland, all over the country, where they’re vulnerable, they’re away from home for the very first time, they’ve been put into a facility.
Some of them never having committed any sort of crime or been accused of a crime, just had a difficult home situation where the state had nowhere else to put them. And so they went into the system and ended up in a juvenile home. And so we started looking at those cases. And as we began to delve into them, the injustices we saw were, horrific isn’t a strong enough word to use to describe it. But what the act did, when they changed it, it allowed for actions to be brought against institutions, organizations, and the government for childhood sexual abuse.
And so unlike, unfortunately, we saw in the news, the clergy in the Baltimore Archdiocese filed for bankruptcy even before the act went into effect on October 1st. But we don’t have that issue with the state. And here’s why. When the bill was being passed, the Attorney General of Maryland came out in support of the bill and said, this is what he said, “Our judicial system should provide a means for survivors who have suffered these harms to seek damages from the people and institutions responsible for them.” And the Attorney General went on to say in support of the bill that he felt comfortable in being able to defend the constitutionality of this bill change, because you are talking about taking protections that were out there statute of limitations wise for the defendants, and you’re doing away with it.
Well, why does that make sense? Why is that due process? Why is that fair? The reason it’s fair is recent studies have shown that people don’t really embrace and start to understand the abuse they’ve gone through until they’re the age of 52. Now, we have some survivors, their abuse happened when they were seven years old. So somebody who’s seven and then goes through a lifetime, and then is 52, 53 years old and suddenly realizes this, well, they’re no less hurt, they’re no less injured, and the injustice is no less significant than somebody who was 18 when they understood it.
It’s what every state should be doing. It’s what’s right? Look, no amount of compensation is ever, ever going to make up for what happened to these people.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah. Sure.
Todd Mathews:
But it does help bring closure for them. And that’s what this is about, is helping these individuals, these survivors, find some sort of closure that helps them to heal completely or as completely as they can.
Susan Barfield:
Well, you just said earlier too, closure, and they were vulnerable and probably never had anyone stand up and protect them. And so the fact that you’re coming alongside of them and helping to bring the closure and stand up for them and be a voice that they otherwise wouldn’t have. Yeah. It’s terrible. We were talking earlier a little bit about, this isn’t your mass tort case. And the way in which we approach these conversations, oftentimes the trauma-focused approach, and you were sharing a little bit about that. I’d love for others to hear your perspective and how we’re handling these types of cases.
Todd Mathews:
Yeah. And I alluded to this earlier. Growing up in the church like I did, I unfortunately have seen, been involved very closely with some of these types of abuses that have occurred through just folks who would seek help at the church or through incidents there itself. And so it’s been foremost on my mind for most of my life that the last thing you ever want to do is re-traumatize one of these survivors. It’s harming them all over again. And so this isn’t a circumstance where you can just talk to a client like we normally would in a case and ask a laundry list of questions.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah.
Todd Mathews:
You’re absolutely going to re-traumatize them. It’s just not the way to do it. And so what we have done, and I would encourage anybody who’s ever going to handle one of these types of cases to do the same thing, we have a team of social workers that are our communication with the clients because they’re highly trained, they’ve dealt with these issues before, they know the way to communicate with these survivors, they know the way to not re-traumatize them, and they know the way to get them to open up and tell their story. And we hope that by doing that, they don’t ever have to tell that story again if they don’t want to.
We hope that we can acquire enough information and knowledge from them that we’re able to tell their story for them, and so they won’t ever have to address that again. And sometimes, we have clients that can talk for five minutes and then just can’t talk about it anymore-
Susan Barfield:
Sure. Yeah.
Todd Mathews:
… for weeks at a time. But you have to have a process in place to address these highly emotional, extremely sensitive issues. And in addition to that, you have to have a team ready, what we call a rapid response team, because we’ve absolutely had folks break down that we were afraid might become suicidal, those types of things. So you have to have the resources in place before you go down this road. You can’t wait until that happens and then scramble to try and find a solution.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah. And one thing I’m interested to hear a little bit more about is Bailey Glasser’s envision of the pursuit of justice. How do you guys see this playing out, and what are your goals and objective?
Todd Mathews:
Yeah, absolutely. So objective number one is to do no harm, right? Do no harm to our clients. That’s objective number one. Objective number two is, on October 1st, we filed six lawsuits in Maryland. Each of those based on one particular facility. We have a tremendous amount of data at our fingertips from all of the clients that we represent. We currently have about 504 survivors that we represent. And so we’re able to see that there are survivors from facility, the Hickey facility for instance. I think we’ve got almost 200 just from that facility.
And so we’re able to see that over a long period of time, survivors who never knew each other, with the exact same complaint, the exact same offender, the exact same location. So we know based on that independent information that it’s very accurate what happened, that it was systematic what happened, that it was facility based. And so that’s why we filed them facility by facility. Because the survivor might change, but the abuse and all of the actions are very similar. So that’s the way we have attacked this to begin with.
We hope that with the position of the Attorney General, which I read to you earlier, along with the law that has changed, we hope that we can find some sort of a global solution for these survivors. The last thing I really want to do is subject these survivors to depositions and trial and all of the public scrutiny that, quite frankly, they don’t deserve. So we are in contact with the Attorney General’s office. We were before we even filed suit. And we believe we’re going to have a very productive interaction. And moving forward, I think we’re going to try and find a… I’m hopeful that they’ll continue to try and pursue justice with us on these cases.
Susan Barfield:
Outside of some of the challenges you’ve already mentioned about the approach and the conversation, how to talk with these clients, what other challenges come to mind when you think about these cases?
Todd Mathews:
Sure. Well, challenge number one that always comes to my mind regardless of the case is how we prove it. How do you prove that this happened? Because much like, let’s just say the product Roundup, right? How do you prove you used Roundup 25 years ago? Well, you say, “I bought Roundup and I used it. Now I have this resulting injury. That’s my proof.” And so that was my initial concern in this litigation. As we’ve moved through this, I’m less concerned about that because of this pattern that we’re able to see from all the representation. It’s almost self-authenticating whenever you have people that weren’t even at the facility at the same time, don’t know each other, who have the same stories. So I’m less concerned about that challenge.
I am concerned about how we convey the stories of the clients to the defendant, the state, without being extremely intrusive into their lives. But in the state’s defense, they have to have something to rely upon. They have to know. They have a job to do as well. They have to protect their taxpayers, and they can’t just pay anybody who says it happened. They have to have some way of validating. And so that’s a challenge that we’re working through right now. I do believe there is a way that we can do it, and I think that the state will be receptive to it. We will see. But that’s a pretty big challenge.
The other challenge is what I’ve already alluded to, is walking these survivors through this process. And it’s extremely emotional. It’s extremely sensitive. And so as a lawyer, somebody who’s dealing with these claims every day, quite frankly, one of the big challenges is your own mental health and your own mental wellbeing. And so that’s another challenge involved certainly with this.
Susan Barfield:
Well, I think it’s great that you’ve got a team that’s supporting you with the foundation and the background and skillset, having social workers to be able to have these conversations. But any case… I know obviously you can’t say names, but is there any case since you started these sexual abuse cases that comes to mind? One case that really stands out?
Todd Mathews:
Well, unfortunately, Susan, there’s 504 cases that stand out. But I understand what you’re saying. I mean, look, here’s what we’re dealing with. We do have some of these survivors who were seven years old when this happened. We have some survivors that this happened to them every single day for six months, multiple abusers. We have some folks that… I mean, almost all of these folks. Think about this. This is our very first sexual experience. And so most of us, all of us remember our very first sexual experience. Some of us remember it fondly, some of us remember it awkwardly.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah.
Todd Mathews:
But these folks all remember it traumatically. They remember it as something horrible that happened to them.
Susan Barfield:
Sure.
Todd Mathews:
And that’s something they carry with them their entire life. And so regardless of who’s watching this podcast, the horrors that have been described to us are things that you would never want in a podcast or published.
Susan Barfield:
Sure.
Todd Mathews:
I mean, they’re just unimaginable the way they were treated like animals in a pen. I mean, that’s what we’re dealing with here.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah. And if there’s any… Well, one thing I just was thinking, just the number of cases. I mean, do you have any idea or speculate on how many cases of abuse are out there? [inaudible 00:17:28].
Todd Mathews:
So speculating on the number of abuse, the number of times that somebody has been abused in a juvenile hall facility has to be in the hundreds of thousands, just based on the data that I’m aware of, the amount of time we’re talking about. Remember, we’ve done away with the statute of limitations. So this goes back into the sixties in some cases. How many survivors might actually choose to pursue this? That number will remain relatively low because it takes a lot of courage and determination to even talk about this.
We’ve got a lot of folks who’ve called in and said, “I’ve never spoken with anybody about this before.” And they’re 40 years old. So I think that there are somewhere… I think there are thousands of these survivors that will come out. But I think there are a tremendous number who are waiting to see what happens. Because the last thing you want to do if you’re a survivor is get the courage up and come out and make yourself known. And then for what? For what purpose? Now, I’m not getting closure, I’m getting hurt all over again.
And so I think as this plays out over the next year, two years, I think that number could increase. And I certainly hope there are more survivors that come out because there is a therapeutic nature too coming out. But it takes a ton of courage to get to that point.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah, for sure. And for our listeners, attorneys that are interested in how these cases are progressing, maybe they want to connect with you or just have some type of resource to learn more. Where would you suggest that they look into more information?
Todd Mathews:
Sure. Well, they can always go to our website baileyglasser.com. A lot of people on your podcast, I’m sure, know me already.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah. That’s right.
Todd Mathews:
And so they’re always free to call me or email me. You can also go to a website that we have set up. It’s marylandabuseattorneys, with an s, .com. And there, you’ll find links to the complaints we’ve filed, the news articles that have run. Sharon Iskra, my partner, did a piece for People Magazine a couple of weeks ago. That link is on there.
Susan Barfield:
Okay.
Todd Mathews:
And we will continue to add information to that page as it becomes available.
Susan Barfield:
Great. And we’ll put all this information in so people can either look to reach out to you directly or look at that website. But Todd, we’re grateful for your time and for the insights. Anything else that you would like to share with our listeners? I mean, we covered a lot about the cases that you’re handling, and really what’s impressive to me is just the way that you’re handling them.
Todd Mathews:
Yeah. The only thing I would pass along is, one, thank you very much for having me. Two, again, just if you’re going to handle these, make sure you have the resources in place before you go down that road so you’re handling these survivors as delicately as you can.
Susan Barfield:
Yeah, for sure. Well, good. Well, thank you so much, Todd. Again, it’s a pleasure to connect. Appreciate the insights. And for the listeners, stay tuned for our next Leverage Report.
Todd Mathews:
All right. Thank you.
Susan Barfield:
Thank you.
Todd Mathews:
Bye-bye.
