Children’s Theatre Company leadership apologized Friday for what students say were years of sexual abuse by former employees of the Minneapolis theater.
Managing Director Kimberly Motes made her comments at a news conference held in downtown St. Paul, where attorney Jeff Anderson announced the settlement of all 16 lawsuits brought by individuals abused by CTC staff in the 1970s and ’80s.
The students say former theater staff members sexually abused them when they were children and students of the CTC.
Sex abuse allegations at the theater first surfaced in the 1980s, resulting in the 1984 conviction of its founder and former director John Clark Donahue on three counts of criminal sexual conduct. He was sentenced to 10 months in the workhouse, and resigned from the Children’s Theatre Company. Donahue died in March.
More suits have followed in recent months, accusing Donahue, theater sound technician Stephen Adamczak and Jason McLean, a former actor/teacher who later became a Minneapolis restaurateur.
Adamczak, who was charged with sexual abuse but acquitted in 1984, died in 2007.
McLean fled to Mexico in 2017 and recently returned to California. He wasn’t criminally charged but faces more than $6 million in judgments. Anderson said he’s working to collect from McLean, who has denied the allegations.
Motes apologized to two survivors present at the conference, and addressed the other victims, most of whom who have not spoken out about their experiences.
“Going forward we wish to participate in a healing partnership with those survivors who were not able to speak until now,” Motes said. “We acknowledge that the acts of abuse by former staff members took childhoods away from children, forever impacting their lives in painful, traumatic and dangerous ways.”
The CTC agreed to create a $500,000 fund for the hundreds of abuse survivors to pay for their therapeutic treatment, said survivor Jina Penn-Tracy. The abuse suffered by the students was not only sexual, Penn-Tracy added.
The settlement amounts will not be made public, as that shifts focus away from the abuse suffered, Anderson said.
The lawsuits were filed after the Minnesota Child Victims Act was passed in 2013. The legislation temporarily lifted the statute of limitations for cases of child sexual abuse. The act expired in 2016.
Laura Stearns, one of the first abuse survivors to file a lawsuit against the theater company, said she will push the Minnesota Legislature to withdraw the state’s current statute of limitations that restricts when child sexual abuse cases must be filed.
“Some of the things I’ve had to face during this legal process have cut me to the core,” Stearns said.
Motes said that the abuse by CTC’s former staff members was not adequately handled 35 years ago.
“No child should have ever been exposed to this horrific behavior, and we are truly sorry that so many of you carry the scars from those wounds,” Motes said. “Nothing we will do will ever undo the pain that’s been endured by our former students.”
This report contains information from the Associated Press.