In a historic verdict, a federal jury in New Orleans has ordered a Catholic religious order to pay nearly $2.4 million in damages to a man who reported being sexually abused by one of its members in the late 1960s.
John Lousteau, 68, asserted that he was sexually abused while attending an overnight summer camp for boys at the Holy Cross school in New Orleans. He maintained that his abuser was the camp’s director, Stanley Repucci, who belonged to the Holy Cross order that ran the school.
The legal victory for Lousteau and his attorney, Kristi Schubert of the Lamothe law firm, is the first since Louisiana’s Supreme Court in 2024 upheld a state law allowing molestation survivors to pursue civil damages no matter how long ago the abuse had occurred. Previously, Louisiana law barred anyone over age 28 from seeking such damages. Experts have established that the average age at which an adult reports child sexual abuse is 52.
The verdict, rendered Wednesday, was thought to be the first time a jury in Louisiana awarded such high damages to a molestation victim whose abuse went back so many decades.
It also comes as New Orleans’s Roman Catholic archdiocese is trying to exit Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection by offering to pay an average of less than $400,000 apiece to about 600 victims of a clerical abuse scandal that has roiled the organization for decades. The declaration of bankruptcy in 2020 indefinitely froze individual lawsuits against the archdiocese
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