Judge throws out sex-abuse lawsuit against Portsmouth Abbey School. Here's why.

PROVIDENCE – A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by an ex-student accusing Portsmouth Abbey School of failing to protect her from being sexually abused by a teacher over the course of four years.

U.S. District Court Judge William E. Smith ruled in favor of the prestigious private Catholic school operated by the Order of Benedict in finding that the woman did not file the lawsuit within the three-year timeframe allowed by state law. Similarly, Smith rejected her arguments that her allegations should be allowed to proceed because the school connected her with lawyers who failed to alert her about the statute of limitations to bring a lawsuit.

Smith found that while Portsmouth Abbey School “may well have known and even expected” the woman identified as Jane Doe would sue, “they took no affirmative steps to conceal information, confuse, or deceive” her and “had no legal duty to give [her] a road map of how to sue them.”

Smith, however, acknowledged that the fact that the school referred her to lawyers who represented Catholic institutions against sexual abuse allegations was “more than coincidence.”

Portsmouth Abbey administrators stood by their response to the allegations.

"The underlying events that form the basis for the Plaintiff’s claims in this lawsuit are clearly troubling. However, our School leadership has always maintained that Portsmouth Abbey responded properly once these difficult circumstances came to light nearly ten years ago. This ruling concludes that the School did nothing to prevent the Plaintiff from filing her lawsuit in a timely manner," spokeswoman Kristine Hendrickson said in an email.

"As part of our Mission to help young men and women grow in knowledge and grace, we remain committed to promoting awareness, education, and enforceable protocols to support the health, safety and well-being of our students. We take this mission seriously and will always act expeditiously if we identify any behavior that may be inconsistent with it," she continued.

Grooming allegations

The woman sued the Portsmouth school in 2020 based on her alleged sexual abuse from September 2010 to May 2014 by her former humanities teacher, Michael Bowen Smith, who was 50 years old at the time. The abuse began her sophomore year and stopped when she stopped the relationship her freshman year in college, the lawsuit stated.

It was during her sophomore year when she was enrolled in Smith’s humanities class that he started spending time with her outside of class, according to the lawsuit. He began flirting with her, eventually introducing sexual banter into their conversations.

In the spring of 2012, Smith invited her to stop by his apartment on the Portsmouth Abbey campus, where he initiated sexual contact, the lawsuit says.

The woman told her parents about the abuse during her college spring break in 2015, and her mother contacted Headmaster Daniel McDonough, the suit said. The woman then provided the school with emails corroborating her allegations. Bowen Smith resigned amid the revelations.

The police investigated, but Smith was never charged.

According to the complaint, Smith continued to stalk and pursue the woman into adulthood, going so far as to contact professors at her graduate school.

The Portsmouth Abbey directed the woman to law firms to assist her in getting a restraining order against Smith in New Mexico. In her lawsuit, she argued those lawyers, who previously represented Catholic interests, had “lulled” her into filing the lawsuit outside of the three-year timeframe allowed by state law.

Statute of limitations extension

State lawmakers in 2019 extended the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse claims to 35 years for lawsuits against accused perpetrators. While the law is applied retroactively to the accused, it did not apply to “non-perpetrator” parties alleged to have contributed to the abuse.

The school argued that the woman's claims were barred under state law because she did not file the lawsuit within three years.

In order for Judge Smith to have allowed the case to proceed nonetheless, the woman needed to produce evidence that school administrators explicitly misled her.

While Judge Smith said it was understandable that the woman "smells a rat in the facts of this case" given the Catholic Church's history of child-abuse coverups, "the court can find no factual basis – as opposed to speculation about winks and nods and secret agreements – that would justify the employment of the extraordinary equitable tools plaintiff asks the court to apply."

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Lawsuit against Portsmouth Abbey School thrown out