Sunday marked start of these new Maryland laws
This article was republished with permission from WTOP’s news partners at Maryland Matters. Sign up for Maryland Matters’ free email subscription today.
When you wake up Sunday, it will be harder to collect damages from the state for child sexual abuse and easier to find relief at a pick-your-own farm, new rules will start the long process of slowing utility rate increases and a new law will again delay the start of a paid family and medical leave program.
Those are the most notable of just over 100 bills that became law on June 1, many of them duplicates. They range from local alcohol and bond bills to a severe retrenchment of a 2023 law on damages for victims of child sexual abuse that could have left the state open to billions in legal expenses.
It’s the first batch of the 849 bills from the 2025 General Assembly that have been signed into law, most of which will take effect on July 1 or Oct. 1.
But this first batch included some significant legislation, the most high-profile of which may have been House Bill 1378, which overhauls the Child Victims Act that passed to great fanfare just two years ago.
Racing to the courthouse to beat new law
Attorneys in and outside of Maryland spent the last week rushing to courthouses around the state to file claims for victims of institutional child sex abuse, working to beat the June 1 law that will cut potential awards in half and make it harder for victims to make multiple claims.
“Since this law was enacted by the legislature, even before the governor signed it, our firm has been devoting, — I’m not even exaggerating to say — probably about 80-plus percent of its time, energy efforts and resources, into getting these lawsuits filed,” said Emily Malarkey, a partner in the Baltimore firm Bekman, Marder, Hopper, Malarkey & Perlin.
In the last six weeks, Malarkey’s firm filed 50 lawsuits on behalf of 250 clients, just one firm among many representing potentially thousands of clients. One case came in at 10 p.m. Thursday, from an out-of-state firm that needed local attorneys to assist in filing.
“We’re exhausted,” Malarkey said. “It has been a Herculean effort, that was never our intended plan.”
Those numbers are part of what drove lawmakers to pass the bill dramatically limiting a two-year old law that allowed victims who were otherwise barred from suing because of time limits to file civil lawsuits. The 2023 law created a scenario in which state and local governments could be on the hook for billions in potential liabilities.
Under the old law, damages were capped at $1.5 million per “occurrence” of abuse in a lawsuit against a private institution such as a school or church. In cases involving government entities, the cap was $890,000 per occurrence.
The new law slashes the caps as of June 1 — to $700,000 for private institutions and $400,000 for public institutions. And the “per occurrence” language goes away.
Lawmakers rushed to address the issue after legislative analysts warned in January that, under the old caps and with the potential of more than one occurrence per claimant, the cost to settle more than 3,100 cases that had been filed at the time could run into the billions. That would be troubling in good economic times, but the January warning came as the state was looking at an existing $3.3 billion structural deficit for fiscal 2026 and a similarly sized one for fiscal 2027.
The new law not only has financial consequences for victims. It could also limit the number of future cases, as lawyers consider whether they can afford to take on clients under the new caps.
“After June 1, it’s going to be really hard, I think, to find good representation, because not only did the legislature cut the cap, but the legislature cut the attorney fees that can be charged,” Malarkey said. “It’s going to be very difficult for businesses like mine to handle these complex, expensive, difficult cases stemming from decades ago, with dead witnesses and lost documents on a 20% contingency fee. We just can’t do it.”
Thousands of cases are pending in Maryland courts.
Malarkey said the vast majority — cases against the Archdiocese of Baltimore and the Department of Juvenile Services — will likely work their way through Baltimore City Circuit Courts. Prince George’s County courts will likely see the bulk of cases against from the Catholic Church’s Washington diocese. The rest, including cases against local schools and other institutions, will be heard in counties around the state.
The rest of the article can be read at WTOP News:
What price power?
Louisiana passes anti-grooming law championed by clergy abuse survivor
Tim Gioe, who was befriended and abused by a priest as a child,
hopes other states are inspired to adopt similar laws
Louisiana’s legislature has voted to outlaw attempts to gain children’s trust with the intent to sexually abuse them – an anti-grooming statute that was championed by a survivor of Catholic clergy molestation, his wife and her father, who is a state lawmaker.
The law was primarily authored by Louisiana state senator Pat Connick at the suggestion of his daughter, Sarah Gioe, whose husband – Tim Gioe – was in grade school in the 1990s when he was abused by a priest who had befriended him and his family.
After gaining final, unopposed passage in both of the state’s legislative chambers on Tuesday, the bill for the first time made it illegal in Louisiana to pursue “an intimate relationship with a child under the age of 17 by means of seduction, emotional manipulation, threats, promises, coercion, enticement, isolation or extortion with the specific intent to commit a sex offense … against the minor”.
It applies in cases where offenders are at least four years older than those being groomed, and authorities can act even in instances where no abuse took place.
Connick said in a statement that his bill’s ratification was “a huge step in safeguarding our children from the insidious threat of grooming”, to which his son-in-law was subjected before his childhood abuse. “This law is not just a policy change,” Connick added. “It’s a promise to every parent and guardian in Louisiana that we will not tolerate the manipulation of our most vulnerable.”
Louisiana joined about a dozen other US states with anti-grooming laws nearly two years to the day after Pat Wattigny pleaded guilty in June 2023 to charges that he had previously molested two children whom he met through his work as a priest for the Roman Catholic archdiocese of New Orleans. One of those children was Tim Gioe.
As the Guardian and its reporting partner WWL Louisiana have previously reported, officials took up the molestation charges against Wattigny in 2020 after learning that he had been sending inappropriate text messages to a third person: a Catholic high school student who was underage. But investigators ultimately could not prosecute Wattigny for those messages because they were considered grooming, which was not illegal at the time, rather than abuse.
Experts have generally defined grooming as behavior that is meant to establish an emotional connection with a vulnerable person, such as a child, and frequently precedes sexual assault.
Tim and Sarah Gioe have said they could not believe that authorities essentially had to wait until they confirmed Wattigny had molested someone before they could move against him. If a grooming law had been in place, they reasoned, Wattigny may have been prosecuted for the inappropriate texts detected in 2020, and he may have received a harsher sentence than the one he got after his guilty plea: just five years in prison, which leaves him eligible for parole as soon as 12 June.
The Gioes also suspect that Wattigny may never have dared to give a young Tim baseball cards as presents while he successfully sought to ingratiate himself with the boy and his family – and then exploit the ensuing closeness to abuse the child.
Ultimately, while running a psychiatric nursing practice as well as raising four children with her husband, the 36-year-old Sarah Gioe took it upon herself to research anti-grooming laws in Texas and Mississippi, she previously told the Guardian. She noted how cases other than that of Wattigny – including multiple ones outside a religious context – highlighted Louisiana’s lack of an anti-grooming law.
Sarah Gioe forwarded her research to her father and in late March sent him a text asking: “Can grooming become illegal?”
Connick, who joined Louisiana’s state senate in 2020 after spending the prior 12 years in its house of representatives, said he regarded his daughter’s idea as a “no-brainer”. Within two days of Sarah’s text, he had drafted an anti-grooming bill. And he submitted it for consideration days ahead of the 2025 Louisiana legislative session, which began in April.
Forty-six of Connick’s colleagues across the state senate and house – both fellow Republicans and Democrats – signed up as co-authors for his bill. Both of the legislature’s chambers approved Connick’s bill by a combined vote of 135-0, sending it to the desk of governor Jeff Landry to sign into law.
The law was set to go into effect on 1 August.
Tim Gioe, 40, said he hoped his, his wife’s and his father-in-law’s legislative efforts inspired the remaining states without an anti-grooming statute to eventually adopt one.
“It’s not going to affect my case or put [Wattigny] in jail longer,” Tim Gioe said of the law that resulted from his abuse. “But it could very well prevent my children, their children or their friends from ever having to experience what we have gone through.”
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