A north-west Louisiana jury recently awarded a staggering $1.1bn in damages to a woman who sued over childhood sexual molestation at the hands of her late stepfather in the 1960s and 1970s – a verdict that the plaintiff says “sends a message that children are precious” and “deserve protection”. The outcome in Pamela Elaine Lockridge’s lawsuit caused waves among Louisiana’s legal community, illustrating how much civil juries are willing to award to plaintiffs for cases tried under the state’s so-called “lookback law”.
Passed in 2021 and upheld as constitutional in 2024, that law temporarily eliminated filing deadlines for lawsuits involving child molestation which happened long ago, giving survivors like Lockridge – whose late abuser at one point confirmed that he molested her – an opportunity to pursue damages. Lockridge’s lead attorney, Ryan Gatti, said neither he nor his client were expecting to ultimately collect the full award from her abuser Leroy Edwards’s estate.
Gatti said he instead was anticipating reaching an undisclosed settlement with Edwards’s estate, which in such a circumstance would forgo appealing against the verdict. Nonetheless, Gatti said the verdict which Lockridge won has in effect “made it too expensive to come to our state and abuse a child”.
“This case was never about money,” Lockridge separately said in a statement. “It was about truth.
It was about accountability. It was about finally being heard.” Jurors in Bossier parish – Louisiana’s word for county – found Edwards subjected Lockridge to criminal sexual molestation for 14 years beginning when she was aged four in 1962.