Louisiana jury awards $1.1bn to woman who sued over childhood molestation in 1960s

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. Edwards, the second husband of Lockridge’s mother, kept her quiet for years by threatening to kill her if she ever reported the abuse.

Lockridge, an intensive care unit (ICU) nurse, eventually requested that Edwards pay for her to receive mental health counseling. He responded by obtaining a restraining order against her in 2011.

In the process, he admitted to the Bossier sheriff’s department that he indeed molested his ex-wife’s daughter when she was a minor. But too many years had passed for him to be able to be legally prosecuted for that abuse.

When Lockridge sued him for damages in 2012, he successfully moved for the case to be dismissed by arguing that the filing deadline for such a civil action had long passed under Louisiana law in effect at the time.

Louisiana’s passage of a lookback law and its survival of a constitutional challenge gave Lockridge a viable opportunity to pursue damages from the estate of Edwards, who died in 2023. So Lockridge availed herself of that opportunity, filing a lawsuit contending that she was owed for the lifelong trauma he had inflicted on her.