Twenty years ago, Ohio had a chance to give people who were sexually abused as children by clergy one year — a single year — to take their abusers and the institutions that hid them to court.

Jon Husted was speaker of the Ohio House. He took that year away.

American Journal News dug the story back up this week, and the contemporaneous coverage is worse than the summary. Ohio newspapers covered it in real time in March 2006, and those stories are still archived by BishopAccountability.org, the group that documents the Catholic abuse crisis.

What the bill was supposed to do

Senate Bill 17 was Ohio's answer to the Catholic clergy abuse scandal. It required clergy to report child abuse by their colleagues. It expanded the definition of sexual battery to cover clergy who sexually exploit minors in their congregations.

And it did one more thing, the thing that mattered most to survivors: it opened a one-year window for people to sue over abuse that happened as long as 35 years ago — abuse that the ordinary deadline for filing a lawsuit had already put out of reach.

That mattered because child sexual abuse takes decades to talk about. Ohio law at the time gave you two years after your 18th birthday. Most survivors aren't ready at 20.

The Ohio Senate passed the bill unanimously in March 2005. Then it went to the House and sat in the Judiciary Committee for a full year, stalled over that one provision.

Who wanted it gone, and who gave it to them

The Catholic Conference of Ohio — the public policy arm of the state's bishops — lobbied hard against the one-year window. They pushed an alternative instead: an online registry of clergy found liable of abuse in civil court.

Read what that swap actually means. Under the registry, a survivor could ask a court to put an abuser's name on a public list. What they could not do is collect a dime in damages. The institution that moved the priest from parish to parish would pay nothing.

The church got its way. In late March 2006, House Republicans stripped the one-year window and put the registry in its place. The Dayton Daily News reported at the time that victims' advocates "lambasted House Speaker Jon Husted, R-Kettering, for striking what they see as the bill's most important provision." Husted's explanation was that leaders couldn't reach a compromise that satisfied both church officials and the survivors' network.

That is a strange thing to say out loud. One side wanted the right to sue. The other side wanted them not to have it. There is no midpoint, and Husted picked a side.

Barbara Blaine, president of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, told the Columbus Dispatch exactly how the math worked:

"The influence of the Catholic Conference is so much greater than ours; that's what it comes down to."

The Dispatch's story that day ran under the headline "Abusive priests get legal break."

The side door

On the day the House voted, survivors lined the main doorway into the chamber. Several held photos of themselves at the age they were abused. They shouted at lawmakers walking in. They called them cowards.

The Cleveland Plain Dealer described what happened next: most lawmakers ducked through another door behind the press and lobbyist area. And Husted?

"Husted, Republican of Kettering, avoided the area altogether, taking a side door into the chamber."

He would not walk past them.

Then they sued him

Two days later, three survivors filed two lawsuits in Franklin County Common Pleas Court trying to void the vote. Their claim: Husted had met with a majority of the House Judiciary Committee behind closed doors, which would violate Ohio's open-meetings law. The Akron Beacon Journal reported that a guard kept the survivors out of the room while the meeting happened.

"Every time the door opened we could see them in there, but we had no access," said Claudia Vercellotti, the Toledo coordinator for SNAP.

"Participating in the legislative process has been personally devastating and a rude awakening. We never stood a chance," she told the Toledo Blade.

There's one more detail from that Blade story that's hard to read past. The judge who heard the emergency request was John Connor of Franklin County — the same judge Husted had publicly suggested, just weeks earlier, should resign or be impeached over a lenient sentence he gave a sex offender.

Husted had plenty to say about a judge being soft on a sex offender. He had considerably less to say when survivors were standing in his own hallway.

This wasn't the only time

American Journal News reports that two years earlier, in 2004, Husted voted for Ohio's tort reform law — the law capping how much money juries can award for pain and suffering.

The Ohio Capital Journal later went back and examined what that law actually did. Its finding: in the 15 years after passage, the law "yielded an unexpected use: stripping child rape victims of millions of dollars in legal damages."

Two examples from that reporting:

• Jessica Simpkins was 15 when her priest raped her twice. A jury awarded her $3.65 million. The cap cut her $3.5 million in noneconomic damages down to $350,000. She walked away with about 14% of what the jury said she deserved.
• Amanda Brandt was drugged and raped starting at age 11 by a man later convicted on 17 counts of rape. A jury awarded her $20 million in noneconomic damages. The cap reduced it to $250,000.

The Ohio Supreme Court finally stepped in. In Brandt v. Pompa, decided December 16, 2022 by a 4–3 vote, the court held those caps are unconstitutional as applied to child sexual abuse victims. It took 17 years and two women's lives being litigated in public to undo.

Why this is coming up now

Husted was appointed to the U.S. Senate last year to fill JD Vance's seat, and he's on the ballot this November against Sherrod Brown. Two other stories from this year sit uncomfortably next to the 2006 record.

The donations. Roll Call went through the money and found Les Wexner — the Ohio billionaire whose fortune Jeffrey Epstein managed for years, and who was later listed as a co-conspirator — gave Husted $116,892 across more than 20 years, including $3,500 to his Senate campaign. In September, Husted voted to block a Democratic amendment calling for the Epstein files to be released. To be fair about it: in November he did support the standalone release bill, which passed by unanimous consent, and he gave $34,300 of Wexner's money to a charity.

The campaign chair. In July, NBC News reported that Andrew Havas resigned as a volunteer county chair for Husted's campaign. Havas pleaded guilty in 2009 in a Mahoning County case involving a 15-year-old when he was 22 — a sexual misconduct charge reduced to misdemeanor assault — and served 90 days in jail. Husted's campaign said Havas "did not disclose" his criminal history.

Any one of these could be explained away. A donation you didn't vet. A volunteer who didn't tell you. A twenty-year-old floor vote.

But 2006 isn't a story about what Husted didn't know. He was the speaker. He controlled the bill. Survivors were standing in the hallway with pictures of themselves as children, and he had the votes to give them their one year in court.

He took the side door instead.

Source

• American Journal News, Claims Jon Husted protected sexual abusers date back more than 20 years (July 29, 2026). Photo: AP.