10,000 Pages of Sealed Documents in Paige Patterson Sexual Abuse Case Accidentally Leaked
Over 10,000 pages of confidential, private, and legally protected material related to an alleged victim’s sexual abuse case against former SBTS president Paige Patterson were unintentionally made accessible for a brief period this weekend in an unsealed format on the court’s website, according to the BNG’s report.
Visible information included the victim’s name, medical and psychiatric records, Social Security number, driver’s license number, banking information, address, phone number, email address, police reports of her alleged assaults, sealed testimony, and other personal identifying information and confidential communication implicating several dozens of individuals with a relationship to the case and the seminary
and
Buried in the thousands of pages are allegations from Jane Roe that in an initial meeting where she first reported the sexual assault to Patterson and a group of “all men,” Patterson asked Roe a series of “unnecessarily invasive questions about the allegations,” including if the alleged assailant (who is now deceased and testified under oath to a prior consensual sexual history with several other women) had “ejaculated” as she was being raped and “if she had had her period.” She also alleges Patterson told her it was “good” that she was raped because “the right man wouldn’t care if she was a virgin or not.”
According to the case summary for Jane Roe v. Patterson and Southwestern Seminary, Roe alleges she was “sexually assaulted by a fellow student of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2015. She sued the seminary and its president, Paige Patterson, for negligently failing to protect her from the assaults and for allegedly defaming her after.”
The district court granted summary judgment for Patterson and the seminary on all claims, and Roe appealed. The fifth circuit upheld the summary judgment regarding claims that Patterson failed to protect her, but sent two questions to the Texas Supreme Court that they would like to see settled, namely:
- Can a person who supplies defamatory material to another for publication be liable for defamation?
- If so, can a defamation plaintiff survive summary judgment by presenting evidence that a defendant was involved in preparing a defamatory publication, without identifying any specific statements made by the defendant?
The court agreed to take on the appeal and oral arguments are set to begin September 11, 2024
About Author
He was the President of SEBTS and SWBTS not SBTS. There is a difference.