A Georgia Court of Appeals decision will stand, absolving five insurers of liability coverage and putting an end to long-running litigation stemming from revelations of child sexual abuse at boarding school.
The Supreme Court of Georgia this month declined to review the lower appeals court’s March decision that reversed a $345 million judgment against five insurance carriers in the Darlington School case. The deadline for asking the state Supreme Court to reconsider expired this week, effectively ending the legal battles that began almost 10 years ago.
“So, the Court of Appeals opinion stands unchanged and is binding precedent in Georgia,” said Laurie Webb Daniel, of Atlanta, one of the lead attorneys representing the insurers.
The crux of the legal issue was whether liability policies that were not in force until 2010 should cover actions that took place years before, along with the victims’ more recent mental anguish. A trial court decided the policies should cover, but the appellate judges disagreed.
The abuse at the high-profile boarding school in Rome, Georgia, was shown to have begun around 1974 and continued through 1994. Some 20 boys were sexually abused by a teacher named Roger Stifflemire. Several of the students informed school leadership but the school failed to investigate or terminate Stifflemire, court rulings explained.
In 2017, Darlington School finally sent a letter to alumni, informing them that the school had been made aware of one instance of abuse. Some 20 students then filed suit. The school in 2024 reached a $351 million settlement, agreeing to pay $6 million of that while its insurance carriers paid the rest. The school also assigned rights to the plaintiffs-victims, allowing them to seek recovery directly from the insurance companies, which included Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance, Continental Casualty Co., The North River Insurance Co., Great American Insurance and Zurich American.
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All insurers denied the claims, noting that most of the insurance policies specified that bodily injury must occur during the policy periods, which did not start until 2010. Other policies excluded unlawful conduct by the insureds.
The only insurance company that had written policies for the school at the time of the abuse was Lamorak Insurance, which was later deemed insolvent and was liquidated in 2011. So, Darlington’s attorneys tried a different approach, arguing that mental anguish, which manifested many years after the abuse and was triggered in part by the 2017 letter to school alumni, was the true injury—and the school should be covered.
