CALIFORNIA
Santa Barbara Independent
Thursday, December 6, 2012
By Barney Brantingham
MOLESTED SCOUT: Tayln Lang, now 38, couldn’t understand why he kept losing job after job, year after year. Finally, determined to get to the root of the problem, “I took a long, hard look at my life and realized that it was due to a loss of self-worth,” the result of being molested by a Boy Scout leader, Lang told me Monday.
The sexual abuse he suffered from the age of 13 to 16, and its psychological effects, were inflicted by “a controlling, domineering, dominating” man with a wife and four children, Lang told me. Lang has just won a confidential settlement from the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) and the Mormon church, which sponsored Troop 275 in Oxnard.
The settlement not only brought a measure of closure and healing, Lang said, “but the most important thing is to ensure that this doesn’t happen to any other young man and is brought to light.” According to his lawsuit, filed in 2010, he was molested by Mark Gum, first in Oxnard and later in Butte County. Although Gum is named in the suit, his whereabouts are unknown, according to Santa Barbara attorney Tim Hale, who filed the suit.
Gum, according to the suit, took advantage of the fact that Lang was vulnerable because of his unhappy home life in a dysfunctional family and created “an overwhelming emotional dependency that rendered plaintiff desperate for the perpetrator’s attention, approval, and affection.” Gum “made plaintiff his sex toy,” according to the suit. The Scouts and the Mormon church (also known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or LDS) knew or should have known that Gum presented a risk, the suit said.
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