MINNESOTA
Minnesota Public Radio
Todd Melby
May 25, 2016
As a kid, Jon Landstrom spent hours in the pool churning out lap after lap. His dedication paid off when he won a spot on the Roseville Stingrays, an elite regional swim team.
But an encounter with an assistant swim coach would change how he felt about going to the pool.
“He wanted to have his hands on me,” Landstrom recalled. “Even if it was in front of people, he wanted to pet me or have his hands on me.”
The inappropriate behavior escalated until one day the coach sexually molested him, he said. “He called me tiger, which to this day gives me the creeps. It was sick.”
This was the 1970s and Landstrom was only 12 years old. He said he was scared and didn’t know who to tell about what was going on. So he kept quiet. Eventually, he went to therapy and began talking about it with his family. In 2012, he called a lawyer, but the attorney said he couldn’t help — the statute of limitations had expired and there was no legal remedy.
It was true. For years, victims of childhood sexual abuse from long ago had little standing in Minnesota courts. In 1989, Minnesota passed a “delayed discovery” law that gave victims six years from the time of adult awareness of past abuse to file suit. In 1996, the Minnesota Supreme Court interpreted that to mean six years after becoming an adult, that is age 24.
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