Gannett Co. Inc.’s attempt to shunt former Democrat and Chronicle newspaper carriers’ Child Victims Act claims off to the state’s Workers’ Compensation Board will be dead on arrival, attorneys for a claimant predict in a recent court filing.
In an amended complaint filed Nov. 16, lawyers for Rick Bates contend that Gannett’s attorneys’ insistence that the state’s workers’ comp system is the only forum in which former paperboys claiming sexual abuse can bring their complaints ignores the intent of the CVA.
The amended complaint comes as the three-year-old case moves toward an inflection point in which the presiding judge, Erie County Supreme Court Justice Deborah Chimes, will have to decide whether to bow to Gannett’s insistence that she step aside or move to quash the media firm’s bid to take the case out of her courtroom.
In a twist to their contention that the former carriers’ CVA claims can only be heard as workers’ comp cases, Gannett’s attorneys further maintain that since the ex-paperboys failed to file workers’ comp claims as teenagers and pre-teens in the 1980s and also failed to alert the Workers’ Compensation Board when they filed CVA claims in 2019, the board will be forced to deny their claims as time barred.
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