Inside a $32.5M Child Sex Abuse Case Built on 170-Year-Old Treaty Promises
- Joe Douglass, 3x Emmy-Nominated Legal Storyteller
- 6 hours ago
- 6 min read
From 1992 to 2016, Dr. Stanley Patrick Weber worked as a pediatrician for the Indian Health Service on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana and the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. During that period, he sexually abused Native American boys who came to IHS facilities for medical care. Weber was convicted in Montana in 2018 and South Dakota in 2019 and is now serving multiple life sentences.
The civil cases that followed focused not just on Weber’s crimes, but on how the system around him responded after warning signs emerged. “The word ‘betrayal,’” Peter Janci says, “I don’t think is strong enough.” He is referring to evidence that supervisors received complaints, punished staff who raised concerns and transferred Weber to a new reservation without warning, where he continued working for nearly two more decades.
Janci, a trial lawyer in Portland, Oregon, has spent 18 years representing survivors of sexual abuse. In a recent episode of the Make Your Case podcast, he describes how litigation over Weber’s conduct expanded from a single survivor’s call into a broader examination of institutional decision-making. He explains how cases connected to Weber resulted in $32.5 million paid to at least 20 victims, including an $18 million settlement for a group of 12 men represented by his firm, Crew Janci LLP.
From One Client to a Systemic Child Sex Abuse Case
Like many of Janci’s cases, this one began with a single person reaching out after media coverage of Weber’s arrest. That client led to others. Then came a second wave.
As Janci’s team and journalists investigated, they learned that Weber had spent about 30 years with the Indian Health Service. He began in 1986 at the Carl Albert Service Center in Ada, Oklahoma, within the Chickasaw Nation, before working on the Blackfeet Reservation from 1992 to 1995 and then on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1995 to 2016.
More troubling, Janci says, is how early warning signs surfaced. Between 1989 and 1992, while Weber was completing a fellowship in Albuquerque, a colleague says he planned to take a 16-year-old Native American boy to Europe and was warned it was a “bad idea.”
Complaints followed once Weber was in practice. Children reported inappropriate touching to nurses. Coworkers raised concerns. A psychologist with experience working with sex offenders, Janci says, “was throwing a fit” about Weber’s behavior.
In one incident, Weber was assaulted by relatives after an allegation that he was “surreptitiously looking” at a teenage boy while the boy was showering. IHS leadership knew. Weber was not removed from his position. Whistleblowers were punished. Complaints were minimized. And when concerns on the Blackfeet Reservation could no longer be ignored, the federal government transferred Weber to Pine Ridge.
“You dumped a predator into a new community,” Janci says, “with no warning.”
A 161-page independent report commissioned by IHS in 2020 later confirmed what survivors alleged: Management protected Weber and targeted his accusers. Leadership, the report found, wanted the warnings to be untrue because addressing them would have been “awkward, arduous, inconvenient, messy and embarrassing.”
How the Abuse Was Allowed to Continue
Weber curated lists of boys he wanted to see. He scheduled after-hours appointments. He isolated children in exam rooms and brought a couch into one of them. He took boys to restaurants, invited them to his home and had some stay overnight.
On Pine Ridge, he created outreach programs that gave him access to youth outside clinical settings. Some boys were drugged and sexually assaulted in his home. Evidence introduced in criminal proceedings suggests he may have recorded the abuse.
These were not isolated incidents. They were visible patterns.
An Uncommon Legal Path
Suing the federal government is difficult by design. Sovereign immunity, procedural barriers and statutes of limitations often block claims before they begin.
Janci’s team pursued a rarely used strategy: treaty-based claims filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The argument was that Weber’s conduct, and the government’s failure to stop it, violated promises made in treaties signed in 1855 and 1868.
Those treaties require the federal government to compensate tribes for harm caused by “bad white men living amongst the natives” and for the “depredations” of white men living among tribal members.
Only one prior case had attempted a similar theory. Janci’s team argued that Weber’s abuse, combined with years of inaction by IHS leadership, fit squarely within those obligations.
The Fight Over Time
The government’s primary defense was not factual, Janci says. It was procedural.
Even if everything the plaintiffs alleged was true, the argument went, too much time had passed. The government said the claims were simply too late.
Janci responded by pointing to research showing that survivors of childhood sexual abuse often do not disclose for decades — with an average age of disclosure around 52 — and that many never tell anyone at all. The point, he says, was not to win a debate over statistics, but to explain why delay is often part of the harm itself. “Victims don’t get a time limit on the impact,” Janci says. “So institutions shouldn’t get one either.”
That framing helped shape the negotiations. It did not resolve the case on its own.
What Actually Moved the Case
The treaty-based claims made the cases legally viable. They were not what brought them to a close.
What changed the dynamic, Janci says, was giving decision-makers direct access to survivors’ experiences through mediation and settlement presentations. “There’s no substitute for hearing directly from the victims,” he says.
He has seen what happens when that distance collapses: not responses to legal memos, but to the human consequences of decades of abuse and silence.
What Lawyers Can Take Away
This case offers concrete lessons for attorneys handling institutional abuse litigation.
Early notice should anchor the story. Janci does not frame the case around Weber’s arrest. He frames it around when supervisors first knew something was wrong, and what they chose to do instead.
Transfers are substantive acts, not minor administrative details. Moving Weber from Montana to South Dakota was a decision that relocated risk and expanded harm.
Statute-of-limitations defenses should be anticipated from the outset. Delay is predictable in trauma cases; the narrative must account for it.
Finally, a strong legal theory is not enough. Resolution came when survivors were allowed to speak directly to people with the authority to settle.
What Parents Can Take Away
Janci is explicit about what he looks for in hindsight, and what parents should pay attention to in real time.
The biggest red flag is orchestrated one-on-one contact, especially when it is secretive or unnecessary.
Boundary violations matter, even when they seem small. Inappropriate touch, sexualized jokes, gift-giving or special privileges are often test runs.
Watch for manipulation and deception. When concerns are raised, pay attention to how an adult responds. Denial and minimization are warning signs.
Predators also often make children feel complicit — encouraging minor rule-breaking, sharing alcohol or drugs, or framing the relationship as a shared secret.
The purpose of this tactic, Janci says, is to instill a specific fear in the victim: "Now I can't tell about what happened because people are going to get mad at me, my parents are gonna get mad at me, or I'm gonna get in trouble because I smoked pot with the perpetrator."
Technology matters, too. There is rarely a legitimate reason for secret one-on-one digital communication between adults and children.
Above all, Janci says, trust discomfort. Parents often see only one slice of behavior. Institutions may see patterns, but only if concerns are reported.
A Case About Power
For Janci, the Weber litigation reinforces a pattern he has seen for nearly two decades.
Institutional abuse is rarely about a lack of information or resources. It is about will.
Power protects itself, he says. It avoids disruption. And it often chooses inaction unless the cost of ignoring a problem outweighs the cost of confronting it.
In this child sex abuse case, accountability came through criminal prosecution, independent investigation, sustained media attention and civil litigation grounded in treaty promises older than the agency itself.
The result was not just compensation, but a public record of how a system failed, and what it took to force it to listen.
About the Podcast
Make Your Case is a series produced by Clear Eyed Media where attorneys break down the most impactful cases of their careers and the strategy behind them. It's hosted by Joe Douglass, a former investigative journalist and founder of Clear Eyed Media. The company helps attorneys present cases more effectively through professional video storytelling for mediation, settlement, or trial.
If you’re a trial lawyer with a case worth sharing, and you'd like to be on the podcast, email joe@cleareyedmedia.com