Trey’s Law, which bans NDAs for child sex abuse victims, is flying through Congress

WASHINGTON – Elizabeth Carlock Phillips remembers her brother Trey Carlock as a bright young man, a National Merit scholar and brain researcher, who struggled with the childhood sexual abuse he experienced at a Missouri summer camp.

The Kanakuk Kamps director who abused him went to prison. But Phillips said Carlock remained haunted by a nondisclosure agreement tied to the settlement of a civil suit he filed as an adult against Kanakuk.

Carlock, a Highland Park High School graduate, died by suicide in 2019 at age 28.

“NDAs were created to protect trade secrets, not trauma secrets,” Phillips said at a news conference earlier this year in Washington.“The NDA requested and pushed specifically by Kanakuk, was so restrictive that Trey was scared to share his trauma, even in therapeutic settings. How do you heal when you don’t have a voice?”

Phillips has turned grief into a campaign, spurring Texas and several other states to adopt “Trey’s Law,” which bars the use of nondisclosure agreements to silence sexual abuse victims.

Now she’s pushing for a federal ban, and Congress is moving with unusual speed to do so.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican, introduced legislation that would prevent nondisclosure agreements from prohibiting survivors of child sexual abuse from speaking publicly about what happened to them.

The bill has drawn overwhelming bipartisan support. It cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously, with senators from both parties rushing to add their names as co-sponsors.

The Senate then approved the measure by unanimous consent, sending it to the House. Cruz said child sexual assault is all too common and litigation often results in attempts to muzzle victims from sharing their stories.

The federal legislation preserves the confidentiality of civil settlement amounts and allows victims to insist on privacy if they choose.

“What it does not allow is the forced silencing of victims in order to protect the abusers,” Cruz said. “Today, we stand here to say no child should be defined by enforced silence, and that no survivor should feel controlled or defeated by the system that is supposed to deliver them justice.”

Phillips, based in Dallas, has said her brother considered the settlement with Kanakuk as blood money.

Family members of alleged victims of abuse at the camp have created Facts About Kanakuk, an advocacy website that asserts the full scope of abuse allegations at the camp has remained hidden by settlements and nondisclosure agreements.

Kanakuk says it has “participated fully in all investigations and legal proceedings” and disputed assertions about its use of NDAs.

“Kanakuk has never used Non-disclosure Agreements (NDA’s) to prevent victims from reporting their abuse to police or telling their story,” according to a statement Kanakuk posted online. “We categorically reject this false narrative. We are not ‘hiding’ anything.”

Phillips highlighted language from Kanakuk NDAs barring the parties from making any statements negatively portraying the other.

State Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Allen, who sponsored the Texas version of Trey’s Law, attended the Senate committee vote and said the issue extends beyond individual victims because sexual predators often reoffend.

“What we did in Texas is paving the way for a groundbreaking movement that’s really empowering victims and survivors,” Leach said in an interview. “It cannot be the public policy of this state or of this country to allow for what is essentially blood money. It’s hush money.”

U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Flower Mound, is sponsoring the bill in the House and said it should move quickly because many states have yet to adopt such proposals.

“The idea that a child survivor of sexual assault is silenced because of an NDA … is something that most people, Democrats or Republicans, think is wrong and that’s something that we can fix,” Gill said.