The Social Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice (TSJ) suspended the hearing related to a civil lawsuit filed by one of the 30 victims of American William James Vahey, considered “the most prolific pedophile in history.”
The hearing was scheduled for Thursday, September 29. Originally it was to be held on July 28, but it was also suspended, according to what is read on the website of the TSJ. All the hearings that were suspended on September 29 were rescheduled for October 13, except for the case file corresponding to the lawsuit against the Asociación Civil Escuela Campo Alegre, according to what was published on the website of the country’s High Court.
In this case, the civil suit was against the Campo Alegre School Civil Association, where Vahey worked between 2002 and 2009, a period in which he organized two trips with students, 30 of whom were sexually abused by that teacher, according to the file. .
One of those 30 victims sued in 2014 before the Lopnna courts in Caracas where the complaint was dismissed because the events occurred outside of Venezuela, according to the criteria of Judge Betilde Araque Granadillo (3rd Trial), endorsed by Aurimar Cáceres Rojas ( Superior 3°), according to the sentences.
On that occasion, the courts of Lopnna de Caracas accepted the opinion put forward by the Campo Alegre School Civil Association, according to which that institution allegedly had nothing to do with the trips organized by Vahey and where he abused the 30 students.
To refute this point, the victim’s lawyers submitted several yearbooks from the Campo Alegre School to the Lopnna courts with reviews of the trips. 2006-2007 Yearbook: “This year the Travel Club took 34 students on an exciting nine-day adventure tour of Costa Rica during spring break,” says the yearbook in the Campo Alegre School archives.
And in the 2007-2008 yearbook they refer on page 99 to the other trip sponsored by the School to Panama, in April 2008. Likewise, the lawyers consigned to the file the 2008-2009 yearbook where the trip to Costa Rica is outlined on page 86 during which Vahey drugged 30 students with a substance placed in cookies and then abused them, according to an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States and reported to the Venezuelan authorities.
The Ombudsman’s Office and the Public Prosecutor’s Office, among others, were summoned to the hearing on September 29 and still without a date. The victim’s lawyers (Javier Pipkin and Eddy Méndez) observe with surprise that the Public Ministry has requested to participate in that hearing “because in the past eight years that the trial has been going on, it has not responded to the complaints we made.”
At the hearing, the Social Chamber will hear the victim (12 years old at the time of the events) and the representatives of the Campo Alegre School. Then a moment will be taken to evaluate and decide if the aforementioned institution is responsible for the moral damage caused to the plaintiff student, explained a source from the TSJ.
