Ohio Sen. Bill Blessing is drafting legislation that would wipe out the state's statutes of limitations on childhood sexual abuse crimes, opening a lookback window that could let survivors revive lawsuits from decades ago. The push follows the August release of former Catholic priest Geoff Drew from prison, a moment that reignited anger because other people who say Drew abused them as children could never bring charges or sue — the clock had already run out under Ohio law.
Drew was convicted in 2021 for raping an altar boy in the late 1980s, but additional allegations against him could not be prosecuted because Ohio's criminal statute of limitations had already expired, according to Premier Christian News. That gap is central to the case Blessing is building, as detailed by WCPO 9 News, which reports the senator will sponsor a bill removing both criminal and civil statutes of limitations in childhood sexual abuse cases and plans to introduce it during the shortened lame-duck session this fall, with a promise to reintroduce it in early 2027 if it stalls.
Blessing has said justice should not be avoided because an institution might go bankrupt or lose money, and he has predicted his bill will face strong resistance from what he describes as a historically powerful and well-funded Catholic Church lobby, per the station's reporting. Attorney Konrad Kircher, who filed 25 lawsuits on behalf of clergy abuse victims between 2002 and 2005, told the outlet that clergy abuse survivors would want to revive their old cases if Ohio law changes, and that even small monetary settlements can have a tremendous healing effect.
Nearly 200 Lawsuits Dismissed Without a Hearing
The stakes in southwest Ohio are concrete. Roughly 400 people reported being sexually molested by priests during childhood there, and almost 200 of those survivors filed lawsuits, mostly in Hamilton County, according to the same WCPO account. Hamilton County judges dismissed nearly all of those cases without hearings or evidence because the claims were deemed too old under state law — a legal wall built by Ohio Revised Code Section 2305.111, which generally requires childhood sexual abuse civil suits to be filed within 12 years after a survivor turns 18, capping most claims at age 30 unless fraudulent concealment can be proven, as outlined by Gervelis Law Firm.
That age-30 cutoff collides with how trauma actually works. Data compiled by the child advocacy organization Child USA, cited by White Law PLLC, shows survivors of childhood sexual abuse come forward to report or disclose their abuse at an average age of 52 — more than two decades after Ohio's door closes.
A Fight Ohio Has Lost Before
This is not Ohio's first attempt at reform. Similar bills stalled for a decade before an earlier lookback-window effort surfaced in 2005 and 2006, not long after the Archdiocese of Cincinnati became the first U.S. archdiocese criminally convicted for failing to report abusive priests — a 2003 Hamilton County Common Pleas Court conviction on five counts tied to a plea bargain covering failures between 1979 and 1982, as documented by Cincinnati CityBeat.
The Ohio Senate passed that 2006 statute-of-limitations bill unanimously, including a one-year lookback window for reviving time-barred lawsuits, per WCPO's account. House Republicans then amended the bill before the vote, stripping the lookback window and adding a civil registry for sexual offenders instead, and the House passed that amended version overwhelmingly. Kircher later filed a 2006 lawsuit accusing lawmakers of violating the Ohio Open Meetings Act, naming then-House Speaker Jon Husted and then-Assistant Majority Whip Bill Seitz, but the Ohio 10th District Court of Appeals ruled the lawmakers prevailed for insufficient evidence. The civil registry itself was later found unconstitutional, revised in 2024, and the station reports it still is not being used.
Former Ohio House member Steve Driehaus, who represented House District 31, told the station that Catholic leaders pressured lawmakers during that 2006 reform debate. Driehaus said he personally met with then-Archbishop of Cincinnati Daniel Pilarczyk — who died in 2020 — in 2006 to discuss statute-of-limitations reform, and other Catholic Ohio lawmakers told WCPO that Catholic leaders contacted them before the House vote on March 29, 2006. Survivors showed up at the statehouse that day holding childhood photographs as they pushed lawmakers to act, the outlet reports.
A Familiar Name Behind Years of Blocked Reform
Bill Seitz, who retired at the end of his 2024 term after 24 years at the Ohio Statehouse, is a recurring figure in this history. According to WCPO's reporting, Seitz blocked Ohio statute-of-limitations reform for years because he believed it was unfair to make institutions defend themselves 30 to 40 years after an alleged abuse. He now works as a lobbyist and lawyer for Dinsmore & Shohl, a firm that has represented the Archdiocese of Cincinnati in alleged clergy sexual abuse cases; Seitz has said he never worked on or billed time to any Archdiocese of Cincinnati cases.
Seitz's record on the issue is not one-dimensional — he later co-sponsored reforms rather than opposing all abuse-related legislation. He and Cindy Abrams sponsored a bill criminalizing grooming a child for sexual abuse, which Gov. Mike DeWine signed into law in 2025. Seitz also co-sponsored the Scout's Honor bill in 2023, which opened a five-year window for larger payments from a national Boy Scouts of America sex-abuse settlement. That carve-out mirrors a separate, narrower fix: under Ohio House Bill 35, the state created a temporary lookback window running through October 11, 2028, exclusively allowing survivors to file claims against the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy estate under a national settlement trust, according to the Constant Legal Group — relief that has never been extended to clergy abuse survivors.
Ohio Lags a National Shift
Ohio's current law already reflects one round of reform: a 2006 statute increased the criminal statute of limitations for child sex abuse cases to age 30 and raised the civil lawsuit deadline to age 43, per WCPO. But measured against where the rest of the country has moved since, Ohio looks like an outlier. At least 30 U.S. states have enacted temporary lookback windows or age-limit revival laws for childhood sexual abuse civil claims over the past two decades, according to reporting from The 74, and 45 states have completely eliminated statutes of limitations for at least some felony childhood sexual abuse crimes, according to Child USA — leaving Ohio among a shrinking minority that still imposes criminal prosecution deadlines. The Catholic Conference of Ohio told WCPO it could not comment on Blessing's proposed bill because it had not yet been introduced, but said the church does not oppose all reform efforts on the issue.
The financial stakes behind that resistance are not hypothetical. New York's 2019 Child Victims Act created a temporary lookback window that resulted in 10,787 civil lawsuits filed on behalf of 14,592 abuse survivors against churches, schools, and youth organizations, per The 74's reporting — an influx that drove multiple Catholic dioceses into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. WCPO reports nearly 40 Catholic dioceses nationwide have sought bankruptcy protection from lawsuit and settlement costs triggered by similar abuse-claim revival windows. California's Assembly Bill 218 produced a comparable wave, extending civil deadlines to age 40 and generating over 1,000 civil lawsuits against public school districts alone, alongside widespread Catholic diocese filings, as Hoodline previously reported.
Courts have not been kind to institutional challenges against these windows. In June 2024, the Louisiana Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of that state's temporary lookback window for adult survivors, rejecting a challenge from the Catholic Church that argued reviving decades-old lawsuits amounted to an unconstitutional taking of church property, a case Hoodline covered in its reporting on a Lake Charles judge's recusal over an undisclosed parish role. For Ohio survivors who watched nearly 200 lawsuits vanish without a hearing, Blessing's bill represents another attempt to force that same reckoning — one his predecessors in the statehouse have faced, and lost, before.
