CENTRALIA — Washington will pay $15 million to settle claims by three sisters who said the state Department of Social and Health Services failed to protect them from years of sexual abuse by their teenage foster brothers at their home just south of Centralia, the sisters’ attorney said.
Attorneys for both parties reached the settlement Thursday night, more than two years after the complaint was filed in February 2022, the sisters’ lawyer Vincent Nappo said.
Jennifer, Sylvia and Rachel Pittman said their foster brothers sexually abused them “countless” times between 1990 and 1995 while the girls were in foster care custody and as young as 6, 3 and 2 years old, respectively, according to a trial brief provided by Nappo. The case had been scheduled to go to trial on Monday in Thurston County.
The sisters allowed The Seattle Times to use their name. The Times does not name survivors of sexual abuse without their consent.
The sisters’ state-assigned social worker failed to visit them monthly as required by policy and did not investigate a complaint about their brothers’ behavior, allowing the abuse to continue after the girls’ foster parents adopted them in 1995, the brief alleges.
“I don’t feel like I got my whole story out,” said Rachel Pittman, because there was no trial. “But hopefully the money helps me bring justice to other children.”
The foster brothers did not respond to a request for comment.
The brothers’ biological parents, who became the sisters’ foster parents in 1990 and adopted the girls in 1995, also did not respond to The Times’ inquiries.
The Times is not naming the foster brothers nor the parents, as they were not criminally charged.
Norah West, a spokesperson for the Department of Social and Health Services, deferred questions to the state Department of Children, Youth & Families, which took over responsibility for and liabilities related to foster care and child welfare in 2018.
Nancy Gutierrez, a department spokesperson, declined to comment on the settlement.
The women said the brothers’ sexual abuse, along with physical and emotional torment by their foster parents, began shortly after the state placed them in foster care on the family’s five-acre property outside of Centralia in July 1990. The state had removed the girls from their biological parents’ custody seven months earlier due to neglect, Nappo said.
Jennifer, Sylvia and Rachel Pittman — now 39, 37 and 36, respectively — joined the foster family’s seven biological children, the brief states.
The crowded, isolated home became a “horror house,” as the sisters endured sexual abuse by their older brothers along with violence by their foster parents, including beatings with belts or spatulas or being forced to sleep on the toilet or sit in a bathtub of cold water for hours as punishment for wetting the bed, the women said in a phone call Wednesday.
Along with the sisters, the parents had dozens of other foster children whom the couple paraded like “trophies” in public but abused and treated as inferior to their biological children in private, the women said.
“There was harassment in the home if you were adopted,” said one of the foster parents’ biological children, Betsyann Stuart, in a phone call Wednesday. “It was as though there was a demarcation between those that were [fostered and adopted] and those who weren’t.”
The state failed to notice or address abuse happening to the three sisters, whom they had a requirement to protect while they were in foster care, the brief alleges.
The sisters’ state-assigned social worker, who was required to visit the girls in person at their foster home every month while they were in foster care, saw them just eight times at the social and health services department to conduct supervised visits with the girls’ biological father between July 1990 and January 1992, according to the brief. Between March 1992 and January 1995, the social worker did not visit the girls at the foster family’s home a single time, Nappo said.
At least one of the girls told the social worker in January 1991 that boys in the home were “peeping” on them while they were naked. The social worker wrote in her case notes in January 1991 that it was “best to move [the] girls to another home,” but she never moved the sisters or investigated their complaints, the brief alleges.
The women said the years of abuse by their foster family caused “lifelong trauma” that shaped the direction of their life, including struggles with substance use, mental health and incarceration.
The sisters decided to seek legal counsel about three years ago, after Rachel Pittman — in an effort to improve her relationship with her adoptive parents — let her then-12-year-old son attend a sleepover at her adoptive family’s Centralia-area home, where a “sexual incident” occurred, she said.
After the incident, the sisters hoped to get children still in the couple’s custody, including those they have adopted, taken away to protect them from any abuse still happening in their home, the sisters said.
Allison Krutsinger, a Department of Children, Youth and Families spokesperson, said the couple’s foster care license was closed in 2017.
“This all started for the children left in the Pittman home,” Rachel Pittman said. “It’s not just me that is affected — it’s affecting other children.”
The women said they hope to use some of their settlement money to create and advertise a hotline for foster children to call if they think they are experiencing abuse, with an attorney like Nappo on the other end of the line.
But the settlement does not erase a childhood of abuse that still haunts them, the women said.
“There’s no accountability on the [foster family],” Rachel Pittman said. “The state is being held accountable for forgetting about us, but there’s never accountability for the abuse itself.”
