Jess Michaels and Jena-Lisa Jones, survivors of abuse by late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, said that while Epstein survivors are still far from getting justice, they hope the increased attention on the Epstein Files — and the stories of survivors – will help others stand up to abuse happening in their own communities.

Women are often not believed, and in many cases, they are blamed. As a survivor of sexual assault, we need to change the culture of silence around sexual abuse.

Overall, 667 people have alleged they were sexually abused as children at youth facilities in Illinois through lawsuits filed since May. The most recent complaints detail alleged abuse from 1996 to 2021, including rape, forced oral sex and beatings by corrections officers, nurses, kitchen staff, chaplains and others.

Three lawsuits filed Monday detail abuse from 1996 to 2021, including rape, forced oral sex and beatings by corrections officers, nurses, kitchen staff, chaplains and others. Overall, 667 people have alleged they were sexually abused as children at youth facilities run by the state and Cook County in lawsuits filed since May.

That lawsuit, filed this week on behalf of 193 former Juvenile Temporary Detention Center detainees, alleges systematic sexual abuse carried out at the facility over the course of multiple decades since the mid-1990s. The plaintiffs claim the state of Illinois “caused and permitted a culture of sexual abuse to flourish unabated at JTDC.”

“This is abuse that occurred at the hands of those who were hired to protect and educate the residents of these facilities,” attorney Todd Mathews said Monday. “Instead, they created a horrific environment and performed unspeakable acts on these survivors.”

The alleged sexual abuse in these cases occurred between 1996 and 2017 and the victims were all minors — some as young as 12 — when the alleged abuse occurred, according to the complaint.

Nearly 100 people are claiming in a new lawsuit that they were subjected to sexual abuse and assault as the hands of correctional officers and staffers at facilities in Chicago and across the state.

The Courage Fund’s first grant comes from the Ford Foundation, which announced a $1 million donation on Dec. 13. A Long Walk Home and A Call to Men, national organizations focused on sexual-violence prevention and education for two decades, will lead the effort.

More than 450 Catholic clerics and religious brothers abused nearly 2,000 children across six Illinois dioceses, according to a multi-year investigation from the state’s attorney general’s office, a total significantly higher than what the church itself had reported previously.

“At best, the cardinal’s claims of being blindsided are misleading,” Attorney General Kwame Raoul said. “At worst, they are more of the same, a continuation of the church’s decades-long pattern of turning a blind eye and covering up allegations of child sex abuse to the detriment of survivors.”

The results of that investigation, published by Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, represents what he called the first comprehensive accounting of child sex abuse by members of the Catholic clergy in Illinois.

“Surviving R. Kelly Part III: The Final Chapter” is a two-part look at the legal fallout Kelly has faced. 

R. Kelly’s onetime manager was sentenced Monday to a year in federal prison for calling in a shooting threat that halted a screening of a damning documentary about the R&B star.

R. Kelly’s lawyers said Monday they would fight prosecutors’ bid to tell jurors about allegations beyond the actual charges  at his upcoming federal sex trafficking trial. 

Federal prosecutors in R. Kelly’s sex trafficking case say he had sexual contact with an underage boy in addition to girls, and the government wants jurors in his upcoming sex trafficking trial to hear those claims.