Curley v. NAMBLA

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Curley v. NAMBLA was a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts in 2000, by Barbara and Robert Curley against the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA).

Their 10-year-old son Jeffrey was the victim of a 1997 murder by two men, Salvatore Sicari and Charlie Jaynes. The men took Jeffrey to the Boston Public Library and accessed NAMBLA's website. At least one of the men, Jaynes, later attempted to sexually assault Curley. When the boy fought back, Jaynes gagged him with a gasoline-soaked rag and eventually killed him. Jaynes then sexually assaulted his corpse.

According to the Curley's suit, Jaynes and Sicari "stalked Jeffrey Curley... and tortured, murdered and mutilated [his] body on or about October 1, 1997. Upon information and belief immediately prior to said acts Charles Jaynes accessed NAMBLA's website at the Boston Public Library." According to police, Jaynes had eight issues of a NAMBLA publication in his home at the time of his arrest. The lawsuit further alleges that "NAMBLA serves as a conduit for an underground network of pedophiles in the United States who use their NAMBLA association and contacts therein and the Internet to obtain child pornography and promote pedophile activity."^[1]

The Boston Globe editorialized in relation to this case: "NAMBLA claims that it has never advocated violence. Their denial, however, relies on an overly narrow definition. The cognitive and emotional violence done to a child's psyche has consequences more lasting than the tearing of bodily tissue. To a child, an adult's wiles can be more coercive than muscular force."^[2]

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) stepped in to defend NAMBLA and won a dismissal based on the specific legal issue that NAMBLA is organized as an association, not a corporation. The Curleys continued the suit as a wrongful death action against individual NAMBLA members and NAMBLA Steering Committee members.

The target of the wrongful death suits were Roy Radow, Joe Power, David Miller, Peter Herman, Max Hunter, Arnold Schoen and David Thorstad, a co-founder of NAMBLA and well-known writer. The Curleys alleged that Charles Jaynes and Salvatore Sicari, who were convicted of the rape and murder of their ten-year-old son Jeffrey, were NAMBLA members (see note at NAMBLA)

In April 2005, the wrongful death cases was still before the courts, with the ACLU assisting the defendants on the grounds that the suit violated their First Amendment rights.^[3] The ACLU makes it clear, however, that it does not endorse NAMBLA's objectives. "We've never taken a position that sexual-consent laws are beyond the state's power to legislate," John Reinstein, attorney for the Massachusetts branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in 1997. "I've never been able to fathom their position." (Boston Globe, October 9, 1997). The plaintiffs dropped their lawsuit in April 2008, after a judge ruled that a key witness was not competent to testify.^[4]