Five insurance carriers cannot be expected to defend or indemnify a Georgia boarding school where child sexual abuse took place decades before the liability policies were written, the Georgia Court of Appeals has found in a ruling that reversed a $345 million judgment against the insurers.
“…The fact that the mental anguish continued in subsequent years does not mean the injury ‘comes into existence’ in each subsequent policy period, the three-judge panel said in the March 6 opinion, addressing the heart of Darlington School victims’ argument.
The litigation has been brewing for almost a decade. The appeals court’s review was deemed so important that the American Property Casualty Insurance Association, the Complex Insurance Claims Litigation Association and the Federation of Defense and Corporate Counsel all filed friend-of-the-court arguments. The appellate judges thanked all three groups for their input.
The sad episode began in 1974 and continued through 1994, when at least 20 boys at the school in Rome, Georgia, were sexually abused by a teacher named Roger Stifflemire. Several of the students informed school leadership but the school failed to investigate or terminate Stifflemire, the court explained.
In 2017, Darlington School finally sent a letter to alumni, informing them that the school had been made aware of one instance of abuse. Some 20 students then filed suit. The school in 2024 reached a $351 million settlement, agreeing to pay $6 million of that while its insurance carriers paid the rest. The school also assigned rights to the plaintiffs-victims, allowing them to seek recovery directly from the insurance companies, which included Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance, Continental Casualty Co., The North River Insurance Co., Great American Insurance and Zurich American.
All insurers denied the claims, noting that most of the insurance policies specified that bodily injury must occur during the policy periods, which did not start until 2010. Others excluded unlawful conduct by the insureds.
The only insurance company that had written policies for the school at the time of the abuse was Lamorak Insurance, which was later deemed insolvent and was liquidated in 2011. So, Darlington’s attorneys tried a different approach, arguing that mental anguish, which manifested many years after the abuse and was triggered in part by the 2017 letter to school alumni, was the true injury—and the school should be covered.
The trial court in Floyd County, Georgia, agreed with that argument and in 2024 ordered Philadelphia Indemnity to pay $232 million; Zurich was ordered to pay $92 million; North River and Great American were both liable for $10 million each.
But on appeal, the Georgia Appeals Court judges last week reached a very different conclusion.
“We find the plaintiffs’ interpretation of coverage to be overly broad,” Judge Todd Markle wrote in the opinion. “According to the plaintiffs, as long as the mental anguish was present in a policy period, it was covered. Under such an interpretation, once an insured suffered an injury, the insured would be able to claim coverage under any future insurance policies in perpetuity. We do not apply that logic to any other insurance claim, and we decline to do so here.”
During oral arguments in September 2025, Appeals Court Judge Sara Doyle gave a strong indication of how the court might lean.
“I can’t believe, in a million years, that these insurance companies thought in 2020 that they were insuring something from 1970 or whatever,” the judge said.
Throughout the opinion, the appellate judges noted the human tragedy of the Darlington School abuse chapter.
“Nothing in this opinion should be read to minimize the abuse the victims suffered at the hands of Stifflemire, or Darlington’s complete abdication of its responsibility to protect the students enrolled there,” the court said in a footnote. “But we are constrained by the language in the various insurance policies and the well-settled principles of contract interpretation to reach the conclusion that there was no coverage under the defendants’ policies.”
No judge wrote a dissenting opinion in the case.
The school and victims have not said if they plan to push the appeal one step further and ask the Georgia Supreme Court to review. The insurers’ arguments were led by attorney Laurie Webb Daniel, of Atlanta. “We appreciate receiving such a thorough opinion from the Court of Appeals,” Daniel said in an email Sunday.
Read More About the History of the Darlington School Litigation:
Zurich, Philadelphia, Others Ordered to Pay $345M to Cover Abuse Charges at Ga. School
Insurers Fighting $345M Georgia School Abuse Award, With Policy Wording at Issue
Topics
Carriers
Georgia
K-12
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