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FORTUNE.COM // JULY 2019
where there hasn’t been some criticism,” says Kenneth Feinberg,
a former adjunct professor at Harvard, Columbia, and NYU law
schools. “It comes with the territory.”
Feinberg is the closest thing the world has to a dean of the sub-
ject. He was the “special master” on the case that set the template
for modern settlements—the Agent Orange litigation in the 1980s,
which ended with Dow Chemical, Monsanto, and other com-
panies creating a fund for Vietnam War veterans who had been
harmed by the defoliant. Since then, Feinberg has overseen a fund
that distributed $7.14 billion to families who lost loved ones in the
Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks (a process Fortune documented in
a 2002 feature); he’s currently working with survivors of sexual
assault in cases involving the Catholic Church with co-administra-
tor Camille S. Biros. “Money is a very poor substitute for damage,
for loss, but that’s the American system,” he says. “Offering a fam-realize that we’ve made mistakes during the
past few years in how survivors were treated.”
Denhollander says that she’s keenly aware of
the system’s flaws and equally aware that the
vast majority of sexual-assault survivors sel-
dom receive any remedy, in or out of the justice
system. “That’s something that societally we
need to wrestle with—that that kind of sacrifice
is what it takes” to win redress, she says. “That’s
what sexual-assault survivors are up against
when they go to report their abuser.”
D
ISTRIBUTING FUNDS from a settlement
is at best messy. “I don’t think I’ve
ever done a compensation program“IT’S THE TRAUMA YOU WENT THROUGH,
BASICALLY, BEING RANKED ...
I DO THINK A LOT OF GIRLS ARE STILL
STRUGGLING WITH THAT.”
Grace French is one of several Nassar plaintiffs now doing advocacy work for other abuse survivors.