Update to our November 5, 2025 article:

Court of Appeals of Georgia Rules in Favor of Insurers

On March 6, 2026, the Court of Appeals of Georgia issued a ruling in the consolidated insurance coverage cases involving sexual abuse at the Darlington School.¹ The issue in the cases was whether the school’s insurance policies from the 2000s and 2010s provided coverage for claims of sexual abuse to students that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s.

As discussed in my article below, the school argued that the continuing emotional distress experienced by its former students years after the abuse took place met the definition of “bodily injury” under the later policies.² A ruling adopting that interpretation could have significantly expanded the scope of coverage for the abuse claims, which could have extended to other claims as well.

The court ruled in favor of the insurers.

The most important part of the court’s opinion focused on the policies’ requirement that any bodily injury must “occur” during the policy period. The court observed that “occur” was not defined in the policies and it therefore looked to the ordinary dictionary definition for meaning. “Occur,” the court stated, generally means to “appear,” “happen,” or “to come into existence.”³ The court then reasoned:

An injury could only appear, happen, or come into existence at a single point in time. Therefore, the fact that the mental anguish continued in subsequent years does not mean the injury “comes into existence” in each subsequent policy period.⁴

Thus, the court nailed down the onset of the emotional distress as the sole point at which coverage could be triggered. The court went on to reject the concept of a continuous-trigger theory applying to abuse claims, which is essentially what the school was arguing.⁵ And as a practical matter, the court concluded that the school’s interpretation of coverage was overly broad.

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.⁶

All in all, this is a solid ruling from the Court of Appeals in Georgia. Sexual abuse victims unquestionably deserve compensation for their injuries, however that imperative does not justify expanding coverage beyond an insurance policy’s term. It is reassuring to see the court uphold those contractual limits.

Endnotes

1. The cases are: A25A1664, Philadelphia Indemnity Insurance Company v. Eubanks et al., A25A1665, Continental Casualty Company v. Eubanks et al., A25A1666, The North River Insurance Company v. Eubanks et al., A25A1668, Zurich American Insurance Company v. Eubanks et al., A25A1669, Zurich American Insurance Company et al. v. Eubanks et al.
2. The policies at issue defined the term “bodily injury” to include conditions like “emotional distress or anguish” or “mental anguish [or] mental injury,” but only if those conditions result from a preceding “bodily injury.” The policies did not specifically say that the preceding bodily injury had to take place within the policy period.
3. See Opinion at 16, C. Rigall, “Insurers Off the Hook for Ga. School’s $345M Sex Abuse Deal,” Law360, March 6, 2026, https://www.law360.com/articles/2450118/insurers-off-the-hook-for-ga-school-s-345m-sex-abuse-deal (citing Merriam-Webster Dictionary (last accessed 1/8/26)).
4. Id. (citing numerous cases from other jurisdictions).
5. Id. at 20-21, fn. 20.
6. Id. at 22. I made a similar observation in my article.

Do Commercial General Liability Policies Cover Mental Anguish From Sexual Abuse?

November 5, 2025

Darlington School is a small private boarding school in Rome, Georgia, about one hour northwest of Atlanta. Its website boasts that it will prepare student for a world they will be changing, with “wisdom, service, and honor.”¹ But the school allegedly has a dark history as well. At least 20 of its alumni have alleged that they were sexually abused by a teacher, Roger Stifflemire, when they were students in the 1970s and 1980s. There were other predators as well.²

In 2021, this group of 20 plaintiffs settled lawsuits alleging sexual abuse claims against Darlington School. Those settlements, now the subject of an insurance coverage case in Georgia, are worth insurers’ attention.³

The 20 plaintiffs claimed the school had received multiple complaints about inappropriate conduct by Stifflemire and others yet did nothing to protect the students upon whom the alleged predators continued to prey. In fact, according to reports, Stifflemire remained on Darlington’s faculty for another 15 years and then went on to teach 11  more years elsewhere.⁴ Stifflemire, also a defendant in the litigation, is still alive and has denied the allegations.⁵

Darlington and Stifflemire tendered the lawsuits to a group of insurers, most of which issued policies that covered periods long after the abuse was alleged to have taken place. Not surprisingly, those insurers denied coverage, asserting numerous coverage defenses. They did not file declaratory judgment actions, however, to protect themselves from being set up for future liability by the plaintiffs and their own policyholders.

The plaintiffs settled their lawsuits in exchange for Darlington and Stifflemire’s assignment of all rights under their insurance policies. Reportedly, Darlington contributed $6 million as additional consideration for its full release.⁶ Stifflemire, allegedly the main perpetrator of the abuse, contributed nothing⁷ but stipulated to a consent judgment against him in the amount of $345 million, which happened to be the total listed policy limits.⁸ The plaintiffs then filed individual lawsuits in Georgia state court against the seven insurance companies that issued the policies, where the cases were consolidated for proceedings against the insurers.

Last month, the insurers made their case to the Georgia Court of Appeals as to why they should not have to pay the $345 million that the plaintiffs are now seeking to collect.⁹ The parties argued a number of issues before the court, including whether the consent judgment should be rejected as collusive because there were no facts presented to establish damages. The insurers argued that, when the only fact was that the amount of the judgment was equal to the total policy limits, the consent judgment should be seen as collusive on its face.

Coverage Issues

Also at issue was whether the policies were triggered solely by mental anguish experienced by the plaintiffs during the policy periods but resulting from the sexual abuse and resulting physical injuries that they experienced many years before. Again, most of the policies at issue covered periods long after the alleged abuse took place. They covered periods when the plaintiffs were no longer students, but rather were adults, still suffering emotionally from the abuse they claimed to have experienced.¹⁰

Typically, insurance coverage is provided for sexual abuse claims only when the sexual abuse itself took place within the policy period, thereby causing “bodily injury” sufficient to trigger the policy. Policies in later years, after the abuse concluded, are typically not triggered. This application distinguishes coverage for sexual abuse claims from traditional long-tail claims like asbestos, where courts developed theories of “continuing injury” to trigger multiple years of coverage.

All the Darlington policies at issue defined term “bodily injury” to include conditions like “emotional distress or anguish,” or “mental anguish [or] mental injury,” as long as those conditions result from a preceding “bodily injury.” As one judge observed, the policies did not specifically say that the preceding bodily injury itself had to also take place within the policy period. Thus, the plaintiffs argued that their “mental anguish,” caused by their abuse decades earlier, fit neatly into the policies’ definitions of “bodily injury” and was therefore sufficient, by itself, to trigger coverage.

It was difficult to read the panel and predict an outcome in this case. However, if the court holds there is in fact coverage based on mental anguish taking place within the policy period, one fear is that it might open coverage under Commercial General Liability (CGL) policies – not only for sexual abuse claims but for potentially any other type of bodily injury claim as well.

Would it make sense for a plaintiff injured in an auto accident to have access not only to the full policy limit for the policy on the risk when she was injured, but also to additional policy limits if she claimed to have suffered “mental anguish” resulting from the accident in the years that followed? An adverse ruling from the Georgia Court of Appeals might start us down that slippery slope.