(Saint Paul, MN) – After years of sounding the alarm on Circle R Ranch, survivors of sexual abuse at the Minnesota youth summer camp and their advocates are relieved the camp was forced to cancel its entire 2024 season. The cancellation, which Circle R Ranch announced on its Facebook page in June, comes after two courageous survivors filed public lawsuits against the camp for allowing convicted sex offender, Scott Francis Fortier, to prey on them and numerous other girls at the camp. Following the public pressure and scrutiny put on Circle R Ranch by these survivors through their lawsuits, Todd County refused to grant the camp a license to operate this year. Circle R Ranch claimed in its Facebook statement that Todd County’s refusal to grant a license is the result of being “held to 2024 standards,” and facing scrutiny from the County unlike it ever has before.

Attorney Jeff Anderson, who represented both survivors in their lawsuits against Circle R Ranch, says the public exposure of the dangerous camp was the result of years of persistence and perseverance. “If not for the courage of these survivors and their determination to expose the hazard Circle R Ranch posed to children, there is no doubt in my mind that Scott Fortier’s decades of abuse and exploitation would still be happening today, and that this camp would continue to put kids in very real danger,” Anderson said. “Parents can rest easier because Circle R Ranch is not operating. The peril the camp posed has perished and kids are safer.”

The timeline of Fortier’s trail of abuse and exploitation of teenagers he had complete access to at Circle R Ranch is a long one that began decades ago.

1990’s – 2005 – Scott Fortier Establishes himself as a Fixture at Circle R Ranch, and uses his Status at the Camp to Sexually Abuse and Exploit Underage Girls There

 Scott Fortier first attended Circle R Ranch in the 1980s as a camper and eventually worked there as a junior counselor and counselor beginning in the 1990s. During his decades at the camp, Fortier used his position and status at the camp to access, groom, and sexually assault and rape numerous girls.

As early as 2005, two camp counselors reported to Circle R Ranch’s owner Jack McCoy that Fortier sexually abused them when they were minors, and that they believed he was using the camp to meet and sexually abuse other minor girls, including a 15-year-old girl he met there. The counselors told McCoy that Fortier bragged that a lawyer told him he could have sex with minors he met at Circle R Ranch as long as they were counselors and not campers. A concerned father also called the camp that year and told McCoy he was concerned Fortier was using Circle R Ranch as a “hunting ground” for underage girls. McCoy fired Fortier after the reports and banned him from Circle R Ranch property.

But by the time he was fired in 2005, Fortier was not only a predator, but had become a larger-than-life personality at Circle R Ranch. He implemented and ran the camp’s evening entertainment activities. These activities, including dance nights and campouts, drew many kids back year after year. Fortier was a singer who played country hits on his guitar around the fire, and who hosted and DJ’ed the weekly barn dance. Fortier the child predator created a junior-high school-like social world at the camp, in which he was the center, deciding who was in, and who was out of the coveted cool group. Teenagers flocked to Fortier and sought his approval, and he knew it. As one former counselor said, Circle R Ranch was really, “Circle R Ranch, starring Scott Fortier.”

2008 – 2016 – Circle R Ranch Welcomes Scott Fortier Back and Gives him Free Reign to Resume his Predatory Ways

Without Fortier at the helm after 2005, enrollment at Circle R Ranch began to fall and the camp began to lose money. So, in 2008 Jack McCoy decided to let the known predator come back. From then on, Fortier worked at the camp every summer until 2016, running evening activities, training staff, interviewing prospective employees, and deciding which campers to hire as counselors.

Despite the reports that Fortier had sexually abused counselors, Circle R Ranch even allowed him to draft its policies on sexual abuse and mandatory reporting of child abuse. Fortier trained incoming and current counselors on those policies. Some former staff members and survivors of Fortier have said he taught them it was legal for adults to have sex with minors if the girls were camp counselors at Circle R Ranch, and the adult was not a paid employee of the camp. Despite this, and despite the explicit warnings in 2005 that Fortier was telling people at the camp he could have sex with minors if he wasn’t a paid employee, Circle R Ranch never put Fortier on its official payroll again after it brought him back in 2008. This scheme permitted Fortier to prey on as many teenage girls he wanted to without fear that anyone at the camp would report him to authorities.

With Fortier back, enrollment at Circle R Ranch went back up. Getting Fortier’s infectious personality, charisma and cult-like following back at the camp, despite the obvious danger he posed to vulnerable girls, had done what the camp hoped it would. With more bunks filled, Circle R Ranch made more money. But this extra money in Circle R Ranch’s pockets came at an incredible cost to the teenage girls Fortier preyed on. The predator quickly resumed his old ways, recruiting campers to become counselors, establishing his social and work status at the camp, and using that status to exploit and sexually assault the children who looked up to him.

“This camp put its own profits and popularity above the safety of the children at its facilities,” said attorney Josh Peck, from Jeff Anderson & Associates. “Because Circle R Ranch was more concerned with filling bunks than protecting children, every child that came to Circle R Ranch and was entrusted to the camp’s care by parents for more than a decade was exposed to this sick and calculating predator.”

2017 – The First Calls Come in to Jeff Anderson & Associates and their Investigation into Circle R Ranch Begins

In 2017, Jeff Anderson, Josh Peck and the rest of the team at Jeff Anderson & Associates began to receive calls from girls and young women who attended Circle R Ranch over the years. The callers told similar stories of horrific sexual abuse and exploitation by long time Circle R Ranch counselor and employee, Scott Fortier. They told Anderson and Peck about Fortier’s status at the camp, how he wielded immense power and prestige in the eyes of the children there. They told that Fortier was given complete access to teenage girls at the camp with almost no oversight or supervision. The girls told Anderson’s team that Fortier had a “club” of minor girls known as “Scottie’s Hotties,” and that he demanded the girls allow him to photograph them topless. They told that for years Fortier sexually abused teen counselors at the camp, sometimes recording the assaults on his phone. He had even concocted a scheme in which he selected certain campers he wanted to prey upon, offered them positions as counselors, or counselors in training, and then sexually abused them – telling the girls it was not illegal because they were no longer campers.

All of this had been well-known to Fortier’s survivors and Circle R Ranch, but as with so many stories of sexual abuse, it was hidden and kept secret from parents and the public. Anderson says secrecy is a common theme in all of the cases he has worked on over four decades representing survivors of sexual abuse. “Survivors suffer in shame and silence, afraid to share their story with anyone,” he explains. “This allows abusers, and those who should be protecting kids from them, to get away with it for so long.” Knowing this, and hearing the harrowing stories the survivors who contacted the firm shared, his team started looking into the predator at Circle R Ranch.

“When we started to look into this and really dig into what these survivors were telling us,” said Peck, “we began to realize the sheer scale of what happened at this camp, and that even with Fortier being in prison, Circle R Ranch still posed a danger to kids because of the lax policies and complete disregard of its duty to ensure safety of children at the camp.”

Slowly, a frightening history of years of abuse and exploitation of minor girls by the predatory at Circle R Ranch began to be revealed.

2018 – Scott Fortier is Convicted of Sexually Abusing Circle R Ranch Camp Counselors and Sentenced to 25 Years in Federal Prison

By the time the first calls came into Jeff Anderson and Associates in 2017, some of the girls already reported the abuse to police, and Scott Fortier had been arrested. He was charged with numerous crimes stemming from his abuse and exploitation of minor girls at Circle R Ranch. After Fortier’s arrest, investigators discovered hundreds of sexually explicit images and videos of minors on his phone and other devices, including images of prepubescent girls engaged in sexual conduct. Fortier admitted at his trial that he collected sexually explicit photographs of girls from Circle R Ranch. He also testified that with regard to his sexual assault of girls from the camp, such behavior “was part of my world in all of the years that I had been involved with people from [Circle R Ranch] and the group of friends that I had and so it wasn’t – it never – it never came up as abnormal to me.”

In 2017 Fortier plead guilty to sexually abusing one former Circle R Ranch counselor in State Court and was convicted of producing and possessing child pornography the following year in Federal Court. Fortier was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Numerous former campers at Circle R Ranch provided statements at his sentencing hearing describing years of sexual assaults and rapes by the former camp counselor. After Fortier’s conviction, he was sentenced by Judge Patrick J. Schiltz in United States District Court on November 7, 2018. At the sentencing hearing, Judge Schiltz called Fortier “a wolf let loose in a field of sheep,” at Circle R Ranch.

Fortier went to prison, but his survivors knew that accountability did not stop there. “These incredibly courageous survivors who were able to make Fortier accountable knew that this camp was still dangerous,” Peck said. “They were adamant that more be done to hold this camp accountable for allowing Fortier to abuse them and so many others for so long, and asked us what could be done to recover for the harm they suffered, and try to stop this from happening in the future.”

Anderson says that given Fortier’s predatory ways, Circle R Ranch’s granting him continued and almost unlimited access to vulnerable young girls for so many years is terrifying. “Fortier was a predator and Circle R Ranch did nothing to stop him. In fact the camp provided him with free access to young girls away from home for decades,” Anderson said. “The managers at this camp turned a blind eye to the peril, and a blind eye to the safety of the kids at its camp.”

Even though Fortier was gone, Anderson, his firm, and the survivors who sought them out for help all knew something had to be done to protect kids from the peril Circle R Ranch posed.

2019 – 2024 – Persistence and Perseverance of Survivors and Advocates Pays Dividends in Child Protection

In June 2020, Jeff Anderson and Associates filed a lawsuit against Circle R Ranch on behalf of one of the minor counselors who was abused by Scott Fortier. Circle R Ranch attempted to have the case thrown out, arguing in Court papers that Scott Fortier could in fact have sex with minor girls he met at the camp legally as long as the girls were 16-years-old and he was not an employee. Circle R Ranch argued that the camp was not responsible for monitoring who Fortier met and had sex with at its camp. The Court denied Circle R Ranch’s motion in May of 2022, stating in its Order:

It appears that the Ranch recognized the risk Fortier posed when he was barred from coming back in 2005. The fact that he was invited back 3 years later is inexplicable.

The lawsuit settled shortly before trial in 2023. Anderson and Peck announced the settlement publicly, and released as much of the information they’d uncovered over three years fighting Circle R Ranch as they could without jeopardizing the privacy of survivors. A local investigative reporter from FOX 9 television ran an in-depth report on Circle R Ranch and Fortier’s years of abuse there, furthering the public awareness of the hazard. But the camp remained open for business, and the 2023 camp season was right around the corner.

In June of 2023, Anderson’s firm publicly filed a second lawsuit against Circle R Ranch on behalf of another survivor of Scott Fortier. Again, Circle R Ranch tried to get the case thrown out, arguing it was not legally responsible for what Scott Fortier did to children he met at its camp. And again, the Court refused to throw the case out.

June 2024 – Circle R Ranch Cancels the Entire Summer 2024 Season

On June 16, 2024, Circle R Ranch announced on its Facebook page that it was canceling the 2024 camp season. It said the reason for the cancellation was that Todd County would no longer continue the license to operate the camp had since 1978. Circle R Ranch stated that it was being “held to 2024 standards,” and that they were “under immense scrutiny in a way that the Ranch has not experienced from the county before.”

For Jeff Anderson & Associates, and for the survivors who were doing all they could to bring Circle R Ranch’s serious safety issues to light, a burden was lifted with the announcement. “Kids are safer because Circle R Ranch cannot operate under its same status quo,” Anderson said. “The peril that has persisted for so long, and that was ignored by those running this camp, has perished.”

It had been almost 20 years since those first brave counselors went to Jack McCoy and Circle R Ranch to warn that Scott Fortier was preying on young girls at the camp, hoping that by sharing their horror, other young girls would not endure the same things they suffered at the camp they loved. It had been eight years since two courageous survivors went to police to report what was done to them, and four years since the first lawsuit was filed publicly. The fight was long and difficult. But over two decades survivors and advocates persisted, pushed for change, reclaimed their power, and persevered.

“The courage, strength and resolve all of these survivors have shown throughout this long and painful journey is beyond believable,” Peck said. “It is a testament to each and every one of them that they continued to fight, to say enough is enough, to reclaim their own power, and to demand change to make kids safer at this camp.”