Titusville Sexual Abuse Lawyer

The events that bring people to this page may be weeks old or decades old. Many people arrive having told nobody at all. Others told one person years ago and left it there. They ask practical questions. Does filing a claim make the story public? Has too much time passed? Do therapy records stay private? All three have better answers than most people expect. We represent survivors bringing civil claims, and we do not defend people accused of sex offenses.

Start with what you control, because everything below reads differently once you know. Privacy, the help you can get tonight without hiring anyone, and the fee come next. The deadlines, the records rules and the statute citations sit further down.

Nothing Happens Until You Decide It Should

You can read everything here, call us, ask every question you have, and stop there. We file nothing with your name on it, and we agree to nothing, until you’ve decided it should happen.

A civil abuse case holds more choices than it looks like from the outside, and nearly every choice is yours. Whether to file at all, whether your name appears, who you bring a claim against, and when you stop are all decisions you make rather than decisions a lawyer makes for you.

Reading what follows commits you to nothing. Plenty of people who call us never file, and they still finish the conversation knowing where they stand.

Who Would Find Out if You Filed a Claim

Most survivors do not start with money or deadlines. They start with who would find out. Most of the protection here is automatic. A judge decides the one piece that is not automatic at the start of a case, before any detail of your account reaches a public file.

Your name is already protected in the police file

Florida’s public records law hides information that identifies the victim of a sexual offense. The protection applies while a law enforcement agency holds the file.¹ A records request from a stranger, an employer or a reporter does not come back with your name. You do not have to apply for it, and the protection covers a report made years ago as much as one made tomorrow.

Printing your name is a crime, not a courtesy

Printing or broadcasting information that identifies the victim of a sexual offense is a crime in Florida, a second-degree misdemeanor.² That rule is why news reports on these cases name the institution and the accused, and not the person who was harmed.

The court file is public, and the name on it is decided at the start

A lawsuit is a different file with different rules. The law starts every civil court file open to the public. No Florida statute automatically seals a civil abuse case, and none gives you a substitute name just for asking. One statute does reach across: it lets the state designate a sexual offence victim by pseudonym “in all court records and records of court proceedings, both civil and criminal.”³ That is a lever your lawyer can pull where there has been a criminal case. It is not automatic, so in a civil suit you still ask the court for anonymity.

Your lawyer asks the court at the outset to let the case go forward under a substitute name, usually Jane Doe. The judge rules on that request, and courts often grant it in abuse cases. Lawyers make that request routinely, and the judge decides it before the case exposes anything.

Put in order, the decisions sit on your side of the table. You decide whether to file a case, and nothing becomes public unless you do. The judge settles the name question at the start, before your account enters the record. The defense learns who you are through the case itself, under rules that limit what it can do with what it receives. You can know who could ever learn your name, and in what order, before you make a single call.

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Help You Can Get in Titusville Tonight, Without Hiring Anyone

Survivors need things a lawsuit cannot give, and Titusville keeps more of them close by than most people realize. The Women’s Center of Brevard sits at 400 Julia Street in Titusville. Its Sexual Assault Victim Services line answers twenty-four hours a day at (321) 784-4357. The counselors and trained volunteers on that line are the people whose conversations carry the privilege described above.⁸ The call is free, it is confidential, and it commits you to nothing.

If the events are recent, a forensic medical exam preserves evidence that nothing else can. Many people believe the exam costs money, and that having one commits them to a police report. Neither belief is true. Florida’s crime victim compensation program pays for the exam. It pays whether or not the victim ever takes part in the criminal justice system or cooperates with law enforcement.¹¹ The same program is the route to help with the treatment costs that follow.¹¹ The exam preserves the evidence either way, and every decision about what to do with it stays yours.

The State Attorney’s office runs a victim services unit here in Titusville, at 400 South Street, reachable at (321) 617-7510. It is there for anyone whose situation touches the criminal side, whether or not charges have ever been filed. A duty runs in the other direction here, and it applies to everyone, survivors included. If a child is being abused right now, Florida law requires an immediate report, and failing to report is itself a felony.¹² Reporting is the only obligation on this page.

None of the help above requires hiring anyone, and talking to a lawyer costs nothing either. Civil abuse cases run on a contingency fee. The fee comes out of any recovery, and you pay nothing otherwise.

No Fee Unless We Recover, and Nothing to Pay Up Front

Andrew Pickett Law works on a contingency fee only. We take a percentage of whatever we recover for you, and we charge no fee at all if we recover nothing. You’ll never write us a check to get started, and you’ll never see an hourly bill. The first conversation costs nothing whether a case follows or not.

Florida Bar rules cap a contingency percentage on a sliding scale, so no firm sets its own ceiling. Asking any firm for its exact numbers before you sign is a normal question, and it gets a plain answer here. We back the Bar’s cap with a commitment of our own. We work your case to its maximum value, and you’re out of pocket for nothing while the case runs.

Case costs are separate from the fee, and both belong in writing. Filing fees, records, expert reports and transcripts are advanced by the firm and repaid out of any recovery. Ask any firm you talk to, including us, what happens to those costs if the case is lost. Firms answer that differently, so put the answer in the fee agreement before you sign. The victim compensation described above runs on its own track, with or without a lawsuit.¹¹ Counselling and medical care do not wait on any of this.

Where the money would come from gets mapped early in a case against an institution. Insurance policies covering schools, churches and businesses often limit or exclude abuse claims. The real sources of payment shape strategy from the start. A request that a jury punish the institution, rather than only pay you back, is called punitive damages. Florida does not let that request be filed at all until evidence for it is shown to the judge first.¹⁶ A hospital that treated you can also hold a claim against part of any recovery under a Brevard ordinance.¹⁷ We cover that hospital rule and the punitive damages rules in full on the Titusville page.

Nothing Is Filed in Your Name Until You Say So

Andrew spent years as a prosecutor in the Eighteenth Judicial Circuit before he represented injured people, and Brevard judges hear civil abuse cases in the same circuit. Civil abuse claims run alongside police files, criminal dockets and victim services offices. A lawyer who has worked inside a courthouse knows which office keeps a police file, which office keeps a docket, and how a criminal timeline shapes a civil claim. He trained at the Trial Lawyers College, and he tries cases to verdict. Institutions and their insurers price a jury record into a file when they decide what to offer.

Clients tell us the same thing in their reviews: they always knew what was happening. On a civil abuse case that practice matters more than anywhere else, and it becomes a commitment. We file nothing with your name on it, and we agree to nothing, before you’ve decided it should happen.

You Decide How Much to Say on a First Call

A first call is a conversation, not a commitment. You tell us as much or as little as you want, and we’ll tell you what the law allows in your situation and what a case would actually involve.

You don’t have to have told anybody before now. You don’t need an arrest, a charge or a conviction, and you don’t need a police report.

The call costs nothing whether a case follows or not. If you’d rather talk to somebody who isn’t a lawyer first, we’ll point you to the Women’s Center of Brevard instead.

Is It Too Late to Bring a Claim

Many survivors still have time, including some whose events are decades old. Florida’s deadlines for abuse claims come in layers rather than as one number. Which layer applies turns on how old you were, when the events happened, and who the claim would be against. The layers run below from longest to shortest.

Abuse of a child under 16 carries no filing deadline at all

The deepest layer covers the most serious acts against a child under 16. Florida statutes group those acts under the term sexual battery. A civil action founded on sexual battery of a victim under 16 may be brought at any time.⁴ No deadline applies, however long ago it happened. The age that counts is your age at the time, not your age now. Some websites say this rule covers anyone under 18. Florida has no such rule.

A claim that was already dead in 2010 did not come back to life

The open-ended rule has a boundary underneath it, and for older events it is the first thing a lawyer checks. The rule did not revive claims that had already expired. An action that was time-barred on or before July 1, 2010 under the deadlines then in force stayed barred.⁴ For events reaching back into the 1990s and earlier, that one date decides everything. If your claim was still alive on that date, the open-ended rule applies to it. Dates answer that question, and guesswork does not.

If you connected the harm to the abuse only later, that date can count

Abuse claims outside the under-16 rule get a different measure, built for people who waited. The deadline runs from the latest of several possible dates rather than the earliest.⁵ The latest date can be the point when a survivor first connects the injury being lived with to the abuse that caused it. Published summaries regularly quote a single number and drop the whichever-comes-later structure. That dropped piece is the part of the rule written for the person reading this section.

Being a child at the time pauses a deadline less than people assume. The rule that stops the clock for a minor has a ceiling of its own. It requires the action to be brought within seven years after the act.⁶ Where a claim stays open for decades, the under-16 rule holds it open, not childhood by itself.

Two years to sue the institution, not the four you may have read

The claim against an institution runs on the shortest clock on this page, and it is the number most published material gets wrong. A case against the school, church, employer, camp or business whose failures allowed the abuse is usually a negligence case. That case rests on careless hiring, careless supervision or careless security rather than on the abuser’s intent. Florida’s deadline for a negligence claim is two years, effective March 24, 2023.⁷ The two-year clock is not retroactive, so events before that date run under the rules in force when they happened. Many websites still say four years. Anyone planning around four years for an institutional claim is counting on two years that no longer exist.

Which layer is yours is arithmetic on a handful of dates rather than a judgment call. A lawyer settles it in one conversation, from your age at the time, the date of the events, the date you first connected the harm to them, and who the defendant would be. That conversation files nothing, notifies nobody and costs nothing. Survivors who spent years assuming they were out of time are sometimes wrong in the good direction.

What Happens to Your Therapy Records

Survivors routinely hear that therapy records always stay private in a civil case. That is half true, and the half left out is the half that matters once a lawsuit starts. Both halves belong here, because the choice between them is one you make with your lawyer.

What you tell a rape crisis counselor stays out of the case

Florida law treats what you tell a sexual assault counselor at a certified rape crisis center as privileged. The protection reaches trained volunteers who have finished thirty hours of training.⁸ Privileged means the other side cannot force the conversation into the case. They cannot question you about it under oath or read it to a jury. It stays yours.

A friend, a coworker or a group chat carries no privilege at all, and anything said there can be asked about later. If you are deciding whom to talk to this week, the counselor is the protected conversation.

Claiming mental harm can open other treatment records

The other half opens only if a lawsuit asks to be paid for mental and emotional harm. A claim like that puts your mental health in issue, so filing it can open the protection on treatment records that bear on that harm. The defense can also ask the court to order an examination by a mental health expert of its choosing.⁹

Florida has a rule limiting questions about a victim’s own history, often called the rape shield. That rule lives in the criminal courts and has no civil version.¹⁰ Anyone who promises that therapy records always stay sealed in a civil case is describing the criminal system. That is not the system a lawsuit happens in.

Where records do open, you know in advance. You and your lawyer settle which injuries the lawsuit claims before you file anything, and that choice controls what opens. Requests for records come through formal channels, and your lawyer sees each one first and can contest it piece by piece. The trade is real, it has limits, and nobody makes it for you.

You Do Not Need an Arrest or a Charge to Bring a Civil Case

Survivors most often skip calling a civil lawyer because the police never charged anyone. That has never been the rule. You do not need an arrest, a charge or a conviction to bring a civil abuse case, and an acquittal does not end one. Civil courts ask a different question under a different standard. A jury asks whether the greater weight of the evidence shows what happened, not whether anyone proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.

The School, Church or Business May Be the One That Pays

The person who committed the abuse rarely has anything a judgment could collect. Recovery, where it exists, usually comes from the institution whose choices made the abuse possible. Florida law gives those choices names, and each name describes a different failure.

Building the claim means proving what the institution itself did, or failed to do. That proof is the work the two-year deadline described above is running against.

A jury can put fault on the abuser, and that lowers what the business pays

In 2023 Florida changed how juries split the blame in negligent security cases. It needs stating exactly, because it works against what most people expect. Florida juries normally do not put a share of the blame on a person who acted on purpose. For these cases the law now says the opposite. Notwithstanding that usual rule, in a case brought by someone lawfully on the property the jury must consider the fault of all persons who contributed to the injury. That reaches the person who committed the assault, because the statute switches off the exception that would otherwise keep an intentional wrongdoer out of the apportionment.¹³ Every percentage point of fault the jury places on the attacker lowers what the hotel, apartment complex or business pays. We therefore build a negligent security case from the first interview with that math in view. The institution’s own failures have to be proved deeply enough that its share survives the split.

A college that knew and never reported faces a $1,000,000 fine

Colleges and universities carry a risk most survivors have never heard of. Where a Florida college, state university or independent postsecondary school is told about known or suspected child abuse on its property and its administrators knowingly and willfully fail to report it, the institution faces a fine of one million dollars for each failure. The same fine applies where its own campus police agency fails to report.¹² In a K-12 school the fine does not apply, but the individual duty does: any person who knowingly and willfully fails to report commits a third-degree felony.¹² Either way, a reporting failure is powerful leverage in the civil case.

Some defendants change the rules of the claim itself

You can sue a public school or another government body only under special conditions. The rules include limits on damages, plus a written notice that has to reach the right agencies before suit. A notice sent to the wrong office counts as no notice at all.¹⁴ The government group is wider here than people expect. Parrish Medical Center is run by a public hospital district, so it sits inside that group.¹⁴ We cover the government rules on the Titusville page.

A cruise that sailed from Port Canaveral is different again. The ticket contract can lawfully cut the deadline to as little as one year. Federal law gives a survivor the right to the ship’s surveillance video of the assault.¹⁵ We also map the cruise deadlines on the Titusville personal injury page.

Paperwork You Signed Years Ago May Not Stop You

Job paperwork, gym and spa memberships, school enrollment forms and old settlements often carry one of two promises. The first is to take any dispute to a private decision-maker instead of a court, an arrangement called arbitration. The second is to stay silent about what happened, usually called a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA. Survivors often assume a years-old signature settled the matter. For sexual assault and sexual harassment claims, federal and state law have since taken most of the force out of both promises.

The arbitration promise is now yours to escape. A federal law covers claims arising on or after March 3, 2022. Under it, a clause signed before the dispute cannot be enforced against a sexual assault or harassment claim.¹⁸ The survivor can pick court instead. The same choice defeats clauses that gave up the right to join claims with other people. A judge decides whether the clause holds, not the arbitrator the clause names. The election belongs to the survivor alone, and the institution that wrote the clause does not get a vote.

The silence promise fares no better. The Speak Out Act is the companion federal law. It makes nondisclosure clauses signed before a dispute arose unenforceable in sexual assault and harassment disputes.¹⁹ Florida adds a wall of its own. A state statute voids any agreement whose effect is to conceal a public hazard, and it defines a public hazard to include a person.²⁰ An agreement written to keep an abuser’s conduct secret is the kind of agreement that statute exists to unwind.

The arbitration and NDA laws do not make old paperwork irrelevant, and they do not ask you to read it alone. Each one makes the paperwork reviewable. If you still have the documents, bringing them to a first conversation turns a years-old assumption into a current answer. If you do not have them, the institution does, and copies become obtainable once a case begins.

What a Case Asks of You, and What You Control

A civil claim differs from the criminal process in the way that matters most to many survivors. The decisions belong to you. In a criminal case the State decides whether to file charges, bargain them down or drop them, and the survivor is a witness in someone else’s case. In a civil case you decide whether to file, and whether to ask for the Jane Doe name described above. You also decide whether to accept a settlement and whether to stop. Those are choices you make with your lawyer, not news you receive.

A civil case asks things of you in return, from start to finish. The defense is entitled to question you under oath before trial, in a conference room rather than a courtroom. That session is called a deposition, and your lawyer sits beside you and prepares you for it in advance. Documents move in supervised categories, and the defense can ask for your social media. If you claim psychological injury, a judge can order the defense examination described above.⁹ A contested case runs in years rather than months. Each demand arrives on a schedule, with notice, and under rules your lawyer can hold the other side to. That is a different thing from the ambush people fear.

When the abuser faces criminal charges at the same time, expect his silence rather than his testimony. A person with charges pending will almost always refuse to answer questions in a civil case, relying on the right against self-incrimination. The court may pause the civil case until the criminal one ends, and that order is called a stay. The pause is common and temporary, and it changes the timing of a case rather than its merits.

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Other Case Types We Handle

• Car Accident
• Truck Accident
• Motorcycle Accident
• Uber & Lyft Accident
• Pedestrian Accident
• Bicycle Accident
• Scooter Accident
• Golf Cart Accident
• Boating Accident
• Slip and Fall
• Premises Liability
• Airbnb and Vacation Rental
• Dog Bite
• Workers’ Compensation
• Wrongful Death

Areas and Zip Codes Served From Our Titusville Office

• Titusville — 32780 and 32796
• Mims and Scottsmoor — 32754
• North Brevard County