ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Lee Forbes always intended to keep what happened to him a secret.
"Decades," he said, when asked how long he stayed quiet about the abuse he incurred as a young Boy Scout.
"How do you sit and, you know, let the world know that you were a victim? It's not comfortable," Forbes explained.
WATCH BELOW: Survivors of Boy Scout abuse frustrated by low payouts, long delays
Forbes, who was raised by a single mom in California, started in the Scouts when he was just a child — first as a Cub Scout and then as a Boy Scout with the Explorer Program. That's when, he said, a young Scout leader, fresh out of the Navy, targeted him and sexually abused him.
"Somewhere between a year-and-a-half and two years. It was a very slow process. The pedophile modus operandi is it's very gradual, very subtle," Forbes said when asked how long the abuse lasted.
Forbes ended up quitting the organization that had been the center of his young life. Still, he kept his abuse secret from the world.
"The shame is insurmountable at that age. I really did feel like a lot of it was my fault, and I just felt a lot of fear and shame," he explained.
That shame would haunt him for the next 50 years.
"I was in and out of therapy, and I'm a recovering alcoholic," Forbes said about the impact the abuse had on his life.
Then, several years ago, after moving to Florida, Forbes heard a radio ad about a settlement fund for survivors who were sexually abused as Boy Scouts. He called his friend, Joseph Saunders, an attorney in St. Petersburg who has represented survivors of abuse in the Catholic Church.
"He took my case, and it's been five years this month; it's still going on," Forbes said, referring to the long road to justice. "It's really painful. You have to be vetted like, did it really happen to you, so you have to relive the stories. You have to name witnesses. It starts making you feel like you felt back then."
As part of his claim, a legal point system determined Forbes' abuse was valued at $1.6 million.
"I'll never see anything even close to that," he said.
He's right. To date, Forbes has received just a fraction of that amount — around $40,000.
The reason? There's not enough money in the Boy Scouts bankruptcy trust fund to pay all 82,000 survivors who have come forward. While the fund was estimated to reach up to $10 billion in assets, so far it's reached between $2.4-$2.5 billion.
As a result, survivors are receiving 4.7% of the value assigned to their individual abuse, according to settlement details. For Forbes, that will total about $75,000.
"It's laughable. I don't know how that could happen where you could get so little of it," he said.
His attorney said the bankruptcy process is largely to blame.
"There are ways that it could have been handled better, but in a bankruptcy, it's generally the recovery of creditors, which is what they [claimants] and it's pennies on the dollar," Saunders explained.
To date, just over $1.2 billion from the fund has been distributed to survivors. Saunders expects it will take at least another year or two for claimants — including Forbes — to receive the rest of his nearly 5% payout.
Meanwhile, the Boy Scouts of America is continuing to sell off assets and litigate with insurance companies to boost the amount in the trust fund, but there is no way of knowing how much that could yield or when.
"As a lawyer, I wish I could say the legal system was better at addressing situations like this, but with one of the biggest bankruptcies there's ever been and 80,000 claimants, it's been a very complicated long road, unfortunately," Saunders said.
For Forbes, he said his settlement has never been about the money.
"I would give up every penny of it if my abuser went to prison, every penny, without even thinking, but I'm not going to get that kind of closure," he said.
Instead, the closure he is expected to get, he's still waiting for.
"Five years and it's not resolved? You're just re-victimizing these 82,000 scouts," he said.
