The state of Pennsylvania has been rocked in recent times by sex abuse scandals in which the powerful are accused of having exploited the vulnerable.

Catholic priests have been found to have preyed on children. Penn State University blighted by the vile proclivities of the sports coach Jerry Sandusky against young boys. Bill Cosby facing criminal charges in the state for an alleged sexual assault of Andrea Constand – who worked at his Pennsylvania alma mater, Temple University.

Now a lawyer who has played a key role in each of these cases has quietly emerged as a leading official in the state, to the dismay of victims’ advocates.

“He has taken repeated positions that are against the interests of victims, and he has done it knowing full well that it would be interpreted that way,” said Marci Hamilton, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has represented one of Sandusky’s victims and testified on proposed clergy sex abuse reforms.

Bruce L Castor Jr isn’t the attorney general of Pennsylvania, but he’s the closest thing to it right now.

Castor, first deputy attorney general, has been running the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office over the past few months, while attorney general Kathleen Kane faces a perjury trial and has had her law license suspended.

Castor is best known for declining to prosecute Bill Cosby a decade ago in the Constand case when he was the district attorney in that county. He lost an election battle for Montgomery County district attorney last year, in a race that centered on his handling of the Cosby case. After the Democrat Kevin Steele took office, he promptly prosecuted Cosby.



But in April, Kane, an elected Democrat, selected Castor, a Republican, to run her office, unelected, while she was professionally impotent.

What followed were a series of other decisions that raised the ire of advocates.

In April he recommended against appealing the dismissal of charges against former Penn State leaders accused of covering up Sandusky’s sex abuse scandal. The case promised not only to hold the state’s largest university, based in State College, to account over the scandal but also to reveal, perhaps definitively, what Sandusky’s legendary late boss, Joe Paterno, knew. But the case, which has dragged on interminably, is now on the verge of collapse.

In June, Castor testified against a state reform proposal to help past victims of Catholic priests sue the pedophiles and the church. He claimed the proposal was unconstitutional, dealing a sharp blow that helped defeat the reform bill.

Hamilton, a constitutional law professor at the University of Pennsylvania who testified in favor of the bill, described as particularly “jarring” Castor’s stance against the legislation, which had been recommended in a statewide grand jury report presented with fanfare by Kane in March.

The grand jury report detailed monstrous abuse and coverups in the Altoona-Johnstown diocese and ongoing investigations there and in other dioceses. It argued that time limits for lawsuits should be abolished or suspended to allow a window for victims silenced for decades.

Kane herself had told senators: “I am begging you to pass that bill immediately.”

In response to a request for comment, a spokesman for Castor, Jeffrey A Johnson, said: “Solicitor general Castor makes legal decisions based on the law and the evidence, whether those decisions are popular are not.”

“[Castor] gives opinions on what the law is, not what he wants it to be, and he applies those opinions to his decisions, whether he likes the outcome or not,” he added.

But victims’ advocates are outraged.

Bill Cosby departs the Montgomery County courthouse after a hearing on 7 July 2016, in Norristown, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Dominick Reuter/AFP/Getty Images

“I’m very concerned with the decisions that he has made thus far,” said Maureen Cislo, founder of Justice4PAkids, a campaign group against child sexual abuse.

“When you look at the Sandusky situation, the scandals in the archdioceses and now Bill Cosby, you would think that with everything our state has been through we would want to come out of that as top dog in the country for taking strong action to protect victims. That’s not what I’m seeing,” she added.

“It’s never a coincidence when a public official makes repeated decisions against sexual assault victims. To chose three times in a row, when the public is watching closely, it’s ensuring that survivors stay in their place,” Hamilton said.

Earlier this year, Castor’s handling of the Cosby case threatened to derail the prosecution again, when Cosby’s lawyers moved to dismiss criminal charges based on the claim that Castor had promised in 2005 to shield Cosby from future prosecution relating to Constand if he agreed to testify in the civil case. The judge rejected the motion, and the trial is expected to go forward.

Meanwhile, Castor is now being sued by Constand for allegedly attacking her credibility in statements to the media about her case.

Dolores Troiani, Andrea Constand’s long-time lawyer, lambasted Castor not just for his original decision not to prosecute, but also for failing to inform Constand of that decision at the time.

“We were notified by the press. It was totally inappropriate, obviously we had an issue with the way he treated Andrea,” she said.



If Kane is convicted in the perjury trial that starts 8 August, Castor will remain effectively in charge for the rest of the year.

“Castor is basically an unelected attorney general. It’s preposterous,” said Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at Pittsburgh’s Duquesne University, who added that he thought Kane was at grave risk of being convicted.

He said he was flabbergasted at the spectacle of Kane, a rare female Democrat in that post and a “greatly admired” rising star once tipped as a potential state governor, plunging from grace. And, on the way down, substituting Castor, a Republican with Cosby baggage, to run her office.

But he cautioned against interpreting Castor’s legal moves as a pattern of bias against rape victims.

“The law protects everyone and often the way it’s designed it ends up looking to the public as if it insufficiently protects the innocent. There’s no easy answer to whether he was insensitive to the needs of victims,” he said.

He added that a request to the state supreme court to review the decision in the Sandusky coverup case would likely have been rebuffed. But if Castor had made a point of trying, it would at least have sent a positive signal to victims. “That case is a catastrophe,” he said.

Overall, Ledewitz said, it’s been a tough time for the reputation of Pennsylvania – especially with scandals dragging out for decades in an atmosphere of denial. But the underlying problems were not unique to the state.

“You’re talking about wider issues of victims being brushed off with callousness and a public that was not interested in hearing about egregious abuse and hush-ups,” he said. “We are dealing with the fallout from these scandals here but the value of so much coming to light now is that it shows the progress that has been made – and the further progress we still need.”