The state of Hawaiʻi says it’s bound by law to protect the confidentiality of anyone involved in the foster care system — names, histories, reports of abuse or anything else from their files. Even the names of foster parents, paid by taxpayers, must be kept secret.

That’s why the Attorney General’s Office says it’s trying to block Civil Beat from seeing documents in a civil lawsuit about a foster parent who a judge found had sexually and physically abused children in his care.

The lawsuit was filed against the foster parent and the state. And here’s the kicker: The state itself had included those supposedly verboten items, including names, histories and intimate details of maltreatment of one-time foster children, in its own publicly available filings in defending itself in the case. 

It all came about in the final weeks of reporting a four-part series that begins Tuesday about the foster dad who, according to a judge’s 2024 verdict, sexually and physically abused boys in his care in the 1990s and 2000s.

It wasn’t just any foster home. By the foster dad’s own reckoning, almost 60 boys lived with him at one time or another. He filled a desperate need for the state: a place to put boys, many of them troubled teenagers, no one else would take.

For years, the state held up this foster dad as a model, and discounted or failed to act on troubling reports when they surfaced. The 2019 lawsuit began to peel away the secrecy. Only then did the state denounce the man it had once celebrated. 

The case was a microcosm for the failures of the child welfare system in Hawaiʻi two decades ago and — as the series will show — to this day.

Series Begins Tuesday

All of that begins to unfold Tuesday when the first part of the series, “When No One Is Watching,” goes live. In the meantime, here’s the story behind the stories.

I’ve been covering child welfare in Hawaiʻi since 2019. Last year, I learned of a lawsuit settlement related to one case and I knew it was a story that needed to be told. 

As I embarked on reporting, I read a document that by now has been available for more than a year to any member of the public on eCourt Kokua, the state’s online court system.

The attorney for the plaintiff in this case, a former foster boy, had hired an expert witness to review his confidential case files, as well as those of his foster dad and other children in the household. This expert reviewed so many records that just the list of them runs to 17 single-spaced pages.

Journalists are trained to always check out other people’s statements by going to the source, so I wanted to see the original documents for myself. As the old newspaper saying goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” 

I might see things in these documents that the expert witness overlooked or didn’t find important, too. We have different priorities.

Why is the state so fastidious about keeping records from the public eye when a journalist seeks to expose its failures, yet so cavalier about revealing names and intimate details to defend itself in its own court filings?

The exhibits I wanted to see had been entered into evidence for the three-day trial in 2024. So, I was told by an attorney in the case, they should be part of the public file. But they were nowhere to be found, either on eCourt Kokua or in the paper files at the Circuit Court records room downtown.

After a few weeks of back-and-forth with court officials, Brooks Baehr, a spokesperson for the Judiciary, texted good news: A box containing all the exhibits had been located. They’d be uploaded to the online court system by Sept. 19, giving me plenty of time to read through them before publication.

Confidential Or Not?

That’s when things got weird.

Judge Kevin Morikone, who presided over the bench trial in 2024, became aware of the request via an email from Judiciary’s public affairs office, according to a deputy attorney general involved in the case.

Morikone, in turn, called a hearing of the parties in the case. The Circuit Court judge told them that he planned to make the exhibits public by the deadline the following day. 

But a couple of hours later, the deputy attorney general who represents the Department of Human Services got in touch with Morikone to say that the state planned to file a motion to seal them. A reminder here: This was a lawsuit filed against the state as well as the foster parent.

The next day, the same day I was supposed to get the records, Deputy Attorney General David Matsumiya filed that motion. 

Matsumiya argued that the records were confidential, and had only been produced for the purposes of the litigation. The exhibits were covered by several orders assuring they would remain private outside the courtroom.

The records involving foster children, foster parents, abuse reports and the like were so confidential, he wrote, that just redacting names would not solve the problem. 

Even then, “Many people, likely including the reporters currently seeking the information, will be able to determine who the people are and what role they played in the case,” he wrote. 

“Once the people’s identities are determined, then their most private and intimate struggles and trauma are now publicly available to read, dissect, and use against them.”

People named in the exhibits “are not parties to this action and are completely unaware that their personal, intimate, private family trauma is about to be made public.”

Only one problem: It already had.

Details Available For More Than A Year

Matsumiya himself disclosed that supposedly off-limits information in his written closing argument defending the state in 2024. By my count, he named six former foster children and another person who served as a foster parent.

And it’s not just their names. He details the accusations the plaintiff made against them, including vivid descriptions of sexual abuse. Two of the people he named said in depositions in the case that they were victims of older boys, who also are named. 

That document has been available for viewing by any member of the public since July 5, 2024.

Anyone who has spent any time with the public docket in this case, which I assume includes Matsumiya, would know that it’s also rife with the names of former foster children and intimate details about their lives. 

The judge’s decision, for instance, includes the names of nine former foster children and at least three foster parents, accompanied by details about their lives and incidents they allegedly were involved in. In the expert witness’s report, which contains 23 pages of analysis of the confidential case files, two names of foster children were blacked out in some spots but not all. 

In contrast to the Attorney General’s Office and the Judiciary, Civil Beat decided from the beginning not to reveal most of these names, following our policy not to name victims of sexual abuse without their consent. 

Others were found by the judge to have preyed on younger boys but none of them have been charged with a crime. Given the seriousness of the accusations, we thought it unfair to name them, either.

A hearing is set for Oct. 16 on whether the exhibits should be released. Our stories will already have been published by then, but we intend to fight the order on the grounds that the public has a right to know the facts of this case. 

The larger question is: Why is the state so fastidious about keeping records from the public eye when a journalist seeks to expose its failures, yet so cavalier about revealing names and intimate details to defend itself in its own court filings?

Read our series over the next four days and decide for yourself. 

Civil Beat’s investigation into foster care received support from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.