Mark Blackowiak v. Richard Kemp

Mark Blackowiak v. Richard Kemp was a 1990's civil case which was appealed to the Supreme Court of Minnesota but dismissed as outside of the statute of limitations. Blackowiak claims to have been abused by Richard Kemp, his school counselor at Sheridan Junior High School in 1970 or 1971, when Blackowiak was 11. While the plaintiff could not remember the abuse for years, he hinted at it to his friend at the time and received concerned inquiries from his mother, events which corroborate his claims. According to Smith Law Firm documents, “the plaintiff told his friend Steven Mayfield to “watch out for” Kemp, with whom Mayfield had been seen, because the plaintiff did not want Mayfield to be abused.” Although Blackowiak was too ashamed to elaborate further, when his mother asked him if “Kemp was doing anything “wrong” to him,” he answered that Kemp was. Even in therapy Blackowiak could not speak about the incidents and did not want anyone to know. However, when he ran into Kemp in 1981, he “freaked out” when he saw that Kemp was accompanied by a young boy; he had assumed that “Kemp was sexually abusing the boy and… felt sorry for the boy because ‘that shouldn’t happen to little kids.’” After the encounter, he “insisted he did not think anymore about the abuse he had suffered until 1991 when a conversation with Mayfield caused him to realize that his problems with drugs and alcohol, crime and with personal relationships were all the result of Kemp’s abuse.” Though Blackowiak's case was not tried, facts entered during the appeals process still show a case of corrborated recovered memory.