Regina Darlene Hunter, Plaintiff-Appellant v. Ed Brown, Jr., Defendant-Appellee

Summary

The Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed summary judgment dismissing a childhood sexual abuse action as time-barred. Applying the settled discovery-rule framework, the court held that the plaintiff, who reported the abuse to her caseworker, the perpetrator's wife, and the district attorney general before her June 1982 abortion, knew of her injury and the wrongdoer at the latest by that abortion, so her claim accrued in 1982 and the repressed-memory theory did not delay accrual. Minority tolling under Tenn. Code Ann. § 28-1-106 extended the one-year limitations period only to one year past her eighteenth birthday, rendering her July 15, 1993 filing untimely. The court expressly reserved for another day whether the repressed-memory theory may apply in sexual abuse cases.