By Dietrich Knauth

(Reuters) -U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily halted the Boy Scouts of America’s $2.46 billion settlement of decades of sex abuse claims, which is being appealed by a group of 144 abuse claimants.

Alito’s brief order freezing the settlement gives the court more time to decide a Feb. 9 request by the abuse claimants to block the settlement from moving forward. They contend that the deal unlawfully stops them from pursuing lawsuits against organizations that are not bankrupt, such as churches that ran scouting programs, local Boy Scouts councils and insurers that provided coverage to the Boy Scouts organization.

The Supreme Court already is considering whether U.S. bankruptcy courts are allowed to wipe away legal claims against non-bankrupt people and organizations in an appeal of OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma’s bankruptcy.

In that case, the court will decide whether the company’s owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, can receive immunity in exchange for paying up to $6 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits over the company’s allegedly misleading marketing of its powerful pain medication.

The settlement involves more than 80,000 men who have said they were abused as children by troop leaders while in the Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts of America (BSA) had urged the Supreme Court on Thursday not to stop the settlement from moving forward, saying that a delay could “throw the Scouting program into chaos” and “potentially destroy BSA’s ability to carry out its 114-year-old charitable mission.”

The Boy Scouts organization argued that its case is “starkly different” from the Purdue settlement, which never went into effect. The Boy Scouts organization, in contrast, emerged from bankruptcy nearly a year ago, and it has already paid more than $7 million to nearly 3,000 survivors of sexual abuse.

The abuse claimants appealing the settlement had argued that an immediate halt was necessary due to a Friday deadline for claimants to decide whether to opt into a more thorough review of their sex abuse claims. People who chose that option would have to pay $10,000 up front, but they could be eligible for a higher payout than a default formula for evaluating claims under the settlement.

The trustee in charge of administering the Boy Scouts settlement, retired bankruptcy judge Barbara Houser, said on Thursday that the claimants who filed the appeal should have acted sooner to challenge the deadline, rather than citing the deadline as a reason to stop the entire settlement in its tracks.

The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020 after several U.S. states enacted laws allowing accusers to sue over decades-old abuse allegations. The organization ultimately reached a settlement, approved in court in September 2022, that would pay between $3,500 and $2.7 million to abuse victims.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung and Dietrich Knauth; Editing by Will Dunham and Chizu Nomiyama)