Lanier, Jenkins Win Kellie Crabtree Award

Abuse Survivors and Their Attorneys Persisted To Help Win Justice For Themselves and Others

The Kellie Crabtree Award will go to Lisa Lanier and Robert O. Jenkins of Lanier Law Firm and their clients Dustin McKinney, George McKinney, and James Robert Tate. The award, which will be presented at Convention 2025 in Charlotte, is given to an attorney and clients in cases where the clients’ story and the attorneys’ representation has made a real difference in protecting people’s rights.  

After surviving years of sexual and physical abuse at the hands of their high school wrestling coach in the 1990s and early 2000s, Dustin McKinney, George McKinney and James Robert Tate brought claims against him and the Gaston County Board of Education in 2020. Represented by Lisa Lanier and partners at Lanier Law, Bobby Jenkins and Don Higley, the trio became the first plaintiffs to test the look-back window of the 2019 SAFE Child Act. They also became the very public face of the act itself. 

“They’re incredibly brave, especially Dustin,” Lanier said. “They had to suddenly have this very private matter become very public. Their names are out there. They ended up on national news outlets, and it’s certainly all over the state. I was just in awe of how brave they were. And they were just so severely abused.” 

The high school coach is serving a 34-year prison sentence based on criminal charges related to the plaintiffs’ claims, and was dismissed from the civil case, but the plaintiffs’ claimed his employer, Gaston County, knew or should have known about the abuse. In McKinney v. Gaston County, the county argued that the look-back window, which revived civil action for child sexual abuse from Jan.1, 2020-Dec. 31, 2021, was unconstitutional.  

In the wake of the SAFE Child Act’s passage, hundreds of plaintiffs had filed claims under the provisions of the look-back window. In January 2025, the Supreme Court of North Carolina ruled in the plaintiffs’ favor in McKinney v. Gaston County.  

In June, NCAJ will honor Lanier, Jenkins and their clients with the Kellie Crabtree Award. Lanier said it has been an honor to tell their stories. 

“They’ve turned out to be just fine men,” Lanier said of her clients. “And that’s an amazing thing, too, because when young people are abused like this it tends to impact their lives in terrible ways. In their teenage years, there’s often self-medicating with drugs and alcohol, there’s often sexual promiscuity, there’s often run-ins with the law because of drugs and alcohol. The chances of someone who’s been through all of that ending up with a successful life are really slim, and they’re all just really fine men.”  

Nominating Committee Member John McCabe said Lanier and her clients exemplify the very spirit of the Kellie Crabtree Award.

“With extraordinary courage and unwavering determination, they stood up in the face of adversity to seek justice not just for themselves, but for countless survivors of childhood sexual assault across North Carolina. Their commitment ensured that victims’ voices could be heard and their rights to pursue long overdue justice preserved. This is exactly the kind of impact and bravery that inspired the creation of this award.”

Big Practice, Small-Firm Feel  

Lanier has made her name representing sexual assault survivors, taking her first case as a young lawyer 25 years ago in a two-person firm when the MeToo movement could scarcely have been imagined. Today, Lanier Law employs more than 75 people in 10 offices – nine in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. She and her team have helped hundreds of clients win millions of dollars in claims against sexual abusers. Lanier has earned national headlines for the successful execution of cases like one against the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, where she won a $12.5 million settlement for 65 students who claimed a culture of abuse by faculty members that dated back to the late 1960s.  

Lanier has enjoyed the growth of the practice but has tried to maintain a small-firm feel when it comes to client relations. 

“I don’t want to mill them through at some huge volume but really strike a balance of having a close quality relationship,” she said. “I think that particularly in the sex abuse cases that’s so critical because when people have been through so much trauma, they need you to be there, to be consistent, to be compassionate. And we spend a lot of time training our staff, taking courses and continuing to learn about trauma-informed counseling, of the practice of law. You can’t just meet a sex abuse client and say, ‘Well, tell me everything’ on the first day, like you would if they were in a car wreck.”  

Lanier represented her first sexual abuse client shortly after she had left a large firm, about five years into her practice. A woman who had been abused by her psychiatrist came to her for help. 

“I’m sure she had talked to a lot of people before she talked to me, this young, unknown woman but nobody really did this kind of work, and I don’t think she was really well-received when she reached out to people,” Lanier said. 

The case inspired her. She had volunteered at the Orange County Rape Crisis Center and the Orange Women’s Center and was excited to be able to incorporate her passion for supporting victims of abuse into her professional life. She also found it empowering to go beyond supporting survivors in the immediate aftermath of trauma and find ways to hold abusers and enabling institutions accountable. 

“People didn’t talk about his kind of stuff then,” Lanier recalls. “It wasn’t something that people were railing against or even outraged by. It was just something that was part of the fabric of our lives. It was powerful for me.”  

After her success with the first case, word-of-mouth led to more. Lanier began to realize that we are experiencing what she would describe as a plague of sexual abuse.  

“I have a statewide practice and I literally, every day, am turning away people that I cannot help that horrendous things have happened to, horrendous,” she said. “Typically, you think about the reason I can’t do anything on the civil side is because there was no institution involved that let it happen, it was the neighbor or mom’s boyfriend. There’s nothing that I can get for the child, because that person doesn’t have assets or there was no institutional oversight where the ball was dropped. And it truly is an epidemic in our culture — of child sex abuse.”  

Don’t Lay Down and ‘Waller’  

One would forgive Lanier for feeling discouraged by the state of things given what she faces in her practice on a regular basis, but she is having none of that. Her guiding star is to maintain a relentless positive attitude.  

“You can’t lay down and ‘waller’ – as they say where I come from – you just can’t,” she said.  

It’s how she withstood losing her spouse, who died when their children were just 2 and 4 years old. It’s how she beat stage 4 Hodgkin’s lymphoma 12 years ago without ever missing a day of work.   

“I just always have a very positive, go-forward, do-it, get-it-done kind of outlook,” she said. “I just really wish I could teach it, bottle it. I look around me and see so many people that don’t have that and I’m sorry for them because it serves you so well. To not for a minute think that anything is going to get you, that you’re going to get it. That you’re going to win. Life throws you curve balls, and you just have to push through it with positivity and work.” 

When she was undergoing chemotherapy, Lanier would get tired and need to nap but she never lost her hair or got sick. She needed help with driving and had to miss her company holiday party but otherwise, few people knew about her condition.  

“I’m the Lanier of Lanier Law Group,” she said. “I have 75 employees. What are they going to think if the boss has stage 4 cancer? That’s going to be unnerving. I was very private about it. I’m not now, I’m now very ‘Yell it from the rooftops so I can raise money for research.’ ”  

Lanier attributes her perspective, in part, to her upbringing. She grew up in a farm family in rural Guilford County, the oldest grandchild of a successful agribusiness entrepreneur. She spent a lot of time with her hands in the dirt – or covered in tobacco gum or pig manure.  

“I always joked that I went to law school so that I could get out of the field, so that I could get off the farm,” she said. “There’s nothing that will make you want a desk job faster that getting covered in hog manure.”  

She took that visceral understanding of hard work and an empathy for people who do it every day with her after she left the farm.  

“I watched how my grandfather took care of folks,” she said. “He took food to farmworkers when they were sick or hurt. He fed everyone on the job. We had a comfortable, good standard of life but we worked hard for it. It creates a respect for others and an empathy for others, and I’m grateful for it.”