For many American victims of Iranian terrorism, surviving the attack was only the beginning of their ordeal. Decades later, some are still waiting for the compensation they were awarded in court, while others have died without ever seeing justice.
The trauma continues through the long psychological and physical recovery, the financial burden of lost income, the costs of families traveling to care for loved ones, and the weight of mounting medical expenses. Everyday financial obligations do not disappear. Mortgage payments, rent, utility bills, and other household expenses continue to accumulate, even as victims and their families struggle to rebuild their lives.
The US Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund (USVSST Fund) was established by Congress in December 2015 under the Justice for United States Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Act. It compensates American survivors and their families who have obtained a final judgment in a US district court against a designated state sponsor of terrorism. The fund, initially capitalized with $1.025 billion, is funded by forfeited assets, civil and criminal penalties, and settlements with banks and companies that violated US sanctions laws.
Although the fund has distributed more than $10 billion to eligible victims, that amount is little more than a drop in the ocean compared with the tens of billions of dollars awarded in court judgments. Many families are still waiting to receive the full compensation they were awarded, even after more than 40 years. Some bereaved family members have died before ever seeing a single payment.
With the number of victims only growing as the Islamic Republic’s proxies continue to escalate attacks, Rep. Laura Gillen (D-NY) and Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY) introduced a bill in late July seeking a loan from the Treasury for $3 billion to ensure payouts are guaranteed for victims over the next three years. The loan would be repaid when the American government collects penalties from those breaching sanctions laws.
“American victims of Iran’s state-sponsored terrorism have waited far too long for the justice and restitution they are legally owed,” said Gillen. “This bipartisan legislation ensures that our promises to victims are backed by real action, delivering the long-overdue compensation they deserve while holding Iran accountable for decades of horrific violence against Americans.”
‘Never having the chance to see justice served’
Aryeh Portnoy, a lawyer from Crowell & Moring representing American victims against the Islamic regime for its role in the Hamas-led massacres of October 7, 2023, told The Jerusalem Post, “Victims of Iranian and other state-sponsored terrorism have been seeking justice for decades, and tragically the community of victims has only continued to grow.
“Victims die every month, sometimes more frequently than that, never having the chance to see justice served. And as new victims see the painful journey of those who came before them, and are afraid that they will also still be fighting 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road.
“The victims have come to the US government with the plea not to let another victim die without seeing justice.”
“The victims have come to the US government with the plea not to let another victim die without seeing justice. Congress and the president can make sure that doesn’t happen by prioritizing and supporting the victims. They can make a difference right now and fulfill the promises the United States made to the American victims of state-sponsored terrorism never to forget and to afford them the relief they desperately need,” Portnoy continued.
Estera Votaw was among the many bereaved family members who died without ever receiving a payment. A Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor who endured both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, Estera had already experienced unimaginable suffering. Decades after surviving the Holocaust, she faced another devastating loss when her husband, Albert Nicholson Votaw, was killed in the bombing of the US Embassy in Beirut by Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Albert, a civilian employee with USAID, was helping Lebanese civilians find housing during the civil war when he was killed in the April 18, 1983, suicide truck bombing. He was one of 63 people killed in the attack, including 17 American citizens.
“He was always extremely funny, very bright, loved to poke fun at what you just said or how you said it or make puns, and he was generally the life of the party when he was in a group,” she shared.
A Quaker from Philadelphia, Albert was guided by strong values and devoted much of his career to public service. After joining USAID in 1966, he traveled the world with his wife and their four daughters, “doing good work.”
Only weeks before leaving his post in Bangkok for Beirut, Albert had reassured his family that “they wouldn’t send me somewhere dangerous,” recalled his daughter Cathy, who was 27 at the time of her father’s death. She said she remains angry that her civilian father was sent into what she believes was an active war zone.
“I have no idea what they were doing, sending civilians into what was basically a war zone…It’s like bombing Iran. You can’t make people do what you want them to do, just because you decide that it’s peaceful,” she said.
Albert had arrived in Lebanon just 10 days before the attack. Estera remained in Bangkok, packing up their belongings and preparing to join him.
It took 24 hours to recover Albert’s body. His remains were cremated in Beirut, and a young Quaker associated with the embassy scattered his ashes in the Mediterranean Sea in accordance with his and Estera’s wishes.
Though the entire family was devastated, Estera was particularly lost, Cathy said. Having spent years moving around the world for her husband’s work and having already lost her home in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust, Estera had no property or roots to return to. Eventually, she settled in Arlington, Virginia, where she lived until 2012, once again having to “remake her life.”
“After the war, after she survived Auschwitz and was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, she had to reinvent herself. She went home to northern Yugoslavia. Her father was still alive, although he didn’t last too long, and she and her brother had survived, and pretty much everyone in the parent generation had been killed, and so she reinvented herself, and eventually went to school in Paris, and then came to the United States, and then at the age of you know 53, she had to do a complete reinvention,” Cathy voiced. “Every single thing has to be reinvented, and it was kind of the same thing when my father was killed.”
Cathy’s own reaction was a slow dribble that eventually amounted to a “nervous breakdown” in the 1990s. “I couldn’t keep it together. I was crying at work. I was trying mainly to hold it together at home, but I couldn’t concentrate. I realized at one point that I was thinking about killing myself,” she said.
“I was thinking about how many of my kids had to die before I would give myself permission to jump out a window,” she recalled. “When I realized that’s what I was thinking, I was sort of fixated on: What if it was just two of them, or did it have to be all three?”
“And what about my husband? I was having these ridiculous thoughts, but when I realized what it was, which was that I was trying to give myself permission to kill myself, I sought professional help and went to a psychiatrist. She basically said, ‘You have something that is called a delayed grief reaction, that your feelings are so strong but so suppressed because you continue to carry on that they’re now sort of popping out here.’ And that made a lot of sense to me,” Cathy said.
Every attack, from the September 11 attacks to the bombing of the American embassies in Nairobi, “jolted all of us back to those raw feelings,” she shared, reflecting on how many grieving families experienced the same.
After years of silent memory, Cathy’s pain became more bearable, and she was finally able to say her father’s name again. Her first son was named Nicholas, after her father’s middle name, and her second son was named Albert. Naming her second son required a warning to family members who were still overwhelmed at the name. Eventually, however, the family was able to share stories about Albert, and how he would take his daughters sledding down hills and over frozen lakes.
Dammarell vs Islamic Republic of Iran
With traditional avenues of justice inaccessible for Iran’s American victims, Cathy said she viewed a lawsuit as the only avenue available to see some accountability. In 2001, a survivor of the attack and the families of victims initiated a lawsuit against Iran, Dammarell vs Islamic Republic of Iran, seeking $5 billion in damages.
Two of Cathy’s sisters immediately joined the lawsuit, though her third sister and her mother needed more convincing.
“My mom said, ‘I didn’t let the Nazis, the Germans, pay me for killing my parents. I’m not going to let Iran pay me for killing my husband,’” Cathy recollected, explaining that she persuaded her mother to join the action on the condition that the money would never be placed directly in her hands.
In 2003, Iran was found liable for orchestrating and funding the attack, and in 2005, 29 plaintiffs were awarded $126,061,657. In 2006, the court entered its final judgment order, consolidating the calculated compensatory damages for the victims and their families at $316,919,657. According to publicly available court documents, the estate of Albert Votaw was awarded $30 million.
Cathy estimated that there was only a 10% chance that her family would ever see even 10% of the money that they were awarded. Now 70, she is afraid that she will never be given what she is entitled to, and that the American government will destroy the mechanisms needed to collect the judgment “in order to be friendly to Iran.”
Under the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Washington and Tehran, which has since failed, the United States committed to ending sanctions against Iran. The lifting of such sanctions would mean an end to the fines and seizures that finance the USVSST Fund.
“The victims of terrorism should be in line for that money before the Iranian government gets it,” Cathy stressed.
“The memorandum of understanding indicated that the president was going to direct that sanctions be lifted, that Iran was going to be back in the fold of nations, and I had a very strong emotional and intellectual reaction to that, which was: no effing way,” Cathy said.
“The victims of terrorism should be in line for that money before the Iranian government gets it. But I think just sort of turning them loose, the way President Trump seems to want to do it, just like, ‘Okay, we’re done, we won, we’re leaving,’ is totally the wrong thing.”
She noted that Libya had been forced to pay compensation to its American victims before being allowed to escape sanctions and the label of a state sponsor of terrorism, and was critical of the fact that Iran nearly had that same opportunity without any conditions of ending its support for terrorism and without compensating those harmed over the past few decades.
In 2008, Libya paid $1.5 billion into a fund for victims of terrorism, including the families of the 270 people killed in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103, and the American families of those wounded and killed in the 1986 attack on a West Berlin disco.
Portnoy, the lawyer representing the plaintiffs, noted that “it is essential that the government not provide relief to terrorist regimes without first providing relief to the Americans and their families whose lives those terrorist regimes destroyed.
“Iran, in particular, has been sponsoring terrorism and destroying lives for more than four decades – targeting Americans and its allies around the world. It has left a trail of heartbreak and devastation,” he said.
“The victims are imploring their government to ensure accountability and justice for those who have suffered so grievously simply because they were Americans.”
The latest generation of Iran’s victims
While some victims have spent more than a decade waiting for justice, receiving only small, partial payments, new victims have continued to join their ranks. The latest are survivors and families of those killed on October 7, who are still waiting for their day in court.
E. and A., who are suing Iran over the trauma inflicted on their daughter, a survivor of the Supernova music festival, spoke with the Post on condition of anonymity, fearing that public attention surrounding their case could jeopardize their daughter’s slow progress in coming to terms with what she endured.
Both were careful to avoid words such as “recovery,” describing the concept as “obscure” in light of their daughter’s condition. “The idea is to teach her how to live with what she saw and how to handle it. I don’t think she can recover,” E. said.
The couple moved to the United States from Israel, becoming citizens in 2002 after years of bureaucratic wrangling. Their three children were born in New York, and the couple believed that they were giving their children a better, more secure future.
Despite being born in the United States, T., their middle child, decided to enlist in the IDF after high school. At 21, her military service was nearing its end, and she planned to attend college and begin the next chapter of her life. She had tickets to the desert rave that would become one of the deadliest targets of the Hamas-led October 7 attack on Israel. Over 1,200 people were killed that day throughout southern Israel, including more than 800 civilians; Hamas and affiliated Palestinians terror groups abducted 251 people to Gaza.
“She gave us a call, and then she said, ‘Dad, don’t panic. They are shooting all over. I just want to let you know that I love you guys.’ I didn’t understand the magnitude of what was going on over there because she woke me up in the middle of the night. I knew she was at a music festival, but I didn’t expect to have anything like that,” E. shared, explaining how he had told his daughter to find security or call the police. “She said, ‘Daddy, you don’t understand. There are so many bodies around me.’ I definitely didn’t understand.”
After telling her parents she loved them one final time, the phone dropped the call as her battery died. T. had already been running and hiding for two hours, and her family didn’t hear from her until she was rescued nine hours later.
“She was running for a life for about 11 hours until she was rescued,” E. recalled.
T.’s parents later learned that T. was in her boyfriend’s car shortly after the sirens started, planning to leave the festival to find shelter. The alarms had led to queues to leave the site. T. received a call from a friend a few cars ahead of her and told her to run, that the terrorists were shooting at those ahead of them. T. and her boyfriend were able to flee the car, but two of their friends in the backseat were shot dead.
For hours the pair hid together, running to new hiding spots when too many people accumulated where they were. At one point, the pair found themselves hiding in a ditch, T.’s boyfriend laying on top of her to try to make themselves as small as possible.
“Two terrorists came over, they thought he was raping her, and they asked T’s boyfriend if she was a Jew” E. continued, explaining how they initially mistook the boyfriend for one of the invading Palestinians. The boyfriend knocked one of the terrorists out, before he could get near T., though the other was able to stab the boyfriend and shock him with an electric rod during the scuffle. He yelled at T. to run, and by the thinnest stroke of luck he was able to escape and rejoin her.
The trauma of that day hasn’t left T. She struggles with severe depression, is unable to get out of bed on most days, and continues to deal with the guilt of surviving when so many did not.
“She saw a lot of girls being raped and killed and being shot. Friends, they were dead, and still being raped. Her friends there were killed, and whatever you see, it’s tough to get out of your mind,” A. explained. “She has survivor guilt. She feels that she doesn’t deserve to live. Everything that starts with depression, not being able to get out of bed, not brushing her teeth, not taking care of herself.”
Even on the days she can almost function, E. said T. described herself as “rotting from the inside.”
“She told me that waking up every day is more painful than dying. Our fear – that she commits suicide, or hurts herself, or something like that – is big,” he continued. “My wife spends a lot of time overseas to help her. I go when I can.” T.’s parents, who pay for their daughter’s living expenses, have spent around $15,000 a year on flights since the attack, at times leaving their work behind for months to support their daughter.
While A. and E. are willing and able to fly to Israel and help their daughter, they acknowledge that many families in their position do not have the same financial capability, and have been forced to make difficult decisions. Yet Iran is still able to fund the terrorist groups that scarred their loved ones.
E. noted that the need to beg US congressmen is a new trauma for the families, who are dealing with the frustration of empty promises and feeling that they are not being heard.
‘She just turned life off’
A. admitted that it would have been easier for the family if T. could return to America, but such a move would never work for her. In New York, T. would encounter marches where people openly scream in support of the group that traumatized her, and deny what she experienced and witnessed firsthand. In the US, she would constantly have to explain what happened to her. People would not understand why she might suddenly park her car in the middle of the street and run.
Israel, on the other hand, has a community of survivors for T. to lean on, as well as services with professionals trained to address this type of trauma. A. said nothing close to this exists for them in New York.
Still, the sound of sirens and news of terror attacks across Israel continue to re-trigger their daughter, forcing her mind back to the festival.
More recently, T. has found a group for survivors with PTSD. Her family said she is slowly beginning to function again, while her boyfriend and his family have continued to care for her. Still, she is not the same happy-go-lucky girl who flew to serve her country.
Her family is “treading on eggshells” and trying to figure things out as they go, but the very idea of accepting or needing help remains difficult for T.
“I walk on eggshells when I talk to her because I don’t want to say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing. She’ll be all over me. I don’t mind being her punching bag. I told her I’m her father. She can punch me as many times as she wants. I’ll still be her father at the end of the day, and I have to take it.
“I’ll be with her no matter what, no matter what comes out of her mouth, but she really rejects every offer of help,” E. said. “If I say, ‘I want to help you,’ just the word ‘help’ triggers her. [She says], ‘I don’t need any help. No one can help me. No one can.’ It’s tough to understand… The thing is that she lost all hope. She has no plans. She doesn’t see the future.
“My job as a parent is to show her how much I love her, how much we care for her, and if something will happen to her, God forbid, that my life will be destroyed. I don’t want to make her live a life of guilt, but I don’t mind if guilt will make her live,” E. shared.
A. said it was like “it’s like a switch with the lights. You turn it on, and you turn it off. She just turned life off.”
“How do you get out of this darkness, or how do you show the light? Because she did survive, and it’s just we don’t know what her future is going to be. Of course, nobody knows,” she continued. “But for now, I don’t care about the future at this point. I don’t care if she goes to college. I don’t care if she has a decent job or not decent job. If she progresses in life, she establishes a nice career or not.
“The only thing that I need at this point is to give her a reason to live.”
On October 6, everything in T.’s world made sense. After October 7, nothing did, A. observed. When the most fundamental rules of life change, it no longer makes sense for her daughter to brush her teeth, shower, eat, or maintain daily routines.
The hardest trigger is when people tell T. she should live life for the friends who could not, because it adds to the guilt she already carries over not being able to live normally on their behalf, A. explained.
Even small talk and everyday questions can leave her feeling low. When people ask what she does for a living, she feels the weight and judgment of saying that she is not employed, is not in school, is not traveling, and is not following what is typically expected of a woman in her early 20s.
Whether T. will ever be able to work or study again, become a wife or mother, remains unknown to her family. While E. is more than willing to support his daughter for as long as she needs him, the USVSST Fund would help safeguard her future and provide the financial security she may need.
