WOW
It’s been quite a year for Los Angeles so far. I’ll bet that’s a number they weren’t ready for.
LA County agrees to $4B settlement over sexual abuse claims at juvenile facilities | Click on the image to read the full story https://t.co/au5tPSNYZw
— KCCI News (@KCCINews) April 4, 2025
On 1 January 2020, a new California law – AB218 – took effect that expanded the statute of limitations for filing claims of childhood sexual assault and was retroactive.
This new law not only allows for a much greater expansion of the statute of limitations resulting in claims that may be filed decades later, it also requires (local educational agencies) LEAs to take reasonable steps or implement reasonable safeguards to avoid acts of childhood sexual assault when district employees are on notice or had reason to know of such a risk.
AB 218 extends the statute of limitations for filing claims of childhood sexual assault to 40 years of age, or up to five years after discovery, whichever is later. If the victim of childhood sexual assault proves that the assault was the result of a cover-up, the victim may recover treble damages: triple the amount of the actual/compensatory damages. A “cover-up” is defined as a “concerted effort to hide evidence relating to childhood sexual assault.” Childhood sexual assault means any act committed against a plaintiff that occurred when the plaintiff was under the age of 18 and that would have been prohibited by a category of crimes defined by the California Penal Code, such as child molestation, sodomy or forcible sexual penetration.
The law also allows for actions to be commenced on or after a person’s 40th birthday if the LEA “knew or had reason to know, or was otherwise on notice, of any misconduct that created a risk of childhood sexual assault by an employee or volunteer, or if the school district or county superintendent failed to take reasonable steps or to implement reasonable safeguards to avoid acts of childhood sexual assault.” Additionally, the law also opens up a three-year window for victims of any age to sue on previously expired claims that have not been “litigated to finality,” a phrase that is not defined and may include previously settled cases.
In the intervening years, the floodgates have opened on decades of stories about the horrific state of the child protective services run by Los Angeles County. They are ghastly.
Los Angeles County faced new allegations related to sexual abuse in its embattled juvenile detention facilities this week, the latest in a staggering tally of more than 5,000 adults who say they were abused as children in foster homes, shelters and probation-run camps and halls in recent decades.
A lawsuit filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court accuses probation officers of rape, forced oral copulation and groping of six youth from the late 1990s through 2017 — young people the employees were tasked with keeping safe. The case is one of about 2,300 now before the courts, following a loosening of the statute of limitations.
Sexual abuse allegations have been filed on behalf of survivors now in their 20s to 70s. One case is as recent as March, when a probation officer was arrested on charges of having sex with with a young person detained at the Dorothy Kirby Center in Commerce, a facility serving youth with significant mental health issues.
Last year alone, the 5,500-member probation department placed 23 employees on leave for possible sexual misconduct, with an additional 18 since January. Eight others have left the department following allegations, with two cases referred to the district attorney, according to officials.
L.A. County Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport had warned county supervisors back in 2023 that the bill coming due was going to be enormous, but the law firms handling the complaints were sure at the time she’d underestimated even her breathtaking numbers.
…Davenport made headlines in 2023 when she estimated in a public budget hearing that the county could be looking at $1.6 billion to $3 billion in liability for the roughly 3,000 sex abuse claims it expected.
Her estimate was met with shock and a dash of skepticism from seasoned attorneys suing the county, who said it would blow any previous sex abuse payout out of the water.
And, with today’s announcement, which does not settle all the cases, it has.
Los Angeles County plans to pay $4 billion to settle nearly 7,000 claims of childhood sexual abuse that allegedly occurred inside its juvenile facilities and foster homes, dwarfing the largest sex abuse settlements in U.S. history.
The mammoth settlement, which still needs to be approved by both the county claims board and county supervisors, is a billion dollars more than what county officials had anticipated as the worst-case scenario to resolve a flurry of lawsuits — and far more than other organizations notorious for allowing unchecked sex abuse have paid victims.
…Many California counties, which are responsible for the care of children in foster homes and juvenile halls, saw an uptick in lawsuits. For L.A. County, it was a deluge that still hasn’t stopped.
Thousands of men and women came forward to say they had been molested or raped by probation officials decades ago while incarcerated as children in the county’s sprawling network of juvenile halls and camps.
Thousands more alleged sexual abuse at the now-shuttered MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run home for foster children that plaintiffs’ attorneys have compared to a “house of horrors.” A report found that the facility went decades without doing criminal background checks on its staff.
Now, allegations can be false, obviously. However, the fact that there were no staff background checks and rare prosecutions leads one to believe there was an atmosphere of benign neglect, where higher didn’t want to hear about it, and if they did, they did nothing. It had to be horrible to be a kid trapped in there with no advocates and no voice.
Again, there have been very few prosecutions.
But it sounds as if there were many too frightened to come forward.
This is such sad commentary.
…Taken together, the thousands of lawsuits, most of which involve alleged abuse from the 1980s through the 2000s, paint a picture of a government that failed to intervene as its facilities turned into hunting grounds for predators, who held immense power over the children in their custody.
So the county is considering a hiring freeze, slashing budgets of departments, issuing bonds (on which the county will owe additional millions in interest payments), and going to drain their ‘rainy day’ fund to scrape up the money to cover the settlement. When, in many cases, they have been their own worst enemy, according to the LA Times. In one instance, a 33-year veteran of child protective services accused of childhood abuse by 20 women was still on the payroll into 2023 when he finally retired.
The LA County employees’ union has been agitating for a raise, too, as Davenport said earlier this month, with their expectations outstripping reality-based county finances.
…Labor could be another big cost. Davenport said in the letter that county unions are hungry for a raise following a significant pay hike for L.A. city workers last year.
“As we enter this bargaining cycle, labor expectations are at an all-time high,” Davenport wrote, citing “significant gaps between labor expectations and fiscal realities.”
As they no longer have a federal sugar daddy shoveling cash their way to pull them out of the holes they dig for themselves, and now this mega-money bomb dropped on their head, it could really be fugly in LA pretty soon.
