The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history on Tuesday, agreeing to pay $4 billion to victims abused as children in county-run juvenile facilities and foster homes.
The vote is the culmination of years of fighting by victims, who argued that no one had paid the price for the rampant sexual abuse they said they suffered in county custody. The settlement includes nearly 7,000 claims, most of which involve alleged abuse from the 1980s through the 2000s.
“I never would have imagined persons hired to be the safety net and care for the most vulnerable could or would abuse their position and power in this way,” said Supervisor Kathryn Barger. “It angers and sickens me.”
The thousands of claims tell the story of a county government that did little to screen for abusers, allowing a sprawling network of facilities for young people to become hunting grounds for predators. Victims said staffers were seldom disciplined for preying on vulnerable kids.
“We have to remember the people who are being compensated were victims of horrific abuse and rapes,” said Adam Slater, a lead plaintiffs’ attorney in the settlement. “This will hopefully give them some measure of closure and the ability to move on with their lives.”
The settlement dwarfs the most infamous sex abuse settlements. The Boy Scouts settlement was for $2.46 billion. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has paid out about $1.5 billion to victims of abuse by Catholic priests. Victims of USC gynecologist George Tyndall got $1.1 billion, and Michigan State University paid $500 million to victims of team doctor Larry Nassar.
L.A. County, which has a roughly $48-billion budget, has said it will pay for the mammoth settlement by taking out bonds and draining its rainy day fund. All the money will be made available to victims in the next five years, while the county expects to be paying for the bonds for the next 25 years.
“We are going to be paying hundreds of millions of dollars that could be invested into the communities, into parks, libraries, beaches, public social services, until 2050,” said L.A. County Chief Executive Fesia Davenport.
The county has taken several steps to try and prevent abuse, Davenport has said, including bolstering the vetting of foster parents and probation staffers and winding down the use of group homes.
The supervisors approved the settlement 4-0, with Lindsey Horvath absent.
Supervisor Holly Mitchell said Tuesday that she wants to make it easier to fire workers credibly accused of sexual abuse, while Supervisor Janice Hahn floated the idea of tying department heads’ salary, in part, to their work cracking down on alleged abuse.
“They’ve got to feel like this rests with them,” said Hahn.
The historic vote came as roughly 55,000 county workers entered the first full day of a two-day strike, accusing the county of slow-rolling contract negotiations and bringing paltry offers to the bargaining table. Davenport has said it would be reckless to offer big raises, considering the sex abuse settlement, an estimated $2 billion in wildfire costs and threats from the Trump administration to slash millions in federal funding.
Slater, whose firm represents about 3,500 victims in the settlement, said former L.A. County Superior Court Judge Louis Meisinger will be leading the allocation process to decide how much of the $4-billion pie each victim receives. Slater said the money will be doled out starting in January.
The historic settlement arose from Assembly Bill 218, a 2020 state law that gave victims of childhood sexual abuse more time to sue, even though the statute of limitations had expired. For L.A. County, which ran dozens of facilities that confined and cared for juveniles, the law kickstarted a deluge of litigation that still hasn’t stopped.
Thousands came forward to describe sexual abuse at the now-closed MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run home for foster youth now infamous for staffers who drugged and molested kids in their care. A report found that the facility had gone decades without conducting criminal background checks on its staff.
“The system has been too lax,” said Supervisor Hilda Solis, who called MacLaren a “stain” on the county.
Jimmy Vigil, a 45-year-old mental health case manager, said he was repeatedly abused by a physician at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, where he was imprisoned as a teenager. Vigil, who sued the county and is expected to receive money from the settlement, was later sent to a camp in Lancaster, where another staff member forced all the boys to masturbate in a control room. The boy who ejaculated first was supposed to yell “Bingo,” Vigil said.
When he complained, Vigil said, he landed in solitary confinement.
“These people should be in jail,” said Vigil. “There’s no amount of money in the world that is going to undo what they did, that is going to wipe that away from a human being’s memory.”
Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
