The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the biggest sexual abuse settlement in US history on Tuesday, agreeing to pay $4 billion to victims who were abused as children in a county-run juvenile facility and raising their homes.
The vote was the culmination of a long-standing fight with the victims, who claimed he hadn’t paid the price for ramp-prolonged sexual abuse that he said no one was suffering in county custody. The settlement includes around 7,000 claims, most of which are allegedly abused from the 1980s to the 2000s.
“A person hired as a safety net would never have imagined that care for the most vulnerable would abuse his position and power in this way,” director Katherine Berger said. “It makes me mad and sick of it.”
Thousands of claims tell the story of county governments that barely screened for abusers, allowing a vast network of facilities to become hunting grounds for predators. The victim said staff were rarely disciplined to prey on vulnerable children.
“We need to remember that those who are compensated were victims of terrible abuse and rape,” said Adam Slater, the attorney for the main plaintiffs in the settlement. “I hope this gives them a measure of closure and the ability to continue their lives.”
Reconciliation warns the most infamous sexual abuse settlement. The Boy Scouts’ settlement was $2.46 billion. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles paid approximately $1.5 billion to victims of abuse by a Catholic priest. The victims of USC gynecologist George Tyndale won $1.1 billion, while Michigan State paid Team Doctor Larry Nasser’s victims $500 million.
LA County, which has a budget of around $48 billion, says it will pay for the mammoth settlement by taking out bonds and draining rainy days’ funds. The county will be available to victims over the next five years, but the county expects to pay the bond for the next 25 years.
“We intend to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in our community, libraries, beaches and public social services through 2050,” said Fesia Davenport, LA County CEO.
The county has taken several steps to prevent abuse, and Davenport said it has taken several steps, including strengthening reviews of foster parents and probation staff and abolishing the use of group homes.
The supervisor approved the settlement 4-0, with Lindsay Horvas absent.
Supervisor Holly Mitchell said Tuesday he wanted to make it easier to fire workers accused of sexual abuse, but supervisor Janice Hahn said he was partially cracking down on the department head’s alleged abuse.
“They have to feel like this is resting with them,” Hearn said.
The historic vote came as about 55,000 county workers entered the first day of a two-day strike, denounced negotiations on slow-rolling contracts and brought small offers to the negotiation table. Davenport said it would be reckless to offer a big pay raise, given the sexual abuse settlement, an estimated $2 billion wildfire costs and threats from the Trump administration, cutting millions of federal funds.
Slater, who represents around 3,500 victims in the settlement, said former LA County Superior Court Judge Louis Majjarter will lead the allocation process to determine how much of the $4 billion pie each victim will receive. Slater said the money will be fired from January.
The historic settlement stems from Congressional Bill 218, a 2020 state law that gave victims of childhood sexual abuse time to resort to childhood laws despite the expiration of limits. For LA County, which operated dozens of facilities that locked up and cared for the boy, the law launched a deadly flood of lawsuits that had not stopped.
Thousands have moved forward to explain sexual abuse at the now-closed McLaren Children’s Center. This is a county-run home for foster parents, now infamous for staff who drug and abused their children. The report found that the facility had been decades without checking staff for criminal history.
“The system is too loose,” said Hilda Solis, director who called McClallen the county “stain.”
Jimmy Vigil, a 45-year-old mental health case manager, said he was repeatedly abused by doctors at Juvenile Hall in Los Padrinos and was jailed as a teenager. Vigill, who sues 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 the control room. The first boy who ejaculated was to scream “bingo,” Vigil said.
When he complained, Vil said, he landed in solitary confinement.
“These people should be in prison,” Vil said. “There’s no amount in the world to try to undo what they did. We’re going to wipe it off from human memories.”
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