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Los Angeles County has agreed to pay a staggering $4 billion to settle sex abuse claims from generations of children in its juvenile detention and foster care systems in what lawyers said would be the largest payout of its kind in U.S. history.
The sweeping agreement, announced Friday, was the latest in a wave of settlements precipitated by a five-year-old state law that dramatically expanded the number of child sexual abuse lawsuits filed against municipalities and school districts.
The settlement is expected to be formally approved over the next two weeks by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and the county’s claims board, covering more than 6,800 claims of childhood sexual abuse that date as far back as 1959. County officials have warned that the amount of the settlement will likely lead to budget cuts.
Most of the cases stem from abuse allegations that occurred in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s at probation and foster care facilities, county officials said. A significant number took place at the MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run children’s shelter that operated for 42 years east of downtown Los Angeles in the city of El Monte.
Opened in 1961 as a temporary foster home, MacLaren permanently closed in 2003 amid lawsuits that claimed severe mistreatment of children. A civil grand jury report at the time found that MacLaren managers had allowed convicted burglars and drug traffickers to care for children and had not checked the criminal background of employees for decades. In subsequent lawsuits, former residents said staff members had crawled into their bunks at night and sexually assaulted them, punishing them if they reported the abuses. Some said they had been as young as 5 at the time.
“On behalf of the county, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts,” the county’s chief executive, Fesia Davenport, said in a statement on Friday. “The historic scope of this settlement makes clear that we are committed to helping the survivors recover and rebuild their lives — and to making and enforcing the systemic changes needed to keep young people safe.”
The proposed payout eclipses the $2.4 billion plan to settle lawsuits brought against the Boy Scouts of America by more than 80,000 plaintiffs. And it far exceeds the $1.5 billion in cumulative payouts made by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles for allegations of abuse of children by clergy and the $1.1 billion paid by the University of Southern California to the hundreds of patients who said they had been abused by George Tyndall, who was a longtime gynecologist there.
The settlement arises from a change in California law that widened both the liability of public institutions for sexual abuse by employees and the window for victims to file lawsuits. Assembly Bill 218 extended the age limit to 40 for child sexual abuse claims and opened a three-year window for people to sue for charges dating back decades.
As that window closed in late 2022, municipalities, school districts and other public institutions in California were slammed by a crush of lawsuits that have since generated multimillion-dollar payouts. In 2023, a $135 million jury verdict in a molestation case involving a middle school teacher in Riverside County left one school district with a judgment totaling $121.5 million. Last year, the Los Angeles Unified School District agreed to pay $24 million to former students who claimed they were sexually abused in 2006 and 2007 by a teacher at their elementary school.
In a January report, the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which helps California schools manage their finances, estimated that the state’s public school districts alone are facing some $3 billion in aggregate costs from “AB 218” lawsuits and warned that the situation could force some districts into receivership.
Officials in Los Angeles County, the state’s largest, had warned before the settlement that the lawsuits might bankrupt the county, which has a budget of more than $45 billion but is currently grappling not only with the current threat of recession but also the cost of recovery from the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.
On Friday, officials said the county would most likely have to make budget cuts, dip into reserves and borrow to pay for the settlement, which will cover most — but not all — of the claims brought against the county under the new law. They added that the bonds the county is seeking to pay for the costs of the settlement not covered by insurance would require annual payments of “hundreds of millions of dollars” that “will have a significant effect on the county’s budget for years to come.”
Patrick McNicholas, a Los Angeles lawyer whose firm represented 1,200 of the plaintiffs in the case against the county, said in an interview that the parties had negotiated for more than a year and a half to strike a balance to both compensate the victims and leave the county fiscally solvent.
“The number of claimants is huge,” he said. “The county is huge. And we had to balance the goal of restorative justice with the county’s ability to pay.”
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