$4 billion to survivors abused as children in county-run facilities and foster homes.
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors recently approved the “largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history,” unanimously agreeing to pay $4 billion to survivors abused as children in county-run facilities and foster homes.
This decision comes after years of bravery by outspoken survivors – the settlement includes nearly 7,000 claims, most of which involve instances of abuse from the 1980s through the 2000s. A small number of these claims date back to the 1950s.
Many of the survivors state they were abused during their time at the MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run foster home that opened its doors in 1961. The facility was overcrowded and conditions were horrific. A recent report found that before its closure in 2003, MacLaren had gone “decades without conducting criminal background checks on its staff,” and that other employees with criminal records were hired.
Throughout the years, survivors say they remember being drugged and abused by those who were supposed to care for them in these facilities. They faced threats of retaliation if they shared their stories and although they are speaking up now, many acknowledge that these experiences will stay with them throughout the rest of their lives.
Jimmy Vigil, a California mental health case manager, was incarcerated at the Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall when he was 14. He recalls abuse by a physician who ordered him locked in handcuffs for hours and ignored his pleas for help, staff members who arranged for residents to fight, and vile conditions: “The irony is they called us monsters, [but] they created those monsters. They did not focus on rehab; they didn’t focus on therapy; they did not focus on teaching young men and women a better path.”
Vigil says that although the settlement deal places monetary responsibility on the county, no financial compensation will erase the trauma he and others faced. “These people should be in jail,” he said. “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.”
The recent historic settlement arose from Assembly Bill 218, a state law created in 2020 to bypass the expired statute of limitations for anyone reporting childhood sexual abuse. Los Angeles county supervisor Kathryn Barger says that the ruling is “an indictment of abuses of power by individuals who were trusted to protect our youth, a reflection of failed oversight systems, and a painful reminder of how vulnerable voices were ignored or silenced.”
Los Angeles County states that this money will be made available to survivors over the next five years, beginning in January.
Authors: Andy Goldwasser and Alexis Kabat
