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 2019 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.
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.
“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 amount involved 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 alleged abuses of children by clergy and the $1.1 billion paid by the University of Southern California to the hundreds of patients allegedly 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.
After that window closed in 2022, municipalities, school districts and other public institutions in California were slammed by a crush of civil lawsuits that have increasingly generated multi-million-dollar payouts.
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 the 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 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 and dip into reserves to pay for the settlement. They added that the county would also likely have to issue judgment obligation bonds requiring annual payments of “hundreds of millions of dollars” that “will have a significant affect 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.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/us/los-angeles-county-plans-to-pay-4-billion-to-settle-sex-abuse-claims.html
