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 wholeheartedly apologize 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 expanded 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 nuisance 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.
