Los Angeles County has agreed to a $4 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit involving thousands of plaintiffs who claim they were sexually abused as children in the county's foster care and juvenile detention systems. This is considered the largest sex abuse settlement of its kind in the United States.
The article highlights the accounts of several survivors, detailing the lasting trauma they suffered. Their stories include experiences of abuse at the hands of staff members in the MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run foster home. The victims describe the lasting effects on their lives, encompassing mental health struggles and difficulties in forming healthy relationships.
The massive settlement was made possible by a change in California law, which provided a new window for childhood victims to sue, even if the statute of limitations had expired. The sheer volume of claims threatened to bankrupt Los Angeles County.
Los Angeles County issued a public apology, acknowledging the abuse that occurred within its systems. The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to officially approve the settlement payment.
The $4 billion settlement surpasses previous settlements in similar child sex abuse cases, involving organizations such as the Boy Scouts of America and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
MaryAlice Ashbrook remembers the rain on the night the Los Angeles police retrieved her, the 8-year-old child of a pill-addicted mother, and took her to the MacLaren Children’s Center, the county-run foster home where she was preyed upon.
Shirley Bodkin remembers the smell of the staff member there who would put her on his lap and make her hold a Raggedy Ann doll while he hurt her. J.C. Wright remembers the social workers who accused him, at age 7, of “fabricating” when he tried telling them what a doctor there had done to him.
Those memories are decades old. Ms. Ashbrook is 65 now, a retired bookkeeper in Yuma, Ariz. Ms. Bodkin is 58, the mother of two grown sons in the Southern California beach town of Dana Point. Mr. Wright is 42, a truck driver and father of four in suburban Los Angeles.
Whole chapters of their lives have gone by — marriages, children, careers — yet the memories have never ceased to torment them. Ms. Ashbrook tried electroshock therapy. Ms. Bodkin attempted suicide. Mr. Wright lived on the streets for years, ending up in prison. There was no escaping the nightmares, they said in interviews on Sunday. So they turned to the courts for some measure of relief.
Last week, it arrived, for them and nearly 7,000 other plaintiffs who say they were sexually abused as children in Los Angeles County’s juvenile detention and foster care systems, in cases dating to the late 1950s. In a settlement that lawyers say is the largest of its kind in the nation, the county publicly apologized and agreed to pay a record $4 billion, dwarfing previous settlements in child sex abuse cases brought against the Boy Scouts of America and the Archdiocese of Los Angeles.
The wave of claims — so immense that officials had warned before the deal that Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous, could be bankrupted by it — came after California gave childhood victims a new window to sue, even though the statute of limitations had expired. The county’s Board of Supervisors is expected to formally approve the payout on April 29.
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