Gavin, the boy is forty-six now. He was nine when his teacher began. He has been waiting since 1986 for someone in Sacramento to believe him. The woman who got the check last week has never lived in California. You signed the paper. Lorena, you wrote it. You called it courage.
California’s 2019 Assembly Bill 218 suspended the statute of limitations for past childhood sexual assault, extended the maximum age at which alleged victims could bring civil claims from 26 to 40, and reduced other barriers to filing. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed it in October 2019. Its author, former state Assembly member Lorena Gonzalez, said at the time that someone assaulted as a child should not run out of time to report the abuse. The statute, she said, was “outrageous.”
The law allowed lawsuits based on events reaching back to the early 1940s. It did not cap the liability of taxpayer-funded counties, cities, or school districts. The bill’s stated purpose was recognition and recompense for people the system had failed.
The system is now failing them a second way. Los Angeles County has begun paying as many as 11,000 people nearly $5 billion to settle decades-old claims arising from foster homes and juvenile-detention centers. The county’s district attorney, Nathan Hochman, has estimated in court filings that as many as 81% of the claims in the county’s main settlement fund contain “fraud indicators,” including records showing that some purported victims lived outside the county when they said the abuse occurred. His office expects to file criminal fraud charges by the end of the year.
Under the county’s settlement agreement, even plaintiffs suspected of fraud can receive $50,000 to drop their claims. Another 5,400 claims remain unresolved. The independent administrator, BrownGreer, had paid plaintiffs $57.2 million as of July 28. The cost per county resident so far is roughly $500. A survey of 19 of California’s 58 counties earlier this year estimated total liabilities of at least $12.4 billion. Public-school districts face an additional $4 billion in verdicts, settlements, and retroactive insurance premiums.
In 2023, a Riverside County jury awarded $135 million to two plaintiffs who said a middle-school teacher had sexually abused them in the 1990s. The teacher, Thomas Lee West, is in state prison after a 2006 conviction for aggravated sexual assault and multiple counts of lewd conduct with a minor. Moreno Valley Unified School District, where West had taught, had hired him despite prior accusations of child abuse. The district negotiated the verdict down to $45 million — most of it not covered by insurance — and reduced staff, pushed class sizes to their maximum, and combined grades in some classrooms.
I have read the filing, Gavin. The boy is forty-six. He has been telling a counselor what his teacher did since 2014. The counselor believed him. The institution did not. Your bill was supposed to let the institution hear him. Your throat closes when you read the 81%. Your hand wants to pick up the phone and call your communications director. The metallic taste under your tongue is the taste of a bill signing you cannot undo. The system you enabled cannot tell the boy from the woman in Phoenix.
Lorena, you wrote the bill. You called it courage. Your courage produced a settlement line item with no evidentiary gate. You removed the statute of limitations and the burden of contemporaneous disclosure. You did not require a verified record of custody or institutional contact before a claim could clear the courthouse door. The boy is in the queue behind the woman from Phoenix. The muscles in your jaw have been clenched since the district attorney’s number became public. The ache in your lower back at night is the weight of a thing you did not lift when you could have lifted it.
Andy, the outside counsel hired by Los Angeles County, you told the district attorney that his 81% estimate “simply does not match what we are seeing in our review process, which includes a significant, detailed fraud prevention and detection protocol.” You declined to explain the protocol. Your hand reaches for the transfer wire every Tuesday. The skin on your forearms knows what your protocol does not say. The transfer you made last week went to a claimant whose address is in Arizona. Your mouth tastes of the money when you eat dinner at home.
John, founder of the firm whose website lists several billion dollars of sex-abuse payouts. A Los Angeles Times investigation published in October found seven people who said they were paid to sue Los Angeles County; two said they were told to fabricate their stories. All seven were represented by Downtown L.A. Law Group, which had filed roughly one-quarter of the 11,000 claims then seeking settlements. The firm denied paying anyone to sue or instructing anyone to fabricate. Your firm is not the firm named in the Times investigation. Your firm ran an ad calling a corroboration bill a “Predator Shield Law,” and the senator dropped it. The pressure behind your eyes has not left since the ad ran. You told a reporter by email that anyone who questioned the bill was “a stooge for teachers & public employee unions & the corrupt politicians who have absolutely allowed thousands of kids in California & beyond to be molested.” You apologized for the wording on a follow-up call. The wording was the diagnostic.
Thomas, you are in state prison. You were convicted in 2006 of aggravated sexual assault and multiple counts of lewd conduct with a minor. You hosted wrestling parties at your home in the 1990s. The Moreno Valley Unified School District hired you despite prior accusations. The district did not vet you. The district’s verdict paid your victims. The cost was passed to the children now sitting in the classrooms the verdict shrunk. You are the man they sent to prison. You are not the man who is paying for the school. But you are the reason the school is paying.
Gavin, the boy is forty-six now. He is in a classroom somewhere with thirty-six other children. His teacher is teaching two grades at once. His teacher is doing her job. The school board is doing what your verdict left them with. The boy is doing his best. None of them chose the system that put him in this room and the woman in Phoenix in his queue.
“You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.” — Matthew 23:27
The system you built looks like compassion. It is full of dead bones. The boy is still waiting.