(The Center Square) – In a letter sent to California legislators, leaders of the nonprofit organization Stand With Survivors urged state officials to refrain from passing laws that they said would roll back rights of child sexual abuse survivors.
According to the letter, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, along with the California State Association of Counties, have pushed for liability reform laws to reduce liability for public agencies named in lawsuits involving allegations of child sexual abuse.
“The California legislature is considering rolling back many well-established survivor rights in California that would severely limit survivors’ ability to hold sexual predators of minors accountable for their actions,” Stand With Survivors CEO Caroline Heldman wrote in the letter sent last week to California lawmakers. “We see this as a direct assault on hard-fought survivor rights.”
The letter was addressed to Senate President Pro Tempore Monique Limón, D-Santa Barbara, and Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Salinas.
Heldman wrote the that thousands of cases of child sexual abuse occurred in juvenile detention facilities owned and operated by Los Angeles County. The letter also goes on to state that public entities like the county Board of Supervisors are trying to reduce liability for lawsuits over alleged abuse. A bill that passed in 2019, Assembly Bill 218, widened the statute of limitations for lawsuits in child abuse cases.
Through a spokesperson, Rivas declined to speak with The Center Square on Friday. And Limón was unavailable.
Since the passage of Assembly Bill 218, thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in which allegations of sexual abuse of children were involved, Heldman wrote in the letter.
“It’s the largest single instance of survivors getting justice in the age of Epstein, in the age of Weinstein and Cosby,” Heldman told The Center Square on Friday. “It was a watershed moment for survivors.”
Because of the large influx of lawsuits over allegations of sexual abuse of children in Los Angeles County facilities, Heldman said, public officials are now concerned about budgets being drastically diminished and efforts are moving forward to lobby for a rollback of survivors’ rights.
“Stand With Survivors has been really direct that we don’t want these secret meetings in Sacramento to happen without us,” Heldman told The Center Square. “Decisions are being made about survivors, so we need to be in the room. The response shouldn’t be to roll back survivor rights. The response should be to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.”
In the March 12 letter, Heldman also called on the California Attorney General Rob Bonta to investigate Los Angeles County for allowing the abuse of children to occur over so many decades in county-run juvenile detention facilities.
Juvenile facilities run by counties aren’t the only public agencies that could be at fault, according to victims’ rights advocates.
“In many cases, there are enablers, so school principals or other types of entities, you have situations where a principal is either going to shift an individual or a sex offender to another school rather than take appropriate action,” Hermina Nedelescu, co-founder of Prosopon Healing, one of the organizations named in the Stand With Survivors letter, told The Center Square on Friday afternoon.
According to a survey summary of Assembly Bill 218 compiled by the California State Association of Counties, counties have spent $105 million on legal defense. County agencies throughout the state face a known liability of $12.4 billion for these types of cases. That is based on the known liability estimate of 19 out of 58 counties in California, and excludes estimates of liability for lawsuits that have yet to be filed. Those dollar figures are a conservative estimate, according to the survey summary.
Law firms who filed lawsuits on behalf of plaintiffs are expected to be paid $3.7 billion to $4.9 billion of those costs, according to the California State Association of Counties.
Those expenses don’t include interest on judgment obligation bonds that counties needed to finance settlements or or awards for damages paid to plaintiffs in child sexual abuse cases.
“It’s clear to any impartial observer that the system is broken, and it’s sending counties toward insolvency,” Ben Adler, the association’s director of public affairs, wrote in an email to The Center Square on Friday. “Counties are committed to negotiating an agreement that both ensures justice for survivors and maintains core public services.”
While advocating for the continued enforcement of the state’s victims’ rights laws like AB 218, Nedelescu said there must be a way to hold agencies accountable without financially decimating schools and other publicly-funded entities.
“We don’t want schools to be destroyed or dismantled,” Nedelescu said. “But there’s got to be a different way where you protect survivors and their voice as well as making sure these structures don’t get completely dismantled.”
According to advocates of liability reform law, public entities like county and city government agencies or school districts are often unable to defend themselves in cases involving the sexual abuse of children because California state law requires that juvenile records be destroyed after five years to ensure confidentiality.
The Los Angeles Unified School District recently borrowed $250 million to settle claims of sexual abuse. A district spokesperson told The Center Square that AB 218 led to an “unprecedented number” of sexual abuse cases.
In a response sent via email to The Center Square on Friday, a member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors said that while AB 218 gave survivors the opportunity to seek justice, there have been unintended consequences that resulted in fraud.
“Too much of the money is going to excessive legal fees instead of reaching victims,” Supervisor Janice Hahn, who represents Los Angeles County’s 4th District, wrote to The Center Square. “We need to get this right. There has to be a path forward that preserves access to justice for survivors while having better protections for tax dollars and ensuring that compensation goes where it belongs – to those who were harmed, not to bad actors or disproportionately high attorney fees.”
Other organizations referenced in the Stand With Survivors letter, including the Female Composer Safety League, Survivors.org, Global Hope 365 and the Sexual Predator Accountability Institute, did not respond to The Center Square on Friday.
