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Los Angeles County is struggling with a massive budget crunch.
Sales taxes are rising to over 10% in some areas and many departments are being cut down the line over what Fesia Davenport, the county’s first black female CEO, has described as “unprecedented financial challenges” and “extraordinary budgetary pressures.”
But those challenges are not coming so much from the massive wildfires that devastated Los Angeles over the winter, but from the even more massive tide of sexual abuse complaints.
Los Angeles County is dealing with $2 billion in costs from the wildfires, after the city’s first black female mayor and first lesbian fire chief badly mishandled the blazes, but the $4 billion in sex abuse settlements are double the worst fires in the area’s history.
What does it say that sex abuse lawsuits have done twice as much damage to LA as the fires?
That $4 billion settlement over alleged abuses in county juvenile halls and foster homes, the largest in the county’s history, makes up nearly 9% of the county’s $47.9 billion budget.
And the bad news has just begun to arrive from the nearly 7,000 sex abuse claims filed so far.
“This is not a one-year, not even a one-decade impact. We anticipate that we will be paying hundreds of millions of dollars every year until 2030, and then millions more each year through fiscal year 2050,” Los Angeles County CEO Davenport warned.
Paying off the sex abuse claims from as far back as 40 years ago will require LA to issue bonds, divert money from reserve funds and make deep cuts in its budgets for the next 25 years.
And that’s not even the end of it.
The $4 billion is a group settlement which does not include all possible plaintiffs. Side negotiations are still taking place with more lawyers who want even more money. County lawyers had previously warned that “If all those cases were to proceed to verdict, the estimated liability could be in the tens of billions of dollars and bankrupt the county.”
Since Assembly Bill 218, which lifted the time limit on sex abuse lawsuits, is a state bill, Los Angeles could be the first of multiple California counties hit with multi-billion dollar bills.
An LA Times article called it as “a looming threat” that “could bankrupt California counties” and reported on a claim by Ventura County lawyers that it “threatens the ‘financial viability’ of every county and public school district in California” and represents a “statewide crisis”.
If a major red state were facing bankruptcy over decades of sex abuses, it would be a huge national story that the media would cover as indicative of the rot in its culture, but since the events are taking place in the bluest part of California, they remain a local story.
And yet Los Angeles County is not the only liberal area in the country being bankrupted by sex abuse settlements. The entire state of Maryland which is in a sex abuse crisis mode.
Like Los Angeles, Maryland unleashed a tidal wave of sex abuse claims by passing a law lifting time limits for sex abuse lawsuits against the state. And then quickly regretted it.
Maryland’s Child Victims Act was only passed in 2023, but legislators rushed to shut it down after it was estimated that the state was facing $4 billion in liabilities.
The same Democrat legislators, under Gov. Wes Moore, who had bragged about their passage of the Child Victims Act, corruptly rushed through a ‘fix’ through the state House, Senate and to Gov. Moore’s desk in a record two days to cover themselves. The ‘fix’ caps settlements for government institutions at $400,000 (and $700,000 for private ones) because, as Del. David Moon (D) explained, the state of Maryland “does not have the option of bankruptcy”.
Sen. Will Smith (D) explained that the ‘fix’ to the bill he had voted for was urgently needed because what “we could never have anticipated was just the sheer volume of cases that ensued”.
A state facing sex abuse bankruptcy and hypocritically rushing through a cap at the last minute should have been bigger news, but once again the national media tried to keep it quiet.
Why did California, Maryland and other state legislatures open the door to these lawsuits?
Democratic legislators were lobbied by politically connected law firms, often using alleged ‘victims’ as a front, with the promise of scoring big payouts from the Catholic Church. California and Maryland officials had been warned that they were exposing their states to untold billions in liability over accusations from a generation ago that could not be defended against.
The dirty little secret of the accusations is how few of them can even be verified.
With over 7,000 claims and over $4 billion in payouts so far, it would seem reasonable that hundreds of sex abusers had also been named and are being arrested and prosecuted.
The actual number in Los Angeles is 2. Not 2,000 or 200. Only 2.
As of 2023, the LA County DA’s office was reviewing the cases of two men, one of whom had allegedly groped a 17-year-old back in 2006, among 21 employees who had been placed on leave. As of now, there has yet to be any word of action actually being taken against them.
Either 2 men, or at best 21, molested thousands of teens, or there has been a massive failure of accountability. But more likely the actions of the California legislature unleashed a massive fraud. Local TV channels were filled with ads for lawyers promising big payouts and the lawsuits could be filed based on little to no evidence based on events that had happened in the 1980s.
One law firm, bragging that it was part of the “$500 million club” of the “National Academy of Sexual Abuse Lawyers” (no such organization appears to exist) even solicited clients by offering “cash advances” on their cases. Plaintiffs could get money just for making an allegation.
Lawsuits could be filed even if there had been no complaint, arrest or prosecution at the time of the alleged abuse. Little more was needed than the word of an individual and perhaps ‘corroboration’ from one of their friends. While there were real abuses and real victims, the wave of thousands of complaints made them all but impossible to seriously investigate.
AB 218 was proposed by Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez-Fletcher, whose husband, a former fellow assemblyman, had to step down after being sued for sexual assault. Law firms and lawyers represent a not insignificant part of her donor base. And that of many politicians.
While the law firms expect to reap a fortune from these lawsuits, it’s unclear how much the victims, real or fictional, will even end up with, but most of it will go to the ambulance chasers.
Contingency fee rates fall between 33% to 60% of most such settlements. With the species of aggressive law firms spending millions on marketing alone, it’s a safe bet that the fee rate will be on the higher side and that at least $2 billion of the $4 billion settlement will go to the lawyers.
But the more likely scenario is that the law firms will take a majority of the cash.
Any actual victims will have to split the money with an army of fraudsters drawn by the ads and will receive a tiny percentage of the settlement after the lawyers and scam artists cash in. After the lawyers take 60% and the 70% of scammers take the rest, the victims may be left with 12%.
The law firms can be expected to pass the money back to the California legislators who enabled their money grab. While counties raise taxes and local schools cut services, the politicians responsible for this planned disaster will see contributions to their campaigns and ‘dark money’ donations to their 501(c)(3) social welfare nonprofits from those same law firms.
The politicians, some of who have turned a blind eye to sexual harassment in their own offices and among their own allies, will tell taxpayers that they need to pay more in the name of justice.
And life in California will get worse while those destroying the state will get even richer.
The Corrupt California series chronicles the misconduct, mismanagement and radical politics of the most broken state in the country. Stay tuned for more articles in the series. Previous articles below:
[1] California Dems Fight Trump While State Burns: CLICK HERE.
[2] Ex-Illegal Alien Senator Suspected of Bribery Leads California’s Insurance: CLICK HERE.
[3] Company That May Have Started L.A. Fires Donated Millions to Dems: CLICK HERE.
[4] California’s Legislature Hides FBI Investigations in the “Public Interest” CLICK HERE.
[5] An Assassination Has Ties to California’s Political Elite: CLICK HERE.
[6] California Doubles Fine on White Drivers: CLICK HERE.
[7] Gov. Newsom’s $750M Gift to Hollywood Donors: CLICK HERE.
