$5.75 Million Settlement for Former Leigh High School Student Abused by Teacher and Coach
After trial: The district settled before trial and the amount was announced by the plaintiff's firm; the terms and payment are not public. The lawsuit also named the teacher, whose criminal case was set for trial in February 2026 and is a separate proceeding.
Won by Cerri, Boskovich & Allard.
The Campbell Union High School District agreed in December 2025 to pay $5.75 million to a woman who said her Leigh High School teacher and football coach sexually abused her in 2002 and 2003, when she was 15. Her April 2024 lawsuit alleged the school's dean, the teacher's wife, was told of the abuse and did nothing. Lauren Cerri represented the former student.
What happened
The Campbell Union High School District agreed in December 2025 to pay $5.75 million to a woman who said she was sexually abused as a 15-year-old freshman at Leigh High School in San Jose. The settlement was announced on December 23, 2025, by her attorneys at Cerri, Boskovich & Allard. Both San Jose Inside and CBS News Bay Area reported it, and both quoted attorney Lauren Cerri.
The woman is identified in the lawsuit only as Jane Doe. She began the 2002-2003 school year at Leigh High, where Shawn Thomas was one of her teachers. He was also the school's football coach, a post he held from 2001 to 2010, and he later coached football and track at Los Gatos High School. The complaint alleged that Thomas groomed her and then assaulted her repeatedly on campus, including in his portable classroom and in a storage room inside the boys' locker room. It said she became pregnant at 15 and that Thomas insisted she have an abortion in the spring of 2003, which she did.
The claim against the district rested on what the school was told. According to the lawsuit, the dean of Leigh High at the time, who was Thomas's wife and a longtime district employee, once came upon the student alone with Thomas in his classroom. After the pregnancy, the complaint said, the student told the dean directly about the relationship. The dean allegedly blamed the student instead of acting. No district employee reported the abuse to police or Child Protective Services, the suit said, and Thomas kept abusing her at school.
Cerri said in the firm's statement that the school had every opportunity to prevent the abuse. 'There were red flags everywhere that Shawn Thomas was a sexual predator,' she said. 'Even worse, a direct report was made by my client and completely ignored.'
The woman did not report the abuse to police for more than 20 years. San Jose detectives arrested Thomas in March 2024, after she disclosed it to law enforcement at the urging of her sister. He was a teacher at Leigh High and a coach at Los Gatos High on the day of his arrest, and the Campbell district placed him on administrative leave. The lawsuit followed in April 2024, naming the district and Thomas.
The district settled for $5.75 million. The sources do not report a response from the district to the settlement, and neither reports that the district admitted fault. The woman's sister said in a statement released through the firm that the family was grateful the district was 'finally being held accountable for its failures,' and called the settlement one more step toward her sister reclaiming her life. Thomas's criminal trial was scheduled for February 2026, and the settlement does not resolve it.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.San Jose Inside, 'Campbell HS District Agrees To Pay $5.75M to Woman Sexually Abused as Student in 2003', Dec. 23, 2025·Archived copy
- 2.CBS News Bay Area, '$5.75M settlement announced in San Jose lawsuit accusing teacher of impregnating student, forcing abortion', Dec. 23, 2025·Archived copy
- 3.San Francisco Chronicle, 'South Bay teacher arrested in alleged rape of student two decades ago', March 2024·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Cerri, Boskovich & Allard
All Cerri, Boskovich & Allard proven verdicts →A Santa Clara County jury awarded $65 million to one of two plaintiffs, $102.5 million in total, against Union School District after finding it failed for years to act on repeated warnings about music teacher Samuel Neipp's sexual abuse of students at Dartmouth Middle School.
A Monterey County jury returned an $18.7 million verdict against Caltrans and a trucking company after finding the state had ignored three decades of its own data showing that the left-turn configuration on Highway 156 made the road one of California's most dangerous corridors.
Evergreen School District paid $15 million to four families whose second-grade daughters were sexually molested by teacher Craig Chandler at O.B. Whaley Elementary School in San Jose.
An Alameda County jury returned a $13.7 million verdict for the families of three San Jose workers whose Honda was struck head-on by a commercial truck after two other big rigs set off a chain-reaction crash inside a dense tule fog bank on State Route 152 in November 2012.
Related sexual abuse verdicts
A Riverside County jury awarded $2.28 billion on April 25, 2023, to a woman identified as Jane Doe who was sexually abused by her stepfather from age 5 until she was 14, at the family's Lake Elsinore home and at events and property of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The stepfather, who had pleaded guilty in 1997 to lewd acts with a child under 14 and served three years in state prison, admitted the abuse at deposition, then skipped the first day of jury selection and withdrew his answer rather than face a bench warrant. The church settled for $1 million and the mother for $200,000 before trial. The verdict, $836 million in compensatory damages and $1.44 billion in punitive damages after three days of deliberation, is one of the largest ever returned for a single survivor of childhood sexual abuse.
A Rio Arriba County jury held Acadia Healthcare and its New Mexico foster care subsidiaries responsible for placing an 8-year-old girl with a foster father who raped her repeatedly, returning one of the largest single-plaintiff sexual abuse verdicts in the country.
A St. Charles County judge entered a $300 million bench-trial judgment for a child, identified only as G.T., who was physically and sexually abused between the ages of three and five while in the care of Susan and James McLaurie, though one defendant died before the suit was filed and the only known insurance was a $303,000 policy.
A St. Charles County jury awarded $247.3 million to six women sexually assaulted by an unlicensed massage therapist at Oasis Foot Spa & Massage in St. Peters, finding the spa and its owner liable for hiring him without any background check and ignoring an early complaint. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed the judgment in full in 2024.