Gary Dordick

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.

On September 16, 2025, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury found Joseph Ruffalo, an 85-year-old former music manager and 1980s film producer, liable for sexual battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress against his former stepdaughter, A.Z., who testified that he abused her from 1991, when she was six, until 2007, when she was 22. The unanimous jury deliberated two hours and forty minutes and awarded $85 million in compensatory damages and $30 million in punitive damages. A.Z. had reported the abuse to police in the United States and Britain without result; Ruffalo was never charged. Her mother was a co-defendant and resolved the claims against her before trial. Ruffalo told the jury he could not pay.

On June 17, 2024, a Los Angeles Superior Court jury unanimously awarded $900 million, $100 million compensatory and $800 million punitive, to a former employee of Alkiviades "Alki" David's companies who was sexually harassed and raped by him between 2016 and 2019. Liability had already been established before trial, so the jury sat only on damages, and the defense table was empty. In September 2024 the trial judge ruled that the award shocked the conscience and conditionally granted a new trial unless the plaintiff accepted $90 million, $10 million compensatory plus $80 million punitive. David filed a notice of appeal at the end of September 2024 and has said publicly that none of the women who have won verdicts against him will ever be paid.

Francisco Briones, 21, was turning left on a green light on his way to a 5 a.m. warehouse shift in Oxnard on March 23, 2013, when Christopher Zink, drunk at 0.14 percent, awake for 24 hours and asleep at the wheel, ran a red light at about 50 mph and hit him. Briones' C4-5 vertebrae ruptured and he was paralyzed from the neck down. Zink pleaded guilty to felony DUI causing injury and went to prison for seven years; his insurer, Nationwide, had refused a timely policy-limits demand. On January 22, 2016, a Ventura County jury found Zink 100 percent at fault, found malice, and awarded $125,168,202, half of it punitive damages. The court rejected Zink's Proposition 213 motion to strip the pain-and-suffering award but reduced the judgment post-trial to about $85 million.

A Maricopa County jury found Banner Health and physician Dr. Laurie Erickson negligent in the 2014 delivery of Greyson Griepentrog, who suffered oxygen deprivation and cerebral palsy after nurses kept increasing his mother's Pitocin dose despite fetal heart tracings showing distress, and returned a $31,550,825 verdict, the largest medical malpractice award in Arizona history.

Antonio Steward, a 17-year-old student, was sitting on a stairwell outside his family's Fontana apartment at 12:30 a.m. on August 26, 2006, when a Crips gang member from a nearby group of ten men drinking and partying in violation of the complex rules shot him nine times. The Stratus Security guard on duty had spoken to the group about a noise complaint and then walked to his car to write a report. Gangrene cost Steward both legs above the knee that day, and he went through 56 more surgeries that removed 40 percent of his stomach. On June 13, 2013, after a trifurcated trial, a San Bernardino County jury found the security companies and their owners 49 percent at fault and set his damages at $55,151,509.72; after apportionment under California's several-liability rule he recovers $27,024,239.76.

Cesar Sosa was crossing mid-block near Los Angeles International Airport in the middle of the night, wearing dark clothing, when Michael Shabun, driving home from a business trip for drone maker DJI Technology, struck him. Sosa suffered multiple fractures, a traumatic brain injury and the amputation of his left leg. DJI argued Shabun was off the clock because he had stopped at a gas station to meet a friend on the way; the court rejected that defense and let the jury decide whether the trip home was within the scope of employment. On November 7, 2017, the jury found Shabun and DJI liable and set damages at about $31.2 million, but assigned Sosa 65 percent of the fault for jaywalking, leaving a net recovery of about $10.9 million.