$30 Million Verdict Against Foster Agency That Cleared a Serial Abuser
Won by Estey & Bomberger.
A Santa Clara County jury awarded $30 million to a man who endured years of sexual abuse as a foster child, finding the Giarretto Institute 75 percent responsible for licensing and failing to monitor the Mountain View home where the abuse occurred.
What happened
In December 1995, an 11-year-old boy was placed into a Mountain View foster home licensed by the Giarretto Institute, a San Jose-based private foster family agency operating under a state license to screen and supervise foster placements. Over the next three and a half years, the foster parent, John Hardy Jackson, subjected the boy to more than 600 acts of sexual abuse.
When other children in Jackson's care reported the abuse during that period, the Giarretto Institute was responsible for investigating those reports. According to evidence presented at trial, every complaint was dismissed. Jackson continued to abuse the plaintiff until March 1999. He was not prosecuted until 2006, when a Santa Clara County jury convicted him on nine counts of lewd or lascivious acts by force, violence, duress, menace, and fear, and seven additional counts of lewd or lascivious acts on a child under 14.
Steve Estey of Estey and Bomberger filed suit on behalf of the plaintiff, who was 25 years old by the time the case reached trial. Two other defendants, Eastfield Ming Quong, Inc. (doing business as EMQ Children and Family Services) and Daybreak Childcare Network, Inc., settled before trial. The Giarretto Institute proceeded to verdict.
At trial, Estey argued that the Institute had a clear duty to properly monitor the homes it certified and to follow up credibly when abuse allegations arose. The jury agreed, finding the Giarretto Institute 75 percent liable for the plaintiff's injuries and Jackson 25 percent liable. On August 5, 2010, the jury returned a verdict of $30 million, making Giarretto responsible for $22.5 million of that total. Attorneys and legal reporters described it at the time as the largest single-plaintiff foster care abuse verdict in California.
No post-verdict reduction has been reported in available court records or press accounts.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Estey & Bomberger
All Estey & Bomberger proven verdicts →Ohio State University agreed to pay $100 million to 279 of 280 remaining plaintiffs who sued the university over decades of sexual abuse by former team physician Dr. Richard Strauss; Estey and Bomberger was among co-counsel firms representing survivors.
A Los Angeles judge awarded $60 million to three female taekwondo athletes who were sexually abused by their coach for seven years, a case that later prompted the California Supreme Court to hold that national sports governing bodies owe a legal duty to protect athletes from abuse.
A Los Angeles jury awarded $23 million in December 2012 after finding that LAUSD ignored repeated warning signs while a fifth-grade teacher molested a ten-year-old student dozens of times over the course of a school year.
A Southern California hospital agreed to the largest medical malpractice settlement in California history after a NICU nursing error with a feeding machine caused glucose overload and permanent brain damage in a five-week-premature newborn.
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.