$122.5 Million Settlement for 124 Survivors of Police Activities League Volunteer Eric Uller

For more than a decade stretching from the late 1980s into the early 2000s, Eric Uller had access to hundreds of children through the Santa Monica Police Activities League, a city-affiliated program meant to build trust between police and youth. Uller was a civilian police department employee who became a PAL volunteer, and at one point the city named him employee of the year. He preyed primarily on Latino boys between ages 8 and 15 from the Pico neighborhood, using food, money, gifts, and trips to sporting events to groom his victims. He used unmarked police vehicles and false credentials to isolate children and carry out the abuse.

Warning signs appeared as early as 1995, when a PAL employee reported that Uller was behaving inappropriately with children. Child pornography was later discovered on his work computer. Despite these reports, the city did not conduct a meaningful investigation. Uller continued working and volunteering until 2018, when an anonymous tip finally prompted his arrest on charges of lewd and lascivious acts with a minor. He died by suicide three weeks later, before any criminal trial.

Survivors began filing civil claims after California extended its statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse in October 2019, raising the cutoff age from 26 to 40 and opening a three-year window for older victims whose claims had previously been time-barred. Claims accumulated steadily. By the time of the April 2023 settlement, 124 plaintiffs were included in the global resolution, bringing the city's cumulative payouts across all Uller-related cases to nearly $230 million.

McGee Lerer Ogrin, led on these cases by partner Catherine Lerer, filed 14 of the settled claims. The firm was also representing a substantial portion of the roughly 180 additional claimants whose cases remained open at the time of the settlement announcement. Lerer told local press that the focus should remain on how Uller was able to abuse children for nearly three decades inside a city-run program, with documented warnings going unheeded.

The $122.5 million settlement was structured without a trial verdict. Santa Monica officials acknowledged the abuse as a 'sad chapter' in the city's history and announced a set of institutional reforms, including updated volunteer screening procedures, a citywide code of conduct, and the creation of a child protection committee. The city financed the payout by borrowing against other municipal resources. At the time of the settlement, attorneys anticipated that additional claims from younger survivors, who had more time remaining under the extended statute of limitations, would continue to be filed for years.