Jury Finds Los Angeles County 45 Percent Liable For Failing To Stop Child Sexual Abuse
After trial: Reduced and paid in part. The $45.4 million verdict left Los Angeles County liable for about $20.7 million as its 45 percent share, and the county reduced that to a $10.5 million judgment, paying the first $5.5 million in the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year (WitnessLA, January 2020).
Won by Taylor & Ring, LLP.
A Los Angeles County jury found the county's Department of Children and Family Services 45 percent responsible for years of sexual abuse a girl suffered in her El Monte home, returning a $45.4 million verdict in July 2018 and splitting the rest of the fault between the girl's mother and four men who lived in the apartment. Two DCFS social workers had been monitoring the family and knew a man with an arrest record for sexual abuse of a minor was staying there, but never called the county hotline or the police. The county's 45 percent share, about $20.7 million, was later brought down to a $10.5 million judgment, of which the county paid $5.5 million in the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year. David Ring and Louanne Masry represented the girl at trial.
What happened
By 2010, a man named Louis Fluet was living in the El Monte apartment where a mother was raising her seven-year-old daughter. Fluet had an arrest record involving sexual abuse of a minor. Two Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services social workers, Elbis Severo and Lucia So, were monitoring the family after an earlier referral about one of the children, and Severo warned the mother she could lose custody if she let Fluet stay. The mother signed an affidavit saying he did not live there. Neither social worker called the county's child abuse hotline or notified El Monte police, and the county did not remove the girl from the home. Severo later recommended in writing that the case be closed.
Over the next two years the girl was repeatedly sexually abused in the apartment by men who lived or stayed there, among them Fluet and Tim Martinson. She disclosed the abuse in 2012, on a trip to New Mexico with her father, and was taken out of the home. Her mother and four of the men were later charged, tried and convicted. Trial testimony described flashbacks and nightmares, poor hygiene, fear driven behavior inside the home, and difficulty telling ordinary situations from abusive ones.
The girl's father, her legal guardian, sued Los Angeles County and DCFS on her behalf in Los Angeles Superior Court in June 2013, arguing that the social workers had a mandatory duty to report once they had reasonable suspicion the girl was being abused. The suit also named the girl's mother and the four men. The county's outside counsel, Christie Bodnar Swiss, argued that nothing available to the social workers in 2010 amounted to reasonable suspicion of sexual abuse, and that the county had no grounds to remove the girl before her 2012 disclosure.
The case was tried in July 2018. Jurors heard from the social workers, the mother, the father and the girl herself, and watched video depositions in which Fluet and Martinson denied abusing her. After deliberating about four and a half hours, the jury set total damages at $45.4 million on July 26, 2018, and apportioned fault: 45 percent to Los Angeles County, 45 percent to the girl's mother, and 10 percent collectively to the four men. The county's share came to roughly $20.7 million.
The county's share did not stay at that figure. Reviewing county litigation payouts in January 2020, WitnessLA reported that Los Angeles County brought the amount down from about $20.7 million to a $10.5 million judgment and paid the first $5.5 million of it during the 2018 to 2019 fiscal year. Public reporting does not say whether the reduction came from post trial motions, a negotiated compromise, or both, and no appellate opinion in the case has been located. What the girl and her mother and the four convicted men collected, if anything, is not public. By the time of trial the girl, then 15, was living with her father in New Mexico, attending high school and in ongoing therapy, and her father testified that she had begun talking about becoming an FBI agent.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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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.