$20.6 Million for One Survivor in Verdict Against Union School District Over Teacher Abuse
After trial: The jury awarded this survivor $37.5 million, all for pain and emotional distress, and found the district 55 percent responsible. The teacher was not a defendant, so under California's Proposition 51 the district owes its share, about $20.6 million.
Won by Taylor & Ring, LLP.
A Santa Clara County jury awarded $37.5 million to a woman represented by Natalie Weatherford of Taylor & Ring, part of a combined $102.5 million verdict against Union School District for failing to act on years of warnings about music teacher Samuel Neipp, who abused her and another student at Dartmouth Middle School. The trial judge later denied the district's motion for a new trial and its challenge to the judgment, leaving the verdict intact.
What happened
Samuel Neipp taught music at Dartmouth Middle School in San Jose, and for years Union School District had reasons to look harder at him. Parents alerted administrators about inappropriate text messages he was sending to female students in 2010 and again in 2013. The district did not remove him from the classroom. Instead it granted him tenure and later named him Teacher of the Year. His abuse of students, which began as early as 2009, continued until 2017.
Neipp was arrested in 2017 after threatening to publish intimate images of one of his victims. He eventually pleaded no contest to a dozen felony charges and received a 56 year prison sentence. The criminal case answered what Neipp had done. It did not answer why a teacher who had drawn repeated parental complaints was still alone with students years later. That question went to a civil jury.
Two survivors sued the district in 2019, and their cases were consolidated for a single trial in Santa Clara County Superior Court. Natalie Weatherford of the Los Angeles firm Taylor & Ring represented the second plaintiff, identified in court only as Jane Doe 2, a woman who came forward after Neipp's arrest. San Jose attorney Lauren Cerri represented the other plaintiff. The trial turned on what administrators knew and when, and on the district's decision to defend itself by pointing elsewhere. "Their strategy at trial was to blame everyone but themselves and they took zero responsibility during the trial," Weatherford told KTVU.
In late March 2022, the jury returned a combined verdict of $102.5 million. It awarded Weatherford's client $37.5 million, finding the district 55 percent responsible for the harm she suffered, and awarded the other plaintiff $65 million, with the district 80 percent responsible. The total was widely reported as one of the largest civil awards in Santa Clara County history in a school sexual abuse case.
The district did not accept the number quietly. It moved for a new trial and challenged the judgment, arguing the award was excessive. Later in 2022, Superior Court Judge Eric Geffon denied both motions and left the verdict standing in full. For a district that spent trial deflecting responsibility, the ruling closed the argument: twelve jurors and the judge who heard the same evidence both concluded the warnings were real, the inaction was the district's, and the price of that inaction was $102.5 million.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.KTVU FOX 2·Archived copy
- 2.Los Angeles Times (via Yahoo): Jury awards $102.5 million to two students molested by San Jose music teacher·Archived copy
- 3.Patch (Cupertino)·Archived copy
- 4.Union Leader: Judge upholds $102.5M verdict against school district·Archived copy
- 5.Taylor & Ring, LLP (firm)·Archived copy
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