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Los Angeles County has tentatively reached a $4 billion agreement to settle more than 6,800 childhood sexual abuse claims dating back to 1959 and allegedly perpetrated in juvenile facilities or foster care, officials said today, ABC 7 Eyewitness News‘ Sid Garcia reported. If the settlement is approved, it would potentially be the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history.
“On behalf of the County, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts,” the county’s Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport said in a statement. “The historic scope of this settlement makes clear that we are committed to helping the survivors recover and rebuild their lives-and to making and enforcing the systemic changes needed to keep young people safe.”
The settlement now must be approved by the L.A. County Claims Board and the Board of Supervisors. In a written statement to Eyewitness News, the L.A. County Board of Supervisors said in part: “We hope that this settlement, once approved, can bring some measure of healing to those who experienced abuse and help them in rebuilding their lives. As a Board, we are committed to holding County departments accountable for safeguarding the young people we serve, ensuring that reforms are enforced, and working with law enforcement to bring perpetrators to justice.”
The majority of the claims date from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s and are alleged to have happened at Probation Department facilities and at the MacLaren Children’s Center, which was permanently closed in 2003, according to a news release.
Investigations are ongoing, and two cases have been referred to the district attorney’s office for possible prosecution.
his marks the costliest financial settlement in the county’s history “and will have a significant impact on the County’s budget for years to come,” the news release said, adding that the county’s plan to pay for the settlement includes cash from reserve funds, issuance of judgment obligation bonds and proposed cuts in departmental budgets. The proposed settlement is scheduled to go before the Claims Board on April 7.
If approved, it will be considered by the Board of Supervisors on April 29. An attorney who helped negotiate the multi-billion-dollar settlement said, “Each individual person who is going to receive settlement money has their own individual case, and each case will be presented in the settlement process individually based upon that person’s facts and circumstances, the injuries and damages they sustained.”
In interviews with ABC News last April, attorneys for some of the victims said the abuse was common among juvenile detainees who did time throughout facilities in L.A. County for more than three decades. As a teenager in the early 2000s, Reanell Hartley was locked up inside the fences of Camp Scott, a juvenile facility run by the Los Angeles Probation Department in Santa Clarita. Hartley said she had a rough childhood, a victim of sexual abuse who was forced into prostitution when she was just 11. She had hoped Camp Scott would help to get her life back on track. “I was excited because I was told that I was going to find discipline, I was going to find rehabilitation within the juvenile probation system,” Hartley told ABC News. “The things that I found here was a total opposite.” Hartley alleged in a lawsuit that at Camp Scott she was repeatedly sexually abused by a probation officer. Camp Scott is now closed, but when it opened as a girls-only juvenile facility in 1987, it was touted as a model “boot camp” style facility, designed to “scare” young women “straight.” Detainees were told when they could eat, talk, and even when they could go to the bathroom. They showered in groups and were punished with solitary confinement.
L.A. County’s juvenile halls and camps came under scrutiny following reports of abuse and unsafe conditions, including by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2007, which forced L.A. County Probation into federal oversight for six years.
