On Friday, Los Angeles County officials announced an unprecedented $4 billion settlement over thousands of claims of sexual abuse in the county foster care system and juvenile facilities.
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Attorney Adam Slater with Slater Slater Schulman LLP, which represented more than 3,500 of the 6,800 alleged survivors involved in the suit, told KNX News the settlement is “proof that the law actually does work.”
“Survivors, historically and the science shows, do not come forward typically until they are in their 50s,” he said. “And the law acknowledged that, and it allowed my clients their time that they needed to come forward.”
The abuse claims date back as far as the 1980s, with many involving the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, which closed in 2003. The first case was filed in 2021 after a change in state law extended the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse survivors to initiate claims.
“The magnitude is absolutely horrific, how many people it affected in both MacLaren Hall and the juvenile detention facilities run by the county of Los Angeles,” Slater said. “The abuse was known to the staff, clearly. It was more than an open secret because everybody knew it was happening. You know, my clients, there were many of them that reported what was going on and of course, they were just ignored and fell on deaf ears.”
Slater said that while the monetary damages won’t undo the trauma the survivors endured, he’s hopeful the settlement will help prevent abuse from happening to more children in the future.
“In this case and in others, it is the institutions that are enabling the abuse and the abusers that must be held accountable,” he said. “And these settlements hopefully act as a major deterrent to institutions, because they see what happened and safeguards are put in place that protect against the infiltration of their organizations from the abusers.”
The settlement is the largest sexual assault settlement in U.S. history. The second largest is the $2.46 billion settlement reached with the Boy Scouts of America, which Slater was also involved in negotiating.
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