Lawsuits spanning decades allege sex abuse, hit Modesto-area Boy Scouts, schools, foster care

She was 4 or 5 when the trauma began.

Her Modesto foster parent sexually assaulted her 20 to 30 times over the course of a year at his home, according to a lawsuit filed last month in Stanislaus County Superior Court.

The girl told her social worker what was happening, but the Stanislaus County Community Services Agency did nothing for a month as the abuse continued, the lawsuit alleges.

Today that little girl is 65, but the emotional scars from that abuse still linger. Her name is withheld due to the nature of the allegations. Until recently, she had limited legal recourse.

Her lawsuit is one of 55 filed since May in Stanislaus County related to sexual abuse or assault, reporting by The Modesto Bee has revealed. The abuse allegations against foster parents, schoolteachers, Scoutmasters, religious leaders and others in positions of authority over children range from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s. The lawsuits also accuse a host of institutions of complicity or neglect.

Multiple lawsuits target the county’s foster care system, its school districts and religious institutions. The majority target the Boy Scouts of America’s local council in Modesto.

The Scouting lawsuits may face an uncertain path forward because the BSA filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2020 to allow it to pay sexual abuse claims and reorganize. The 250 local councils across the nation are not part of the bankruptcy.

Lawsuits have been filed against the Modesto, Ceres, Stanislaus Union and Sylvan school districts.

Three Sylvan lawsuits allege an elementary school teacher assaulted three students in the late 1980s. A fourth lawsuit involves an elementary school counselor during the same time period.

A former Franklin Elementary School student is suing Modesto City Schools for alleged abuse in 1971. Attorneys for a 57-year-old man have filed a lawsuit alleging that when he was 15, he was sexually assaulted and molested in 1980 at Ceres High. Stanislaus Union faces a lawsuit from a former Eisenhut Elementary School student who alleges abuse by a homeroom teacher from 1999-2000.

Wave of litigation

The catalyst for this extraordinary wave of litigation was Assembly Bill 218, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October 2019, which extended the statute of limitations for adults to sue over childhood sexual abuse claims.

In a news release in 2019, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, praised the law as a “major step forward,” saying that “survivors often take decades to come forward about their abuse.”

Before AB 218, the statute of limitations had been age 26 or within three years of discovery, whichever was later.

Plaintiffs now can file lawsuits up to age 40 or within five years of discovering that their psychological injury was caused by the childhood assault, whichever is later.

The law also opened a three-year look-back period for others to file lawsuits in cases where the statute of limitations had expired.

As the Dec. 31, 2022, deadline approached to file such lawsuits, litigation swept across the state. In Stanislaus County, dozens of suits were filed in Superior Court. Thirty-four were filed in December and one in January, which was allowed because the deadline to file was a Saturday and the court was closed.

Under AB 218, the lawsuits in which the plaintiff is older than 40 identify the defendants as “Does.” Litigation can be amended to include the defendants’ names after a plaintiff’s attorney has provided the judge with corroboration of at least one of the allegations.

However, some cases now provide sufficient identifying details or have advanced enough to disclose the kinds of people accused of harm: church leaders, teachers, foster care parents and troop leaders.

Countless cases, billions of dollars

Because each AB 218 lawsuit is filed in the county where the alleged abuse took place, no one has determined how many there are across California’s 58 counties, said Bay Area attorney Rick Simons, who has specialized in childhood sexual abuse lawsuits for two decades.

But the number is in the thousands. Herman Law, a national firm with offices in Southern California and the Bay Area, is handling 2,500 cases, including 10 in Stanislaus County.

Records may no longer exist for these decades-old cases, Simons said, so the plaintiffs and their testimony are the key.

“Having worked with victims for a couple of decades now, it (the assault) was like yesterday for them,” he said. “Juries are adept and capable of determining whether this is truthful or not. While verdicts have gone both ways, more often than not, they say the plaintiff was truthful.”

For the defendants, the costs are high. In 2003, the last time California revised the statute of limitations and created a one-year window for survivors of sexual assault, Catholic dioceses paid more than $1.2 billion in damages to settle the 850 lawsuits that victims had filed.

Ignoring red flags

Even if the abuse wasn’t explicitly articulated by a child, an entity still could be legally responsible if it ignored red flags, said Herman Law attorney Blake Woodhall.

The most common examples of such warnings include teachers holding hands with students or initiating hugs, he said. He cited another example where one teacher regularly had female students sit on his lap. Other teachers saw these red flags but didn’t report them, according to court records.

“There is no hard case law on this type of thing,” Woodhall said. “Red flags are largely subjective and in some cases will be argued to a jury.”

The Stanislaus Union, Modesto, Ceres, and Sylvan Unified districts all said they have received and are addressing the lawsuits. They reiterated the importance of student safety and the seriousness of the allegations.

“The district was made aware of legal claims alleging sexual misconduct from the 1980s,” Sylvan Superintendent Diolinda Peterson said in a statement. “While the staff involved in the claims have not worked for the district for decades, we want the community to know that the district is committed to reviewing and addressing the lawsuits with integrity.”

Peterson said the school district could not say more because of its ongoing investigations and the pending litigation.

Herman Law also is representing numerous clients suing the Stanislaus County foster care system for alleged abuse by foster parents and for the county’s alleged negligence.

“Foster care kids are prisoners of their abuse,” Woodhall said. “They are forced to live in the abusive environment and have nowhere to go and nobody actively protecting them, so they are living in a nightmare.”

The county was served with three cases pertaining to its foster care system, said county spokeswoman Sonya Severo, who declined to comment further.

Like the case filed by the 65-year-old woman in Modesto, some lawsuits allege that county social workers learned of abuse but waited days before securing a new home for the child, Woodhall said. Meanwhile, the child continued to endure the abuse, the lawsuits allege.

In more egregious cases, Woodhall said, a social worker didn’t believe a child, further shaming him or her.

“I hope that this influx (in cases) will affect even more change to make sure it doesn’t continue to happen,” Woodhall said. “There are so many instances where something could have been done and it wasn’t.”

Boy Scouts bankruptcy

The Bee found about three dozen lawsuits involving the Boy Scouts. They allege sexual assaults took place in communities throughout the Northern San Joaquin Valley and its foothills from the mid-1960s through the mid-2000s.

But Greater Yosemite Council President Bob French said last week that the council had been served with only four lawsuits and stays have been issued against them as the BSA bankruptcy process proceeds.

The BSA bankruptcy reorganization plan includes nearly $2.5 billion for a trust to compensate victims of sexual assault. French said the BSA faces 82,000 claims filed across the nation.

French said the Greater Yosemite Council is contributing its Camp John Mensinger in Twain Harte, valued at $1.6 million, toward the trust. He said this essentially protects the council from the local lawsuits as long as the bankruptcy gets its final approval.

A bankruptcy judge has approved the BSA’s reorganization plan. A district judge will hold a hearing in February and is expected to make a decision in March. An approval would allow the BSA to emerge from bankruptcy and for the trust to start its work.

Scouting officials have said the BSA has instituted reforms to protect its children and will institute others. French likened the lawsuits filed in Stanislaus County against the Greater Yosemite Council as “insurance policies” in case the bankruptcy falls apart.

One lawsuit that includes the local council among the defendants claims a Stanislaus County man born in 1977 was sexually assaulted when he participated in Scouting in Manteca as a boy.

The lawsuit states as a result of his abuse in Scouting, the man has suffered from “depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, emotional distress ... and feelings of worthlessness, shamefulness and embarrassment ... .”

The lawsuit identifies the Boy Scouts of America as a non-party in the lawsuit but states that as early as 1919, the BSA maintained files of ineligible volunteers to keep sexual abusers out of Scouting but ignored those files and allowed pedophiles to prey upon children.

And another lawsuit that includes the local council as a defendant states a Stockton man was sexually assaulted and molested by an adult when the man participated in Scouting as an 11-year-old in 1969-70. The lawsuit states the abuser used gifts, privileges and other rewards to gain the young boy’s compliance.

Stockton Diocese bankruptcy

The Stockton Diocese also declared bankruptcy, in 2014. Due to an injunction in its reorganization plan, the diocese — covering Stanislaus, Alpine, Calaveras, Mono, San Joaquin and Tuolumne counties — cannot be sued for sexual abuse that occurred before 2014, the year it filed for bankruptcy.

But $750,000 of a $14.2 million trust established for sexual abuse victims was set aside for “unknown tort claims” that were filed after the 2014 deadline, according to court documents. In April, the bankruptcy case was reopened for the limited purpose of establishing procedures for payment of such claims.

Only six people in this category had filed tort claims, according to documents at that time, and it’s unclear how many have been filed since then. Victims have until Feb. 14, 2024, to file claims.

The tort claims for late filers allow victims to get a piece of a limited pool of money, but nothing more than five figures. Lawsuits usually result in larger settlements.

If not for the injunction, Simons — who serves as a plaintiff liaison for cases against the Catholic Church — estimates 80 to 130 lawsuits would have been filed against the Stockton Diocese under the new law, similar to the number of lawsuits filed against the Sacramento and Fresno dioceses.

In cases in which the organization or institution has not filed bankruptcy, the payout for the victim can happen quickly. CrossPoint Community Church, formerly First Baptist, already had paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to two women who were abused by different youth pastors. It did so after a series of stories from The Bee about decades of abuse and subsequent cover-ups in the 1970s and 1980s.

CrossPoint faces several recent lawsuits from men alleging abuse and molestation. The church has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

A case filed in May alleges that Sikh priest Khem Singh abused a girl in 1994 at the Hughson temple. Singh later was convicted of sexual assault and died of starvation in prison in 2004, and an attorney for the temple did not respond to comment. Another case refers generally to abuse by a youth group leader at a Modesto “religious entity.”

Two cases name religious organizations, First United Methodist Church in Tracy and the Church of Latter-Day Saints in Turlock, as party to abuse that occurred through Scouting. In both cases, the churches had sponsored a local troop.

The United Methodist Church and the Mormon Church applied to join the Boy Scouts of America’s bankruptcy claim. A judge has denied the Mormon Church’s claim and has yet to rule on the claim by the United Methodist Church, though Methodist conference treasurer Diane Knudsen expects the judge to affirm it.

While high-profile abuse cases and movements like #MeToo have raised awareness about sexual assault, both for adults and children, Simons said that coming forward about abuse is still difficult for victims, even decades later.

“This is not the kind of thing people want to make up and talk about,” he said.

While the three-year window closed Dec. 31, Woodhall predicts more cases will be filed, with lawyers arguing the deadline is actually June 27.

That’s because, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, Emergency Rule 9 of the California Rules of Court stopped the clock on statutes of limitations for civil cases from April 6, 2020, to Oct. 1, 2020.

“The courts were closed and people were quarantined,” Woodhall said. “Bottom line is ... you couldn’t just go into court and file a lawsuit during that time. That is right in the middle of that window. It is going to be a total mess. The defendants are going to scream that the statute is not fair and fight tooth and nail.”

He predicts the California Supreme Court eventually will have to settle the issue.