The bill for sex abuse cases has come due in California, and lawmakers are trying to deal with the sticker shock.
It’s been six years since Gov. Gavin Newsom signed AB 218, dramatically expanding the time people have to file lawsuits alleging they were sexually abused as children. Since then, school districts and other public entities have spent billions defending against the rush of lawsuits the law made possible.
Faced with the worsening fallout, legislators are under pressure to rein in AB 218 and stem the bleeding.
How to do so, however, has proven difficult. The search for a solution pits the interests of past students seeking justice for old horrors against kids today whose education is impacted by the legal fees and payouts their school districts are being forced to pay. It’s the type of zero-sum calculation politicians loathe: Any help they give to schools means taking away some of what they gave to abuse victims.
Lawmakers have failed in the closing days of the legislative session this week to reach agreement on a piece of legislation that would provide some relief to school districts. The measure came about because of agitation by people like Anthony Ranii, superintendent of Montecito Union Elementary School District, a tiny school district outside of Santa Barbara. An outspoken critic of AB 218, Ranii has had to deal with its impact firsthand after three former students sued the district over claims they were sexually abused by a school principal in the 1970s.
Ranii met earlier this year with state Sen. Monique Limón, the incoming leader of the Senate, to try to convince her of the need to rethink the law. He hammered on its mounting financial toll that he and others say risk driving districts into insolvency. And he highlighted the impossible position school districts are in defending themselves against claims from decades past when the accused and witnesses are often dead and documents long gone.
However compelling Ranii’s arguments might have been, Limón and her colleagues are keenly aware of the risk of weakening the law too much and being seen as abandoning the abuse victims they initially sought to help.
“This is just thankless, but somebody needs to do it,” said state Sen. John Laird, the author of the reform bill, during a hearing in July. “The victims are depending on us to hold their rights, and the school districts and local governments are depending on us to not go belly up. So we have to figure out a way to do our best toward both.”
Assembly Bill 218 allows people to seek damages for assaults until they turn 40 or within five years of becoming aware of trauma caused by the alleged abuse, essentially increasing the previous statute of limitations on cases by 14 years. It also created a window for expired cases to be revived through the end of 2022.
The bill’s author, Lorena Gonzalez, who now leads the powerful California Labor Federation, said she was inspired to push for the changes after hearing from sexual assault survivors. The bill came about against the backdrop of the #MeToo movement. The names of infamous predators like Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore and Larry Nassar were invoked during debates. A broad coalition ranging from police chiefs to social workers who believed it was too easy for abusers to avoid accountability came out in support of the measure.
“We were looking back at what had happened previously but also sort of as a warning to these institutions and schools — that they needed to be far more attentive and take responsibility for this,” said Hannah-Beth Jackson, the former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which advanced the bill.
Projections of the financial hit public entities would take under the new rules were “far less than what we’re seeing now,” Gonzalez said in an interview, adding that no city or county representatives came to hearings to sound the alarm.
Newsom’s Department of Finance, however, raised concerns, noting the bill could pull “hundreds of millions to low billions of dollars” away from school funding.
A spokesperson for the governor declined to comment.
Amid the groundswell of support for victims of abuse, lawmakers also saw first-hand the risks of questioning the wisdom of the law.
After he voiced concerns about the financial exposure school districts would face if AB 218 passed, state Sen. Ben Allen, a Los Angeles Democrat, said a photo of him with Nasser, the disgraced former U.S. women’s national gymnastics team doctor who was convicted of sexually assaulting hundreds of young women and girls, was emailed to delegates at that year’s California Democratic Party Convention.
“The only thing worse than a sexual predator is a politician who shields them,” Allen recalled the email stating.
Allen blamed Richie Ross, a lobbyist for an attorneys association that was pushing for AB 218, as well as a longtime consultant for Gonzalez and other Democratic lawmakers. Ross declined to comment. Gonzalez said she did not know about the email before it was sent, stressing that Ross was not working for her on the bill.
Allen ultimately voted for the bill, which passed the Senate 33-0 and the Assembly 69-0.
“People end up voting for these things in spite of concerns because they don’t want to be attacked,” Allen said. “There’s no question in my mind that we could have passed a responsible version of this bill that would have met the goals of the author and all of us, while also lessening the devastating impact on public agencies and entities.”
He added: “Shame on us.”
Max Allen didn’t know about AB 218 until 2020, when he was interviewed as a potential witness by an investigator looking into allegations that one of Allen’s teachers in the 1970s had abused students.
Allen, who is not related to Ben Allen, claimed that he had been a victim himself. In a lengthy conversation, he recalled to the investigator how the teacher had brought him on trips to the Great America amusement park, overnight stays at an inn next to the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, and a cruise to Mexico over spring break that also included the school’s principal. He accused school administrators of turning a blind eye. (The teacher was criminally convicted of lewd and lascivious behavior with children under 14 in 1982.)
Allen, now 57, joined a lawsuit with four other men against the Union School District in San Jose and in 2022 reached a settlement in which the district paid them $7.5 million. “If that law hadn’t allowed me to voice what happened to me, I’d likely still be an alcoholic. I’d likely have gone back to ruining my life,” Allen said.
Cases like Allen’s have multiplied. A survey of 1,340 public entities found the number of sexual abuse claims filed each year against school districts has tripled since AB 218 passed from 63 in the 2019 school year to 193 last year.
Superintendents like Ranii at Montecito Union have been left to deal with the fallout. Trying to mount a defense against the allegations by the three former students has been next to impossible, Ranii said. The accused principal is dead, few documents from the time remain, and none of the people the district has tracked down who were connected to the school five decades ago had direct knowledge of the allegations, he said. A firm the district hired to search for insurance policies it may have had at time of the alleged abuse came up empty, leaving the district on the hook to pay settlements and legal fees.
Such disadvantages leave districts with few options, said Faith Borges, legislative advocate for the California Association of Joint Powers Authorities, which represents groups of small public entities that pool resources.
“It is kind of a tug-at-your-heartstrings, compelling narrative that you just end up paying. It’s not like someone could really prove it in most instances,” Borges said.
Ultimately, the district paid $400,000 to settle with one of the former students without admitting fault. A trial for the other two is set to begin later this month. A jury could easily hand down a verdict that would wipe out the roughly $10 million Ranii said the district has in reserves.
Amid increasing complaints from local governments about the costs of defending against the claims or paying settlements, the Legislature commissioned a report last year by the state’s education watchdog on the impact of the law. The report estimated school districts had paid between $2 and $3 billion as of January.
The total for public entities spiked in April, when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $4 billion settlement with 6,800 people who claimed they had suffered abuse in county-run juvenile facilities. The payout, which is the largest of its kind in U.S. history, covered cases dating back to 1959.
A few months later, the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second largest school district in the country, issued $500 million in bond debt to help cover the costs stemming from more than 370 cases filed since AB 218 became law. The sum, the district said in a staff report, would allow it to continue providing “essential services and opportunities to students, particularly those from underserved communities.”
In a state where more than half of the school districts have 2,500 students or fewer, these smaller districts are more vulnerable than behemoths like LAUSD.
Like many small municipalities and school districts, a rural, high-poverty district in Tulare County joined a “risk pool” with several other public entities nearby to make insurance affordable. Because of cases against others in the pool, the district has seen its premiums grow by nearly $370,000 since last year – the cost of employing more than two teachers, according to a district administrator.
“Insurance works on what’s known and forecasts the unknown going forward,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which wrote the report commissioned by the Legislature. “But it forecasts that unknown going forward based on the past, and we’ve completely changed the story of the past.”
At least two school districts and one county have asked the California Supreme Court to review the legality of AB 218, arguing it forces settlement payments that amount to unconstitutional gifts of public funds. The court has so far declined to review the law and last year, a lower court stated that while it was “not unsympathetic” to the concerns of school districts, “to the extent that AB 218 excessively strains school district budgets or has other negative unintended consequences, recourse is with the Legislature.”
Any talk of needing to roll back the reach of AB 218 has been met with scorn by lawyers representing victims, who have mounted an organized, strident campaign against reforms.
Ben Allen, the Democratic state senator who had the photo of him and Nasser sent around, became a target again earlier this year when he introduced a bill that sought to raise the burden of proof for abuse cases. He pulled it amid an attack from plaintiffs’ attorneys, led by the firm Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, which specializes in representing sexual abuse victims. In fliers and letters to lawmakers, they dubbed the bill “Ben Allen’s Predator Shield Law.” And they called Allen the “worst possible and frankly the least credible legislator to propose these radical changes in child sexual assault legislation” because the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District was facing sex abuse cases that it’s board discussed when Allen was a member more than a decade ago.
“I’ve been in the Senate for 11 years, and I’ve never seen personal attacks associated with a policy position on a bill,” Allen said. “It’s one thing if you want to take issue with the substance of the bill, but to engage in that kind of personal attack — it was really beyond the pale.”
The Manly firm teamed up with another firm in Irvine to produce a 375-page rebuttal to the state watchdog’s report titled “CHILD RAPE, LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS.” In it they argued the report was biased in favor of public entities, saying its authors had not interviewed any victims and overstated the fiscal impact on school districts.
“This is an engineered crisis by school districts and public entities to scream to the Legislature when there are solutions built into the law already,” said Morgan Stewart, an attorney at Manly, Stewart & Finaldi.
Lorena Gonzalez, the author of AB 218, isn’t convinced. In April, she posted on social media that she supported proposals to place caps on attorneys’ fees and other rollbacks of the law, claiming that some “unscrupulous attorneys” were exploiting it as a “feeding frenzy.” Justice is important, she said, but “we cannot allow cities and counties and school districts to go bankrupt.”
The bill by Sen. John Laird that was being discussed this week as the legislative session came to a close, SB 577, was considerably less ambitious than the one Allen floated. It would have raised the burden of proof for plaintiffs over 40 years old, banned people from seeking triple damages and prohibited refiling of certain childhood sexual assault claims against public entities.
The bill cleared a key vote in the Assembly Judiciary Committee in July with the understanding that both sides would keep working on the final language. But as the clock ticked on negotiations this week, Laird faced pressure from both sides.
Zero Abuse Project, a victims’ rights group, warned the bill would weaken “one of the strongest child protection laws in the country” and that a rushed deal to amend AB 218 would “put children at risk of being molested.”
School districts and counties, meanwhile, pushed for more protections even as negotiations appeared to be falling apart. The California State Association of Counties sought to require a higher burden of proof for claims and have public entities’ legal costs covered in baseless cases.
In the end, Laird gave up. He pulled the proposal, leaving AB 218 unchanged and school districts and counties to fend for themselves until someone mounts another effort.
Democratic Assemblymember Dawn Addis, who authored a separate measure that eliminated the statute of limitations entirely for child sexual assault lawsuits filed after 2024, highlighted the conundrum facing lawmakers.
She conceded that Laird’s bill had some “righteous goals in it.”
But, she stressed, lawmakers “cannot balance the budgets of public entities on the backs of survivors by silencing their voices and putting barriers in front of them.”