$4 Billion, and Still Counting: Inside the Largest Child Sexual-Abuse Settlement in U.S. History

On April 29, 2025, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to approve a $4 billion settlement — the largest child sexual-abuse settlement in United States history, larger than the payouts by the Boy Scouts of America or any single Catholic diocese. It resolves roughly 6,800 claims from people who say they were sexually abused as children inside institutions the county ran to protect them: its juvenile detention halls, and MacLaren Children’s Center, the foster shelter operated by the county’s Department of Children and Family Services. Six months later, the county agreed to add $828 million more for hundreds of additional survivors, pushing the potential total past $4.8 billion. The number is historic. What it represents is worse: decades in which the system knew and did not stop it.

These figures come from the county’s own board actions, from court filings, and from reporting by outlets including The Imprint and Courthouse News. This is not a case of allegations awaiting a verdict. The county has approved the money, and its own chief executive has apologized.

MacLaren Hall: a shelter that became a hunting ground

MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte operated from 1961 to 2003 as an emergency shelter for foster children — some of them very young — housing as many as 300 at a time while they waited for placement. It was supposed to be the safe pause between a removal and a foster home. Instead, survivors say, it was where the abuse began. The first two plaintiffs filed suit in 2021; within a year, the litigation had grown to include more than a thousand people who said they were mistreated, tortured, and sexually abused at MacLaren and at county probation halls and camps. The common thread, according to the complaints, was that county staff used their positions of trust to abuse children in their care — and that supervisors were repeatedly told and did nothing.

The county’s job was to be the safe place children landed after being taken from danger. For thousands of them, it was the danger.

The background checks that never happened

The negligence was not abstract. According to the litigation, the county failed to run routine background checks on MacLaren staff, leaving “dozens” of employees with criminal backgrounds working around vulnerable children. When checks were finally run in 2001 — two years before the facility closed — 17 then-current employees had criminal histories that should have disqualified them from working with children. And this was not a secret the lawsuits uncovered decades later: a 2006 U.S. Department of Justice investigation into the county’s juvenile facilities concluded there was a systemic failure to protect youth from harm by staff, and found that only about four percent of staff had received formal child-abuse training in the prior two years.

An apology, and a reckoning the county tried to avoid

County Chief Executive Officer Fesia Davenport apologized “wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed,” and county officials published a list of reforms — background checks at hire and promotion, a program that flags new criminal records for employees and foster parents, a dedicated abuse-reporting hotline, and expedited outside review of allegations. Those reforms are welcome. They are also an admission: every one of them names a safeguard that did not exist while thousands of children were being harmed.

In the interest of the accuracy this outlet insists on, one caveat belongs here. After the settlement, the Los Angeles Times reported that some individual claims may be questionable — a small number of people said they were paid to sue, and one man said a claim was filed in his name without his consent. Unions and some officials have called for a state forensic audit of how the settlement was assembled. None of that erases what is documented at MacLaren and the juvenile halls, or the county’s own apology and reforms. But honest reporting notes it, and any fair audit that separates real survivors from opportunistic claims serves the survivors, not the county’s critics.

What real accountability would look like

A record settlement is not the same as accountability, and the county’s own budget math shows why: it plans to pay for this with reserves, bonds, and departmental cuts stretching to the 2050s — meaning the public, not the individuals who abused children or the supervisors who ignored it, absorbs the cost. Real accountability would mean naming and, where the law allows, criminally referring the staff and supervisors who abused children or covered for those who did — not just cutting a civil check decades later. It would mean the independent oversight the reforms promise actually having teeth, with public reporting of substantiated abuse by county employees. And it would mean applying the same scrutiny to the children in county custody today, because the only thing that separates a current foster child from a MacLaren survivor is time and a lawsuit not yet filed.