23 L.A. County probation staffers taken off the job amid sex abuse allegations involving juveniles in detention

Kids complained for years about sexually abusive probation officers. Some of them still work for L.A. County​

The girls said they were molested in bed and raped in an administrative office, leered at in the communal shower and surveilled in the bathroom.

If they told, they said, they were threatened with solitary confinement and revoked phone privileges. If they stayed quiet, they might get out a few weeks early.
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It wasn’t until this fall that Jackson resigned from the Los Angeles County Probation Department, capping a 33-year career during which 20 women say he sexually abused them when they were girls. His last day was Sept. 28.

Ernest Walker, a longtime probation supervisor, resigned two days later, also after 33 years with the department. His departure would come nearly two decades after he was accused of having sex with a teenage girl he supervised.

Faced with roughly 1,500 plaintiffs accusing the county of tolerating unchecked sexual abuse at its juvenile facilities, the Probation Department has spent the last two years removing alleged sexual abusers from its ranks.

“It makes my stomach sink,” said Thom, a former sex crimes prosecutor. “To hear that number — and I guarantee it’s probably double if not more — it just shows how irresponsible the county is.”

The crackdown can be traced to the 2019 passage of the Child Victims Act, a state law that gave victims of childhood sexual abuse a new window to sue.

In April, the county estimated it will need to spend $1.6 billion to $3 billion to resolve a deluge of lawsuits accusing county staffers of raping and molesting the children they were paid to protect

[In many cases, such as the two men named above, they were never criminally charged, and I presume the statue of limitations prevents them from being charged now.]

In unprecedented payout, L.A. County will settle sex abuse claims for $4 billion​

Los Angeles County plans to pay $4 billion to settle nearly 7,000 claims of childhood sexual abuse that allegedly occurred inside its juvenile facilities and foster homes, dwarfing the largest sex abuse settlements in U.S. history.

The mammoth settlement, which still needs to be approved by both the county claims board and county supervisors, is a billion dollars more than what county officials had anticipated as the worst-case scenario to resolve a flurry of lawsuits — and far more than other organizations notorious for allowing unchecked sex abuse have paid victims.

The Boy Scouts of America, by comparison, agreed to pay $2.46 billion. The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has paid out about $1.5 billion for alleged abuse at the hands of Catholic priests. Victims of USC gynecologist George Tyndall got $1.1 billion.Michigan State University paid $500 million to victims of team doctor Larry Nassar.

There have been few criminal prosecutions of county staffers accused of abuse in the lawsuits. The probation department presented the L.A. County district attorney’s office with evidence against two staff members, Thomas Jackson and Altovise Abner, in December 2023. The status of those cases was not immediately available.