Starting in 2020, survivors of childhood sex abuse in California were given a powerful tool to confront their abusers and the institutions that employed them.
Churches. Schools. Youth sports leagues. Boy Scouts. Foster care homes. Juvenile justice wards. Summer camps. Boarding schools. All were suddenly on notice that survivors had a three-year window to pursue a lawsuit over past molestation and sexual assault.
For survivors, the law — Assembly Bill 218 — afforded them their day in court, empowering generations to gain reparations for what had long haunted them and confront perpetrators and the institutions that covered up abuse.
While the law has provided a measure of healing, it has unleashed an unprecedented wave of litigation on many of the nearly 1,000 public school districts in California. Scores of former students have come forth with allegations of rape and molestation dating to the 1950s. This reckoning has upended school budgets, drained district coffers, triggered cuts to programs, threatened cost-of-living increases for teachers and even contributed to layoffs, a Times investigation found.
It has also raised questions of whether a noble effort to address the deep wounds of childhood sexual abuse has imposed a collateral penalty on today’s students, with little public awareness of the true financial cost.
The Times sought records from 937 school districts in the state to assess the impact of the three-year lifting of the statute of limitations under AB 218. The law also greatly expanded the universe of people who could sue going forward, by extending the age at which a childhood sexual assault case could be brought to 40 from 26, or within five years of a person discovering they had a psychological injury.
The Times found that nearly 70% of school districts faced no sexual abuse litigation from 2020 through 2024, but more than 1,100 victims have come forward and pressed claims against school districts, with the majority concentrated in Southern California.
So far, public school districts have paid out about $700 million in sexual misconduct settlements since 2020 to resolve about one-third of cases, The Times found. Of those, The Times identified more than 220 settlements related to new criteria under AB 218. Those have so far cost more than $436 million; more than 500 cases related to AB 218 were pending as of the end of 2024.
The total financial impact of AB 218 is far greater, however. Districts have paid out millions in trial verdicts — some reaching nine figures — for the fraction of cases that have gone before a jury, and defending a lawsuit adds to the overall cost. The state this year projected districts will pay up to $3 billion once all cases wind through the court system.
Los Angeles Unified has paid out the lion’s share of settlements — more than $211 million since 2020 — but the most significant financial toll has been felt by smaller and mid-size districts, The Times found.
Ducor Union, a 160-student elementary school district 40 miles north of Bakersfield, has paid out $2.65 million, or an average of $16,500 per current student, to cover settlements in two cases alleging abuse in the 1980s and 1990s. Eastside Union Elementary School District in Lancaster has paid out $9 million — nearly $3,000 per current student — mostly stemming from a settlement with a student who accused a security guard of sexually abusing her “hundreds of times” as a sixth and seventh grader nearly 25 years ago.
The highest settlement rate: $22,898 per pupil at the 345-student Montecito Union School District, which paid three alumni a total of $7.9 million after they accused a former principal of fondling, oral sex and other abuse in the mid-1970s.
Anthony Ranii, the longtime superintendent of Montecito’s elementary school system, said the total cost of the case, including attorney fees, was north of $9 million. Because the district could not prove it had insurance during that time frame, the settlements and legal bills came out of a cash reserve that had accumulated over decades. The settlements forced the district to trim programs, reevaluate how to repair an aging roof that leaks into classrooms and a science lab, and not refill vacant positions.
“We took $9 million that was supposed to support the students of 2025 and we took that and devoted it to another purpose, and that was a huge impact for us,” Ranii said. The district, he added, had relied on the cash reserve when Montecito incurred costs from catastrophic debris flows in 2018, wildfires and the pandemic. “We are going to cut back on some significant things, and we are certainly not prepared for the next unexpected event.”
The law, AB 218, has already come under scrutiny and triggered calls for reform. In L.A. County, for example, lawmakers including Supervisor Kathryn Barger said AB 218 was the “biggest driver of our fiscal crisis,” and a recent investigation by The Times found fraud in a $4-billion settlement paid out by the county for sex abuse in juvenile hall.
For survivors and their allies, the law has offered an overdue forum for accountability.
“It’s taken me this long to be able to look back on that and realize how much of a child I was,” said a woman, now in her 30s, who sued in 2020 over alleged grooming and rape she endured as a 15-year-old by her track coach at Calabasas High School. After she sued, she and her lawyer learned the coach had an extensive criminal record, including firearm and drug-related charges, even before he was inexplicably hired by Las Virgenes Unified School District. The coach denied wrongdoing in court papers, saying all interactions were “nonsexual.” The case settled for $5 million.
“There was an acknowledgment,” she said, “and it kind of gave me a little bit of closure, and validation.”
A series of sex abuse scandals and societal upheavals led California lawmakers to pass AB 218 in 2019, with the law taking effect the next year. Despite shocking revelations involving the Catholic Church, the Boy Scouts and a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in Los Angeles, survivors of childhood sex abuse had difficulty suing due to statutes of limitations. At the same time, the #MeToo movement was raging nationwide.
In 2019, New York created a one-year window in which victims could sue over past childhood sex abuse. Around that time, then-Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez proposed AB 218, which offered a three-year window for previously expired claims and dramatically extended the statute of limitations for victims. Up until then, California children had until age 26 to sue for childhood abuse, but Gonzalez’s bill proposed extending it to age 40.
Gonzalez and her allies knew they had the support of the Legislature. A year earlier, a nearly identical version had reached Gov. Jerry Brown’s desk, but he vetoed, saying institutions “should be secure in the reasonable expectation that past acts are indeed in the past and not subject to further lawsuits.”
After Gonzalez unveiled her bill, a coalition of insurance associations and education groups mounted opposition and warned of fiscal doom.
Sara Bachez, a lobbyist for the California Assn. of School Business Officials, told lawmakers at a hearing in March 2019 that even just allowing victims up to age 40 to sue would cost anywhere from $550 million to “hundreds of billions of dollars.” Bachez noted that schools lacked witnesses and records to verify a potential abuse claim.
“With little to no evidence available, school districts will be forced to settle lawsuits resulting in diversion of critical resources and services for today’s students,” Bachez said in 2019.
Gonzalez said then that she was “horrified” by the cost estimates, but framed the large sum as proof that school officials have “known about this for a long time.”
“It’s important that we actually make institutions face the consequences of their past behavior so that we never are in this position again,” Gonzalez said. “Money is not the panacea in our society. … But until you make people hurt, this behavior doesn’t stop.”
Gonzalez’s bill sailed through the Legislature, with the final vote eliciting no opposition. Gov. Gavin Newsom bucked his predecessor and signed the bill in October.
Despite the estimates offered by school and insurance groups, the Legislature’s analysis of the bill said there was no fiscal impact but “potentially major” costs to school districts.
“They never put a dollar amount on it because they didn’t know,” said Michael Fine, chief executive of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state agency that helps public schools in California resolve financial challenges. “We didn’t know these claims existed until the claim walked into the door.”
By the first half of 2020, school districts began receiving a stream of lawsuits dating back decades: A man sued Anaheim Union High School District for alleged abuse by a high school wrestling coach in the early 1990s. A woman sued Porterville Unified, alleging the auto shop teacher sexually assaulted her as a 17-year-old in 2000. Beverly Hills Unified was hit by a lawsuit from Laurie Siegman, who detailed how coach Hank Friedman had sexually assaulted her in 1978. Friedman denied any inappropriate sexual contact, according to deposition excerpts filed in court.
“I wanted to get the truth out,” Siegman said. “I did have some hesitation, but it was important to stand up for myself and other victims.”
Beverly Hills Unified contested Siegman’s claims and pressed ahead toward trial. In November, jurors determined Beverly Hills Unified owed Siegman about $10 million for what she endured. In a statement, the district said insurance would cover the cost, adding, “The Beverly Hills community will likely not bear the financial impact of this matter.”
Many lawmakers had anticipated that insurance would cover settlements or verdicts. But reality has proved more complicated.
Districts hit by lawsuits have had to search for records dating back to the 1950s to determine whether they even had coverage or if their insurance provider from that time still exists. In their search for coverage, districts have been forced to enlist insurance archaeology firms, such as downtown L.A.-based Arcina Risk Group.
Richard Janisch, the founder of Arcina Risk, said his firm has worked with more than 100 school districts in the state on AB 218 sex abuse cases. Janisch and his team have visited vacant school buildings, warehouses and old vaults, poring over old microfiche and digging up stacks of papers to ascertain whether a district was insured.
The team has had “eureka moments” in school archives, like after Janisch found folded-up insurance policies from the 1970s in a fireproof box deep in a Southern California school district’s vault.
More than 90% of the time, he said, his firm has secured coverage for a district, and he touted how he and his colleagues had recently located $25 million of coverage for one unnamed district. Having insurance, however, doesn’t often mean it applies to a particular case or fully covers what a district faces. Other times, a school district’s insurer no longer exists.
United Pacific was a leading insurer for school districts up until the mid-1970s, when it largely left the state and ultimately went bankrupt. Janisch said that about 300 school districts had United Pacific, leaving their insurance from those years in effect useless.
“If I find United Pacific, then the good news is I found your policy. The bad news is it’s not worth anything,” Janisch said.
For the Bellevue Union School District in Santa Rosa, the lack of insurance put it on the hook for much of the $4.55 million in settlements to two people who sued over allegations of abuse around 1972. To cover the payout, the district took out a judgment bond for up to $5 million, which will require the district to pay $400,000 per year, according to district records.
District Supt. Michael Kellison cited the legal cost as one of four reasons for “financial distress,” according to district records. “We could not wait,” Kellison said in 2024, when the district laid off 20 people. The district announced a second round of layoffs this year. Kellison did not respond to emails seeking comment.
Other districts believe they had coverage, but can’t prove it, such as Black Butte School District in Shasta County. It had to rely on reserves to cover a legal defense. School board member Carolyn Christian, who stepped down this fall, said the district ultimately gambled on taking the case to trial.
“We just had to go with our gut on it,” said Christian, who runs an equine therapy business that pairs veterans with wild mustangs. “It’s scary for a small district that doesn’t have a lot of money.”
The district won at trial, but the total cost of lawyers and the defense took funds that could have been used to repair playground equipment and perhaps add needed personnel.
“It did cause some harm to the kids today,” Christian said.
The insurance crisis in the state in the 1970s forced school districts and other public entities to shift toward a different, self-run model: joint-powers authorities. These function as a sort of regional, government-owned nonprofit collective.
Districts essentially agree to pool funds to cover one another’s legal liability. These joint-powers authorities had operated under the belief that potential claims for past sex abuse had largely timed out.
With the change in the statute of limitations, the demand for cash to cover settlements, verdicts and legal bills far outpaced what the risk pools had saved.
“For AB 218, there was no money. There was zero. No one is going to keep that level of funding around just in case something might happen,” said Dave George, CEO of the Schools Excess Liability Fund, or SELF, a joint-powers authority that provides coverage for school districts when a claim is above $1 million to $5 million.
Consequently, George’s agency has had to turn to its member districts to cover the cost of verdicts and settlements by issuing a series of special assessments totaling about $595 million.
For example, if SELF has to pay out six settlements totaling $20 million from 1992, and it had nothing reserved for that year, it has to levy special assessments on every district that had coverage in 1992.
“You go back to all the members in 1992, you determine how much you need, and you send them the bill,” George said. “Think of it as the potential for a never-ending premium.”
Even if the settlements affected only one or two districts in a year, every district that was part of the coverage pool at that time must pay its share.
The special assessments have posed a financial challenge for districts up and down the state, such as Bass Lake Joint Union Elementary School District at the edge of the Sierra National Forest.
Bass Lake, a small, 760-student district, had no lawsuits over sex abuse or related to AB 218, but still faced a budget-busting assessment from SELF to cover other districts’ claims.
The top financial officer, Tara Campanella, said the special assessment in 2022 was a modest $9,254, but each year it has gone up, from $26,188 in 2023 to another $26,325 the following year to just over $86,000 in 2025, according to an invoice reviewed by The Times. The recent bill is to cover losses dating from 1986 to 2006.
“For us, that could be a full teacher’s salary with benefits,” Campanella said. The most recent bill could also cover a handful of special education aides, which the district also needs. Campanella said she had scant room in her budget to cover the fee, and feared another assessment in 2026 could rise even further and prove impossible to pay.
“I asked them, ‘Is this going to keep going up?’ They seemed to not have an answer,” Campanella said. “I don’t know how we’ll make that work for our budget.”
Although AB 218 has been costly to many school districts statewide, the law’s proponents note that institutions could have saved themselves — and helped protect scores of young students — if they had taken steps to prevent and respond to abuse.
Annie Visser is one illustration of this.
Visser was about 11 years old in Laguna Beach when she met Rick Scott, her teacher in middle school. According to court documents and a lawsuit she would later file, Scott became a mentor and left a big impression. Once she reached high school, Scott became her coach on the varsity water polo team, when, she said, he started “grooming” her.
Court records detail how Scott’s involvement in Visser’s life intensified when problems arose in her family. He helped arrange for her to move in with a school counselor, who lived next door to Scott, his wife and family. Then she moved in with his family.
Visser increasingly spent more time with Scott, and later, at meetups in a local park, he confessed his love for Visser and kissed her, which eventually escalated to sexual intercourse when she was 17 years old, according to her lawsuit and court records.
“Do I call it a relationship? Do I say that I was raped? … I’m still looking for the word for what it was, because neither word is comfortable for me. Manipulation. Being taken advantage of. Being used at an age when you are much too vulnerable to understand,” Visser recently told The Times. “To 17-year-old me, it was like my first love. But now I’m not 17. I’m 40.”
The pair exchanged notes. Scott said, “I look forward to calling time outs during games just so I can be closer to you,” adding, “I love you more than life.” He signed the notes, “Love Always, Dad.”
On a 2002 water polo team trip, parents complained about Scott’s holding hands with Visser and overly affectionate demeanor, according to an internal investigation later conducted by Laguna Beach school officials and filed in Orange County Superior Court.
After Visser confided about Scott to a school counselor, Laguna Beach police became involved. But when confronted by police, Visser would deny anything untoward. “I was so trained by him,” she recalled, adding, “I was very well groomed. And I was lying … and trying to protect him.”
Police continued investigating, and eventually recovered the notes, text messages and evidence of calls between Scott and Visser. Officers traveled to Visser’s college dorm room in Davis and knocked on her door. Police threatened her with obstruction of justice if she didn’t share what happened, she said.
Visser relented, opening up to police.
Scott pleaded guilty in 2004 to two counts of felony statutory rape, which were later reduced to misdemeanors. Scott and his attorney did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Within the community of Laguna Beach, Visser felt ostracized and blamed. Scott was a beloved teacher who was married to a local pastor. The Daily Pilot published letters to the editor praising his character.
“There was not just the trauma that happened, but the being shunned from the community the way that I was, and the mixed beliefs on what actually happened,” Visser said. “Even after he plead guilty, there was some sentiment of support for him.”
In the years afterward, Visser dropped out of college, stopped playing water polo and turned to substance abuse. For two decades, she said, she was mired in what happened.
“I can still hear him in my head, telling me that if I loved him, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt him,” Visser said.
Visser might have lived with these traumatic memories at the forefront for her whole life, but a former teammate on the high school water polo squad urged her to take action. This was around 2022, and although the three-year window under AB 218 was closing, the law also gave Visser until age 40 to pursue a childhood sex abuse case. .
“You should do this,” Visser recalls her friend saying. She initially balked, but her friend persisted.
A family friend led her to David Ring, a lawyer in Manhattan Beach, who told her she had a “righteous” case worth taking on.
In her lawsuit, Visser detailed their extensive relationship, spanning years and dozens of instances of sexual contact with a minor. Ring, her lawyer, said school officials had several opportunities to intervene.
Once everything was revealed, “it was outrageous,” Ring said.
As Visser’s case proceeded toward a trial, lawyers for Laguna Beach Unified tried to keep secret an investigation into Scott that numbered more than 400 pages. An Orange County judge sanctioned the district’s lawyers for “improper withholding of evidence” and ordered the lawyers to pay more than $51,000 to Visser’s lawyers, according to the judge’s order. (A spokesperson for the district disputed that it intentionally withheld evidence.)
Laguna Beach Unified ultimately agreed to settle the case for $8.5 million, but in a statement, it said insurance covered the costs, with no adverse effect on its finances: “This settlement did not require program reductions or impact district reserves.”
Visser said the outcome was cathartic.
“I processed more during this lawsuit than I did in 20 years of therapy and workshops,” she said. “Nothing came close to just speaking for myself. That’s what this law did.”
For years, Visser had avoided Laguna Beach when visiting family in Orange County. After the settlement, she purchased a home there, reclaiming a town she once felt exiled from.
“Since I’ve moved back down here, I’ve gotten multiple apologies,” she said. “A friend from high school said, ‘The entire town should apologize to you.’”
Efforts to roll back some or all of AB 218 have met stiff opposition in Sacramento.
Earlier this year, Sen. Benjamin Allen (D-Santa Monica) proposed a bill that would, among other measures, raise the standard for childhood sexual assault claims to “clear and convincing corroborating evidence,” making it more difficult for those claiming abuse to prove their case to a jury.
And Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) proposed a bill that would allow more flexibility for public agencies to use bonds to cover settlements and trim the statute of limitations for some cases, among other measures.
Trial attorneys — a powerful lobbying force in Sacramento — branded Allen’s bill the “predator shield law.” Lawyers blasted many efforts to reform AB 218 as a misinformation campaign, like the doomsday scenario that school districts would go insolvent.
“Show me a school district in history that has gone bankrupt over a lawsuit. You can’t find one. That’s a lie,” said Nick Rowley, a prominent trial attorney, at a news conference this year. He called it “propaganda that they’re feeding to politicians who are dumb enough to believe stuff like that, or they’re on the take.”
John Manly, an Orange County lawyer who is nationally known for representing sexual harassment and abuse survivors, criticized reform efforts as the harmful work of the “unholy trinity of concealment” — school boards, teachers unions and the joint-powers authorities that provide liability coverage.
“Their solution is to severely limit the ability of victims to come forward because they don’t want to pay them,” Manly said, adding that local school districts and joint-powers authorities have seen no adverse effects for their bond ratings and that fiscal concerns were exaggerated.
Moody’s Ratings noted in a November presentation that California school districts had “especially strong” reserve and liquidity levels relative to their peers, although Moody’s said AB 218 posed “ongoing risk,” according to a copy of the slide reviewed by The Times.
Diana Rigby, the superintendent of Carpinteria Unified School District, said her district had been on the brink of insolvency due to four lawsuits dating to the early 1970s. The district’s insurer from that time period had gone defunct.
The district settled the cases for $5.75 million by selling two properties and is taking out a judgment obligation bond with a payment plan lasting between 10 and 20 years — measures that have restored fiscal stability, albeit with significant impact on her current students.
Rigby has trimmed staffing, which boosted classroom size, and cut enrichment programs, and she cannot use her general fund for staff development, field trips, or academic tutoring.
“The district will be living with this for years,” Rigby said. “It’s unreasonable to expect a district that is small like ours — with $42 million in our operating budget, of which we spend 86% on staffing … that we should be totally responsible for something that happened in 1970.”
Dorothy Johnson, the legislative advocate for the Assn. of California School Administrators, lamented that trial attorneys had successfully opposed major reforms, suggesting political donations and advertising campaigns by the industry had beat out public agencies and school districts.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have the same resources as the trial attorneys when it comes to that level of influence,” Johnson said.
Lobbyists for the joint-powers authorities and school officials have continued pressing for reform in the next legislative session.
Faith Borges, an advocate for the California Assn. of Joint Powers Authorities, whose members provide school districts with liability coverage, says there is a consensus emerging among legislators about the need for action — and soon — “because they see this avalanche of claims coming forward.”
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