LA County Sex Abuse Settlement: $4 Billion Deal and Paused Payments

The Los Angeles County sex abuse settlement is a pair of agreements totaling more than $4.8 billion to resolve claims from over 11,000 people who say they were sexually abused as children in county-run juvenile halls, probation camps, and foster care facilities. The Board of Supervisors approved a $4 billion deal covering roughly 6,800 claims on April 29, 2025, and a second $828 million deal covering 414 additional survivors on October 28, 2025.¹² Payments were scheduled to begin in January 2026 but have been paused while a criminal fraud investigation moves forward, and no survivor has yet been paid.

What the Settlements Cover

The claims reach back to 1959, though most describe abuse during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. Survivors, now ranging in age from their twenties to their seventies, allege they were sexually assaulted as children by probation officers, correctional staff, and other county employees inside facilities meant to protect them.³

The facilities most often named are Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall, Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall, the Dorothy Kirby Center, Camp Scott in Santa Clarita, and the MacLaren Children’s Center in El Monte, a foster shelter that closed in 2003.⁴⁵ Lawsuits describe a pattern of grooming, coercion, and retaliation, with staff allegedly using solitary confinement and loss of privileges to punish children who resisted or reported the abuse.

The two settlements are structured separately. The $4 billion deal, negotiated with Slater Slater Schulman LLP and McNicholas & McNicholas LLP as co-lead counsel, resolves the largest group of cases and is scheduled to be paid out over five years.⁵⁶ The $828 million agreement was negotiated separately by Arias Sanguinetti Wang & Team LLP, Manly Stewart & Finaldi, and Panish Shea Ravipudi LLP, who kept their 414 clients out of the larger deal to pursue higher per-person compensation. The average payout under the smaller agreement works out to roughly $2 million per survivor.²

How Individual Awards Are Decided

Neither settlement pays every claimant the same amount. Individual awards are set by independent allocators — retired judges — who review each claim based on the severity of the alleged abuse, its impact on the survivor, and the supporting evidence.⁷ Retired Superior Court Judge Louis Meisinger reviews the majority of claims, with awards ranging from $100,000 to $3 million.⁸

Every plaintiff must submit a detailed written factual summary under penalty of perjury. Claims flagged for possible fraud trigger a heightened evidentiary burden, and an allocator who concludes a claim is fabricated can remove the plaintiff from the process and deny payment altogether.⁷

Why Payments Have Been Paused

Payments were supposed to reach survivors’ bank accounts in January 2026.⁹ That did not happen. On November 19, 2025, Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan Hochman announced a criminal investigation into potentially fraudulent AB 218 claims, targeting claimants, lawyers, recruiters, and medical practitioners. His office set up a fraud hotline and offered limited leniency to non-lawyer claimants who came forward voluntarily.¹⁰

In late January 2026, Hochman asked the county to pause initial payments while his investigation proceeded.¹¹ By June 2026, he was asserting that as many as four out of five cases in the $4 billion settlement may be fraudulent, and on June 10, 2026, he formally asked Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff to freeze settlement payments for six months, arguing that existing vetting had been “insufficient” and that proceeding would cause the “irreparable loss of public funds.”¹²

The Downtown LA Law Group

Much of the fraud concern centers on one firm. The Downtown LA Law Group (DTLA), founded in August 2013 by cousins Daniel Azizi and Farid Yaghoubtil with their friend Salar Hendizadeh, represents roughly 2,700 of the settlement claimants.⁸ A Los Angeles Times investigation identified nine people represented by DTLA who said recruiters had paid them to file claims. Four admitted fabricating their stories entirely, and at least one man said a claim was filed in his name without his knowledge.¹³

The California State Bar opened an investigation into DTLA for alleged “fraudulent and unlawful practices” and served the county with a subpoena in November 2025 for documents on the firm’s approximately 2,700 sex abuse clients.¹⁴ On March 5, 2026, Hendizadeh was charged with 11 counts including deceptive advertising and charging illegal fees.¹⁵ On June 4, 2026, the State Bar filed formal charges against all three founders and litigation attorney Igor Fradkin. Yaghoubtil faces 16 counts and Azizi faces 11. DTLA has denied all wrongdoing and said it “categorically does not engage in, nor has it ever condoned, the exchange of money for client retention.”¹⁶

The county has appointed former presiding Superior Court Judge Daniel Buckley, working through Signature Resolution, to conduct an extra layer of review on DTLA’s cases, with the firm covering the cost. Since the Times reporting broke in October 2025, DTLA has itself requested dismissal of at least 14 of its clients’ cases.⁸

Where the Court Case Stands

As of mid-June 2026, Judge Riff had not ruled on the DA’s request for a six-month freeze. He ordered lawyers to halt payments pending a hearing scheduled for June 25, 2026, and expressed frustration with the conflict between county counsel, which wants to move forward with payouts, and the DA’s office, which argues the county is failing to protect public funds.¹⁷ One attorney for survivors warned that victims “will die before they get paid.”¹³

Critics have said the county approved the $4 billion deal too fast. Union leaders Curtis Chambers of AFSCME Local 685 and Regino Torres Jr. of Teamsters Local 986 wrote that the settlement was approved “without depositions, without evidentiary hearings and without a meaningful independent review.” Other observers noted the county relied “solely on the say-so of the claimants’ lawyers,” who stand to collect more than $1 billion in contingency fees, and that at least one plaintiffs’ firm had flagged suspected fraud by other firms without action being taken.¹⁸¹³

The Law That Made These Claims Possible

None of these lawsuits could have been filed under California’s old statute of limitations. Assembly Bill 218, signed by Governor Gavin Newsom on October 13, 2019, and effective January 1, 2020, extended the deadline for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to file civil claims to age 40, or within five years of discovering a psychological injury linked to the abuse, whichever is later.¹⁹

The law also opened a three-year revival window from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2022, letting survivors whose claims had already expired sue for the first time. AB 218 also exempted childhood sexual assault claims from the Government Claims Act’s notice requirements, removing a long-standing procedural shield for public entities.¹⁹ By mid-2026, total AB 218 claims filed against LA County had exceeded 14,000.¹⁰

Claims Not Covered by These Settlements

More than 200 women who allege they were sexually abused at Camp Joseph Scott, a now-closed juvenile boot camp, are not part of either agreement. Their attorneys, John Manly and Courtney Thom, said the county excluded these clients, claiming records were no longer available and that attorneys had not produced evidence sufficient to identify perpetrators in most cases. A civil lawsuit against former deputy probation officer Thomas Jackson, accused by at least 30 women, was scheduled for trial in August 2025; prosecutors previously declined to bring criminal charges because the alleged conduct occurred too long ago. The attorneys have asked the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate why the accused have not been prosecuted.²⁰

What the County Is Changing

Alongside the settlement, the county announced institutional reforms managed by the CEO and Risk Management team, including a countywide hotline for reporting abuse allegations against employees, expedited investigations with independent expert review, mandatory background checks at hiring and promotion, and a strengthened “zero tolerance” policy requiring termination and law enforcement referral for substantiated allegations.⁵

Conditions inside the facilities remain contested. The Probation Department faces roughly 700 vacancies, a staffing shortage approaching 30 percent.¹⁸²¹²²

Whether the existing settlements hold together, and how quickly legitimate survivors will actually be paid, depends on the outcome of the DA’s fraud investigation, the June 25 hearing before Judge Riff, and the eventual resolution of the State Bar proceedings against DTLA.

1
Courthouse News Service. LA County Board Approves $4 Billion Settlement Over Sexual Abuse Claims at Juvenile Facilities
2
ABC7. Los Angeles County Reaches $828 Million Abuse Claims Settlement
3
ABC7 News. Los Angeles County Reaches Tentative $4B Settlement Involving More Than 6,800 Claims of Childhood Sexual Abuse
4
The Imprint. A Staggering Tally: Cases Alleging Sexual Abuse of Children in Los Angeles County Custody Now Number Thousands
5
LA County. LA County Reaches $4 Billion Tentative Settlement in Thousands of Sexual Abuse Cases
6
PR Newswire. Slater Slater Schulman LLP Reaches Historic $4 Billion Settlement With Los Angeles County
7
LA County. LA County Announces Tentative Settlement of Additional AB 218 Cases and Heightened Anti-Fraud Provisions
8
Los Angeles Times. LA County $4 Billion Sex Abuse Settlement Vetting
9
EdSource. $4 Billion Sex Abuse Settlement Approved by LA County Board of Supervisors
10
LA County District Attorney. District Attorney Hochman Announces Criminal Investigation Into Potentially Fraudulent Claims
11
Bloomberg. LA County Told to Pause Abuse Payouts as DA Probes Fraud Claims
12
Los Angeles Times. LA County DA Claims Four in Five Cases in $4 Billion Sex Abuse Payout May Be Fraudulent
13
Los Angeles Times. LA False Sex Abuse Claim Settlement Allegation
14
Los Angeles Times. State Bar Investigation Into LA County Sex Abuse Settlement
15
Los Angeles Times. DTLA Law Firm Co-Founder Faces California State Bar Charges
16
Los Angeles Times. DTLA Law Firm California State Bar Charges
17
Los Angeles Times. Sex Abuse Settlement: Los Angeles District Attorney Victim Payouts
18
CalMatters. Juvenile Sex Abuse Settlement California
19
LegiScan. California AB 218
20
U.S. News. Attorneys Seek Federal Probe of Los Angeles County Sexual Abuse Allegations
21
Office of the Attorney General. Attorney General Bonta Asks Court to Place Los Angeles County Juvenile Halls Under Receivership
22
Los Angeles Times. Judge Blocks California Juvenile Hall Receivership Bid