Los Angeles, California
By Sam Dordulian, former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney and sex crimes prosecutor, founder of Dordulian Law Group
The short answer: California legislators are considering a last-minute deal that would cap the damages a child sexual abuse survivor can recover from a school district or county, and raise the burden of proof for survivors who come forward more than 20 years after the abuse. Both proposals should be rejected. Damage caps do not prevent sexual abuse. They do not fix a budget. They simply move the cost of an institution’s failure off the institution’s books and onto the survivor, who never had a choice in the matter to begin with.
Lawmakers have until midnight on August 31, 2026 to finish business for the year. Whatever they decide in those final hours will define – for a generation of California children – whether the harm done to them is worth accounting for in full or only up to a number chosen by the people being sued.
What Is Actually on the Table
Counties and school districts are asking for two things:
- First, a ceiling on how much any individual survivor can seek in damages;
- Second, a heightened evidentiary standard for claims filed more than two decades after the abuse occurred.
An attempt at a similar compromise collapsed at the end of the 2025 session, when Senate Bill 577 failed in part because public agencies objected that it contained no damages cap. This year, according to CalMatters reporting, a draft from the Assembly Speaker’s office again floated caps and a higher evidence threshold for older claims, while Senate leadership has resisted caps as an erosion of survivors’ rights.
I want to be clear about what a cap does, because the word sounds administrative and the effect is not. A cap does not reduce the number of children who were abused. It does not reduce the psychiatric care a survivor will need at age 35 for what happened at age nine. It does not reduce the lost wages, the ruined marriages, the addiction, the decades of therapy. It reduces one thing only: the amount a jury is permitted to say out loud about what an institution did.
Crying Broke Is a Cop Out
The argument from school districts and counties is that the payouts are unaffordable. I have read the same figures everyone else has. The 2024 report to the Legislature projects that settlements and verdicts could cost California school districts up to $3 billion, with counties facing significantly more. Los Angeles County alone approved a roughly $4 billion settlement in 2025 resolving more than 6,800 claims of abuse in its juvenile facilities, foster homes, and shelters, some dating back to the 1950s. Districts describe cutting programs and deferring maintenance to fund insurance premiums and self-insurance reserves.
I do not dismiss those numbers. I want to be clear about what they represent. That $4 billion is not the cost of litigation. It is the cost of what happened to 6,800 children in facilities the County was running. The lawsuits did not create that liability. The abuse did. The decades of institutional silence that followed it did.
This is the part of the debate that should trouble every California taxpayer. Public entities are not uninsured. They carry coverage – most of them through joint powers authorities – which are self-funded risk pools built for exactly this category of catastrophic loss. Risk pooling is the mechanism our public agencies chose. When the risk materializes, the answer cannot be that the mechanism was never meant to actually pay.
Every industry that has faced mass abuse liability has run this same play. The Catholic dioceses ran it. The Boy Scouts of America ran it. USA Gymnastics ran it. In each case, the institution said the claims would destroy it. Nevertheless, in each case, the real story was decades of internal knowledge, transfers of known abusers, and documents that never saw daylight until a plaintiff’s lawyer forced them into a courtroom. The financial reckoning was not a surprise; it was deferred.
If a district’s premiums are painful today, the honest response is to ask why the underwriting risk is so high, and to fix the supervision, hiring, reporting, and background check failures that generate claims. Several school districts are already doing that work. Capping recovery does the opposite. It tells every risk manager in the state that the maximum exposure for failing to protect a child is now a known, budgetable, survivable number. You cannot deter conduct you have priced in advance.
Caps Punish the Worst Cases Hardest
Here is the practical arithmetic of a damages cap, and it is the reason plaintiff attorneys and survivor advocates react to the idea the way they do.
A cap has no effect on a modest claim. It has its entire effect on the most severe cases. The survivor who was abused once has a claim that likely falls below any ceiling the Legislature would set. The survivor who was groomed for three years by a teacher the district had already been warned about, who attempted suicide at 12, who has not held steady employment in adulthood, is the survivor whose recovery gets cut. A cap is a discount that scales with the severity of the harm.
That is not a policy tradeoff. It is a subsidy for the worst institutional conduct in the state, paid for by the people who were hurt the most by it.
Juries already perform the function caps are supposed to serve. Twelve Californians sit through the evidence, hear the defense, and decide what the harm is worth. Appellate courts already have authority to reduce awards that shock the conscience. We are not operating without guardrails. Rather, we are being asked to replace the judgment of citizens who heard the facts with a number written by lobbyists who did not.
Raising the Burden of Proof Punishes Survivors for Being Children
The second proposal – a heightened evidence standard for claims older than 20 years – misunderstands how child sexual abuse works.
Delayed disclosure is not the exception in these cases. It is the norm. Survivors are groomed into silence, threatened, shamed, and often abused by the exact adult the institution told them to trust. Many do not understand what happened to them until well into adulthood. The Legislature already recognized this in 2019 when Assembly Bill 218 extended the deadline for childhood sexual abuse claims to age 40, or within five years of discovering that a psychological injury was caused by the abuse. That change was made because the old deadlines were built around an assumption about disclosure that the research does not support.
Public agencies say old cases are harder to defend because witnesses die and records go missing. That is true, and it cuts in a direction they do not acknowledge. The institution is the party that controlled the records. It set the retention schedules. It decided which complaints went into a personnel file and which were handled quietly. It had staff counsel, archives, risk managers, and investigators. The nine-year-old child had none of that. Asking a survivor to produce more documentation than the district itself preserved is asking the victim to compensate for the defendant’s recordkeeping.
Compensation Is Not a Windfall. It Is the Only Enforcement Mechanism We Have.
There is no state agency that fines a district for failing to act on a credible complaint about a coach. There is no regulator that audits whether a county probation camp investigated the report a 13 year old made in 1994. Civil liability is, functionally, California’s entire child protection enforcement system for institutions.
Take away the financial consequence and you have not reformed anything. You have quietly repealed the only rule with teeth. The survivor in a recent CalMatters report who won a verdict against her district said she hoped the money would force change, because it cannot happen again. She understands the mechanism better than the lobbyists do.
Ed Howard of the Children’s Advocacy Institute put the moral question plainly at a Sacramento press conference when he said of survivors, “It is our fault what happened to them.”
He is right. And the response to a fault we have already admitted cannot be a statute that limits what the admission costs us.
What Lawmakers Should Do Instead
There are real ways to address the fiscal pressure on districts and counties that do not run through survivors’ recoveries:
- State-backed reinsurance or a catastrophic loss fund for legacy claims, so a small rural district is not destabilized by conduct that occurred generations ago under different administrators.
- Structured or scheduled payouts over defined terms, so large judgments do not hit a single fiscal year, without reducing the total owed.
- Premium credits tied to prevention, rewarding districts that implement verified background screening, two adult rules, mandated reporter auditing, and complaint tracking.
- A public complaint registry so a credibly accused employee cannot quietly transfer to the next district.
- Full daylight on process. If the Legislature intends to alter survivors’ rights, it should do so through the regular committee process where survivors can testify, not in a negotiated package in the final week of session.
Every one of those options spreads risk without asking a survivor to absorb it personally. That is what insurance is for.
The Standard California Should Hold
The state made a promise when it took custody of these children, whether in a classroom, a foster home, a probation camp, or a juvenile hall. It did not keep that promise. The bill for breaking it is large because the breach was large and because it went on for decades.
California can pay that bill honestly, or it can legislate a discount for itself. Only one of those is justice.
I have prosecuted these cases as a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney and I have tried them as a sexual abuse civil attorney. In every one, the survivor’s central need was the same. Not a check. Acknowledgment, in public, at full value, of what was taken from them. A cap tells them the state has decided in advance how much of that acknowledgment it can afford.
Legislators have until August 31. They should let the deadline pass before they pass a cap.
About Sam Dordulian and the DLG SAJE Team
Sam Dordulian is a former Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney and sex crimes prosecutor who has secured more than 100 jury trial victories with a 98% winning record and over $150 million recovered for clients. He founded Dordulian Law Group in Glendale, California, where the firm’s Sexual Assault Justice Experts (SAJE) Team represents survivors of childhood and adult sexual abuse across California.
The SAJE Team is built specifically for these cases. It pairs trial attorneys with a retired LAPD sex crimes detective, licensed victim advocates, and a clinical therapist, so survivors are supported throughout every step of the process rather than simply litigated through it. Consultations are free and confidential, and Dordulian Law Group represents survivors on a contingency basis, meaning there is no fee unless the firm recovers compensation.
If you or someone you love was sexually abused as a child at a school, foster placement, juvenile facility, church, camp, or youth program in California, you can speak with our team confidentially at (866) GO-SEE-SAM.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is a damages cap in a California child sexual abuse lawsuit?
A damages cap is a statutory ceiling on how much money an individual survivor may recover, regardless of what a jury decides the harm is worth. California does not currently cap damages in child sexual abuse claims against public entities. Proposals under discussion in the 2026 legislative session would create one for claims against school districts and counties.
Why do school districts and counties want damages caps?
Public agencies say settlements, verdicts, and insurance premiums have strained budgets since filing deadlines were extended, forcing cuts to staffing, programs, and maintenance. A 2024 report to the Legislature projected costs to school districts of up to $3 billion, with counties facing more.
Why do survivor advocates oppose damages caps?
Because caps reduce recovery only in the most severe cases, remove the financial incentive for institutions to improve child protection, and substitute a legislative number for a jury’s assessment of actual harm. Advocates also object to the state assigning a fixed value to sexual abuse it failed to prevent.
How long do I have to file a child sexual abuse claim in California?
Under Assembly Bill 218, survivors of childhood sexual abuse generally have until age 40, or five years from the date they discover that a psychological injury or illness was caused by the abuse, whichever is later. Deadlines vary by the facts of the case and by when the abuse occurred, so survivors should speak with an attorney rather than assume a claim is time barred.
Under Assembly Bill 452, survivors of California childhood sexual abuse who were victimized on or after January 1, 2024 have an unlimited window to file a civil claim (there is no statute of limitations). However, it is recommended that survivors contact a sexual abuse attorney for a free and confidential consultation as soon as possible to ensure the greatest likelihood of success in one’s case.
Can I sue a public school district in California for sexual abuse?
Yes. California school districts, counties, and other public entities can be held civilly liable when negligent hiring, supervision, retention, or failure to report enabled abuse. Claims against public entities involve specific procedural rules, which is why early legal guidance matters.
Does a lawsuit against a school district take money away from students?
Public agencies carry liability coverage, generally through joint powers authority risk pools funded for catastrophic claims. Litigation does not create the underlying liability; the abuse and the institutional failure to stop it do. Prevention measures, not damages caps, are what reduce future claims and premiums.
*On August 27, the Los Angeles Times reported that California state legislators had announced a plan to make “modest” changes to Assembly Bill 218. “The proposed legislation, offered in the final days of the legislative session, would require older victims to provide additional proof that they were abused as children, but does not limit the amount they could receive in payouts — a demand made by local governments and school districts that have shelled out billions of dollars in recent settlements,” the Times wrote.
Media Contact Details
Jason Kitchen
Dordulian Law Group Los Angeles Sexual Abuse Lawyers
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Phone: 8187884919
Website: dlawgroup.com