I once sued the County of Los Angeles—together with the American Civil Liberties Union and pro bono lawyers from Davis Wright Tremaine LLP—to expose how much it was paying private firms to defend misconduct by sheriff’s deputies. We won. The California Supreme Court affirmed the public’s right to know. Then the legal team vanished. The ACLU moved on. The attorneys moved on. And I had to track down the records myself. It’s hard not to seem like a crank when you show up every week demanding transparency. But what I feared has now become reality.
Los Angeles County is preparing to pay out $4 billion to settle thousands of allegations of childhood sexual abuse, without a single public trial, without naming a single perpetrator, and without a single reform that isn’t buried under attorney-client privilege.
I’m not outraged that survivors are receiving compensation. I’m outraged that the system that failed them for decades is now failing the public, again, by hiding behind settlements instead of seeking justice. What’s being built here isn’t healing. It’s a legal mill enriching attorneys while accountability and reform are quietly buried.
This is the largest sexual abuse settlement in American history. Bigger than the Catholic Church. Bigger than USC. Bigger than Michigan State. Yet it arrives with no public reckoning, no televised hearings, no subpoenas. Just a closed session vote, a press release, and an army of attorneys poised to collect a staggering cut, more than L.A. Metro’s entire operations budget.
Even the $40 million the county paid to Vanessa Bryant, after deputies shared gruesome crash site photos of her husband and daughter, was infuriating—not because she wasn’t entitled to something, but because she never saw a single image. None of us have. And yet she was awarded a staggering sum from an already overstretched public system. That payout was tragic, but at least it had a trial. This has only silence.
At the April 29 Board of Supervisors meeting, survivors gave heartbreaking testimony. One said it wasn’t about the money—they just wanted to be heard. And still, the county received and filed its internal Litigation and Risk report without reading a single word aloud. No discussion. No questions. No acknowledgment. A multi-billion-dollar payout, and they moved past it like it was a pothole repair contract. Supervisor Kathryn Barger called it “historic, and not in a good way.” Supervisor Janice Hahn said it was about “healing.” Supervisor Holly Mitchell said we need civil service reform. But none of them explained why no perpetrators were named, why no departments were held accountable, or why it took decades of interest on silence to get to this point.
The truth is, the public hasn’t just been excluded—we’ve been silenced. For years, speakers like me have been cut off during public comment for asking how much we’re spending on outside counsel or what’s being done to prevent future abuse. As former Supervisor Sheila Kuehl once said, the First Amendment guarantees your right to speak, not our obligation to listen.
At the very moment this settlement was being finalized, 55,000 County workers walked off the job. Paramedics were diverted. Beaches shuttered. Libraries closed. Their contract had expired in March. They were asking for basic cost-of-living raises. The county said it couldn’t afford them. And yet, CEO Fesia Davenport told reporters the county’s plan to cover the $4 billion abuse settlement hinged on maintaining its AAA credit rating, so it could borrow the money.
It played like a coordinated diversion. Distract from the settlement, focus on us. The supervisors congratulated themselves on preserving that rating like it was a sacred heirloom. We can borrow billions to bury the past, but we can’t find the funds to pay the people who keep the lights on.
One speaker at the hearing said, “Everything was hush-hush.” That could be the county’s motto. They hired Covington & Burling and HBR Consulting to evaluate systemic failures—then used attorney-client privilege to make sure the public never saw the results.
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On Tuesday, the Board skipped my comment on this item. My hand was lowered twice. I told Chair Kathryn Barger I’d write about it. Because, once again, they wouldn’t let me say it out loud.
When the truth costs too much, Los Angeles County doesn’t fix it. It just pays to make it go away.
Eric Preven is a writer, producer and SoCal Journalism Award winner
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