They were the children of domestic violence, parents haunted by drug addiction and other traumas, taken from their homes by social workers convinced that they would be safer in the custody of San Diego County than with their own parents.
But in case after case, boys and girls were sexually abused by people charged with protecting them, according to a spate of new lawsuits filed against San Diego County.
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Many of those who reported the abuse over the course of decades — including some abused by dozens of perpetrators — were told to be quiet or simply disregarded, the lawyers and lawsuits allege.
“Based on our investigation, the County of San Diego was apparently one of the largest employers of child molesters in the state of California,” said attorney Blake Woodhall, who represents scores of alleged victims.
“Many children reported to the staff and administration that they were being sexually abused while they were at Polinsky,” he said. “Others pleaded for help but were completely ignored or dismissed.”
The alleged abuses happened decades ago, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the cases have been piling up in San Diego County and elsewhere since lawmakers in 2019 passed the California Child Victims Act, legislation by then-Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez that rewrote the statute of limitations for people who were abused by institutions as minors.
County officials are being inundated with lawsuit after lawsuit alleging heinous behavior by social workers — men and women accused of sexually exploiting children as young as 8 years old.
Earlier this year, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the county already faced dozens of lawsuits involving its Probation Department, which runs the region’s two facilities that house boys and girls ordered into custody by the juvenile justice system.
But San Diego County is also facing at least 100 additional lawsuits filed by now-grown victims who say they were assaulted while under the supervision of the Health and Human Services Agency, which is responsible for protecting children removed from their home.
The cases amount to a tidal wave of litigation that could ultimately cost San Diego County $100 million or more. In a settlement of similar claims reached last month in Los Angeles County, officials agreed to pay billions of dollars to resolve thousands of accusations.
San Diego County officials declined to comment on the roughly 200 lawsuits, citing a policy of not publicly discussing litigation pending in state or federal court.
But they provided some context about the legislation that sparked so many of the legal complaints, and said their social workers, probation officers and other staff remain committed to doing their best to protect and nurture children under their care.
“We prioritize the safety of all children and youth in our care,” the county said in a statement. “The county has comprehensive training, rules, procedures, and additional oversight to ensure the safety of youth.”
Even though the allegations date back years, “The county will thoroughly investigate all of the claims made in these cases,” the statement added. “We remain committed to the protection of children in the county.”
The East Mesa Juvenile Detention Facility in the Otay Mesa area on Thursday, May 25, 2023 in San Diego, CA. (Eduardo Contreras / The San Diego Union-Tribune)San Diego County has a difficult history when it comes to protecting vulnerable children — both those in Probation Department custody due to court orders and those who were removed from their homes by social workers.
Over the past seven years, the county has paid out at least $11.7 million to victims who were injured, abused or killed due to negligence or misconduct by the Child Welfare Services office.
One of those cases involved Michael Hayes, a county-approved foster parent who molested twin brothers for years even though they repeatedly reported the abuse, the Union-Tribune found in an investigation published in 2018.
The county, which returned the boys to Hayes multiple times before they were finally believed, agreed to pay $3 million to the brothers to settle their lawsuit. Hayes pleaded guilty to molestation and was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
‘Drugged and sexually abused’
The Polinsky Children’s Center opened along Ruffin Road in Kearny Mesa in 1994, when it replaced the declining Hillcrest Receiving Home near the bluff overlooking Mission Valley.
At the time, Polinsky was celebrated as a new beginning for child-protective services in San Diego County, a 24-hour safe house for the region’s most vulnerable youth. Most children cycle through relatively quickly before they are returned home or placed with relatives or a foster home. The average length of stay is seven days.
The state-of-the-art facility includes six residential cottages, classrooms, a gymnasium, library and other amenities. It is licensed as an emergency shelter that can house up to 204 children at a time, and it accepts more than 100 minors each month.
“Services focus on the child’s safety and meeting the immediate physical, emotional, social and spiritual well-being of each child, while return to their family or other placement options are assessed,” the center website says.
But according to the lawsuits and other public records, employees have not always met their responsibilities.
Instead, the failures outlined in the legal complaints share a basic pattern: boys and girls being sexually assaulted, physically and verbally abused, over-medicated and neglected by staff — and the accusations being ignored by managers even after being reported.
One of the more egregious cases was brought by S.G., who filed his lawsuit against the county last month. He was eight years old when he landed at Polinsky in 2002.
According to his lawsuit, S.G. was molested by four separate employees, including one woman. He was groped over and under his clothes, forced to fondle and orally copulate the perpetrators and repeatedly raped.
He said the county knew or should have known about the abuse, but nothing was done.
“Despite the foregoing, no action was taken, no investigation was completed and perpetrators continued to sexually abuse and assault (the) plaintiff,” the lawsuit alleges.
“Children within the foster care system were habitually sexually abused and assaulted while in defendants’ custody and care,” it adds. “Defendants’ agents and/or employees were aware aware of such sexual abuse and assaults, yet said sexual abuse and assaults were not reported as required.”
Similar allegations were brought forward by plaintiffs at a press event last month, held just down the street from the Polinsky facility.
Speaker after speaker, almost all of whom declined to provide their names, said they had been sexually abused, over-medicated and physically and verbally assaulted after they were moved into Polinsky as children.
“You don’t just get over being drugged and sexually abused,” said one man, who is among the dozens of plaintiffs now suing San Diego County. “I was a child in need of protection placed in an institution that was supposed to provide safety and care.
“Staff did not believe me; they failed in their duty,” he said, his voice cracking. “This is not just my story. This is a systemic failure that must be addressed.”
A 35-year-old woman who called herself Jamie said she too reported being abused at Polinsky when she was a girl — many times — but her allegations went nowhere. She urged others to come forward to somehow hold officials accountable.
“I know that we were young and didn’t have a choice about what happened to us, but today we do,” she said. “We can bring some form of justice, not only to ourselves but for all of the other victims who have not come forward yet.”
Failure to supervise
The accusations pouring into San Diego Superior Court are not the only reports of misconduct or abuse inside the Polinsky Children’s Center.
According to the California Department of Social Services, which regulates Polinsky and thousands of group homes and other facilities, state officials have documented repeated claims from residents of sexual assault and related negligence.
Many of the accusations were ruled unsubstantiated, a classification the state uses when there is not enough evidence to support the allegations.
That’s what investigators concluded in March, after a client reported that an unnamed staff member had been improperly touching them and others. The alleged abuse came to a head last fall, when the client punched their abuser, state documents show.
“Based on confidential interview and records reviewed, the allegation that staff inappropriately touched minors in care may have happened or is valid, but there is not a preponderance of the evidence to prove that the alleged violation occurred,” investigators said.
But Department of Social Services regulators have substantiated a host of other violations in recent years and ordered the facility to implement corrective actions, records show.
According to an investigation completed this past November, two Polinsky staffers were found to have bullied, sworn at and made fun of clients’ sexual orientation. The offending employees were moved to different cottages.
Investigators in 2023 substantiated a complaint that night workers at Polinsky failed to properly supervise children. That same year, a worker was found to have hit a child, and another review concluded that staff failed to prevent a client from engaging in self-harm.
Such allegations against San Diego County aren’t new.
As far back as 2008, the Union-Tribune reported that danger and negligence inside Polinsky and county-approved foster homes had led to at least 33 deaths. Three of those involved physical abuse by caretakers; many of the others were due to accidents, neglect or medical issues.
Even after the A.G. case roiled the county’s Child Welfare Services office — and prompted calls from a host of public officials for independent reviews and or commissions — almost nothing was done to reform the system.
San Diego County has not audited its foster care system in a decade. When the last audit was completed, the resulting report was just five pages long.
“There is reasonable assurance that reports of child physical and/ or sexual abuse received through the child-abuse hotline are reported to law enforcement within the required timeframe, and that CWS processes foster care aid payments in a timely manner,” the 2015 report said.
Billions in claims
The California Child Victims Act was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom and took effect on the first day of January in 2020.
The legislation expanded the statute of limitations for victims of childhood sexual assault to pursue damages against organizations and institutions. Plaintiffs can now file a lawsuit anytime before they turn 40 — up from 26 — or within five years of discovering or reasonably discovering the abuse.
Since then, thousands of new legal claims have been filed in California against major institutions like the Catholic Church and Boy Scouts of America.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego, for example, filed for bankruptcy protection last June in response to more than 400 new lawsuits filed by people who said they had been abused by priests when they were younger.
That new round of litigation may be even more costly than the nearly $200 million the San Diego diocese paid to 144 plaintiffs in a 2007 legal settlement.
Bishop Charles Francis Buddy Pastoral Center, Diocese of San Diego in Clairemont on Thursday, June 13, 2024 in San Diego, California. (Alejandro Tamayo / The San Diego Union-Tribune)School districts around the state also have seen a sharp rise in litigation over abuse that is alleged to have occurred sometimes decades ago. A study released in January estimated the lawsuits by former public school students could cost California districts billions of dollars.
“The best estimate of the dollar value of claims brought to date because of AB 218 is $2 billion to $3 billion for local educational agencies,” said the report from the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a state-created adviser to school districts.
“Other local public agencies’ costs will exceed that value by a multiplier, with one county government alone estimating their claim value at $3 billion,” the study added.
That government agency turned out to be Los Angeles County, which last month agreed to pay $4 billion to settle some 6,800 abuse claims filed by former residents of its emergency children’s shelter, juvenile halls and foster homes.
“On behalf of the county, I apologize wholeheartedly to everyone who was harmed by these reprehensible acts,” county CEO Fesia Davenport said in a statement. “The historic scope of this settlement makes clear that we are committed to helping the survivors recover and rebuild their lives.”
Los Angeles County expects to issue bonds to cover the debt and pay hundreds of millions of dollars annually for years to come.
Gonzalez, the former San Diego lawmaker who wrote AB 218, said she was conflicted about how the law is affecting local governments. Most of the debate back in 2019 focused on non-public entities like the church, she said.
“Cities and counties didn’t even oppose the bill,” said Gonzalez, now president of the California Labor Federation.
She said that the State Bar needs to do a better job policing unscrupulous lawyers filing claims on behalf of as many victims as possible — sometimes without evidence — and that the attorneys defending public agencies need to do more to protect taxpayers.
“We need to make victims whole, and we need to send a clear message that institutions of all sorts need to take these allegations seriously and do more than just move these perps around,” said Gonzalez, a UCLA School of Law graduate.
“What we can’t do is allow counties and cities to go bankrupt and not be able to provide child protective services to the children today,” she said. “I hope I’m wrong, but if there are this many victims, we have a much bigger problem than we thought we did.”
Supervisors dodge issue
None of the four San Diego County supervisors would discuss the history of charges against Child Welfare Services, or the millions of dollars paid to plaintiffs over the past decade or longer.
Supervisors Joel Anderson, Jim Desmond, Terra Lawson-Remer and Monica Montgomery Steppe all declined to respond to requests for an explanation of the lawsuits or to questions about what measures they have or plan to put forward to prevent such abuse in the future.
The supervisors also would not discuss why Child Welfare Services has not been audited in 10 years.
District Attorney Summer Stephan, who has made sex trafficking and other crimes against children a cornerstone of her political campaigns since her 2018 election, said through a spokesperson that her office does not track county employees charged with abusing minors.
In a statement, her office said it had no comment on whether it has opened criminal cases against some of the alleged perpetrators in the civil lawsuits but added that it regularly reviews such public filings and takes action as appropriate.
“If a sexual assault victim is represented by legal counsel in a civil case, they may elect to report to the appropriate law enforcement agency,” spokesperson Steve Walker said by email.
“Or they may elect not to have their case pursued in the criminal justice system,” he added. “The law empowers them to decide how they want to proceed.”
Much like the Los Angeles County lawsuits, the Polinsky-related lawsuits are likely to be coordinated under the supervision of a single judge, said Woodhall, the attorney who represents more than 50 clients in San Diego and also worked on the Los Angeles cases.
The coinciding of the caseload could be similar to a class-action proceeding in order to allow the court to manage cases efficiently, but with each claim treated individually and each plaintiff represented by their own lawyers.
In the claim filed last month by S.G., who alleged being molested by four different Polinsky workers when he was a boy, a case-management conference is scheduled for Sept. 5.
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