County

A top Los Angeles politician said Tuesday that LA 2028 Olympics committee chair Casey Wasserman should resign following revelations about racy emails he exchanged with convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell.

“I think Casey Wasserman needs to step down,” said L.A. County Supervisor Janice Hahn, who along with other L.A. politicians is working with the LA28 Olympics organizing committee on planning of the Games.

“Having him represent us on the world stage distracts focus from our athletes and the enormous effort needed to prepare for 2028,” said Hahn, who represents an area of south Los Angeles County that includes coastal neighborhoods.

A representative for Wasserman didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wasserman and other top officials with LA 2028, which is in charge of paying for and planning the Games, are in Italy for meetings ahead of the Winter Olympics.

Hahn’s comments follow the release of investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein released last week by the Justice Department that include personal emails exchanged more than 20 years ago between Wasserman and Maxwell, Epstein’s former romantic partner.

In emails sent in March and April 2003, Wasserman — who was married at the time — writes to Maxwell about wanting to book a massage and wanting to see her in a tight leather outfit.

She offers to give him a massage that can “drive a man wild,” and the pair discuss how much they miss each other, according to files released and posted online by the U.S. Department of Justice.

In a statement released Saturday, Wasserman said he regretted his correspondence with Maxwell, which he said occurred “long before her horrific crimes came to light.”

“I never had a personal or business relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. As is well documented, I went on a humanitarian trip as part of a delegation with the Clinton Foundation in 2002 on the Epstein plane. I am terribly sorry for having any association with either of them,” he said in the statement.

The Daily Mail in 2024 published an extensive story on Wasserman’s alleged affairs during his marriage with Laura Ziffren, whom he divorced. He denied the accusations.

Good morning, and welcome to L.A. on the Record — our City Hall newsletter. It’s David Zahniser, giving you the latest on city and county government.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass did something this week that would have been unthinkable three years ago — she took an unprompted swipe at her counterparts in L.A. County.

Bass, while weighing in on L.A.’s so-called “mansion tax,” dinged the county for creating what she called a “bureaucratic” homelessness agency, saying it threatened to undermine the city’s progress on the crisis.

County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath hit back hard, telling Bass on X that the county created the new agency because the existing one — which is partly overseen by Bass appointees — was incapable of tracking its spending.

“The County is fixing the problems you’ve ignored,” Horvath said.

Things have been bad between Bass and Horvath for more than a year, with the two Democrats taking veiled, and sometimes not-so-veiled, swipes at each other. But could they become adversaries in the truest sense of the word — as head-to-head rivals in this year’s mayoral election?

Horvath, who has spent months lining up endorsements for her own reelection campaign, has until Saturday to decide whether to enter the mayor’s race, challenging Bass’ bid for a second term. She told The Times she is seriously weighing a run — and “spending the weekend in deep reflection” with friends and family.

“From a young age, my faith has guided me through the most important moments of my life,” said Horvath, who is Catholic. “This is one of those moments.”

Bass, who is running in the June 2 primary for a second term, is already facing challenges from reality television star Spencer Pratt, former school superintendent Austin Beutner and community organizer Rae Huang, who has focused heavily on housing issues. Still, a Horvath bid would reshape the contest dramatically.

Beutner has not campaigned publicly since Jan. 5, one day before his 22-year-old daughter died of undetermined causes. Real estate developer Rick Caruso opted on Jan. 16 to stay out of the race, after sharply criticizing Bass for more than a year.

On paper, a Horvath mayoral bid looks somewhat risky. If she takes the plunge, she would no longer be permitted to seek reelection to her supervisorial seat, representing about 2 million people on the Westside and in the San Fernando Valley. Bass has been raising money for more than a year and has locked up key endorsements, including the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor.

If she runs, Horvath would face questions about the county’s difficulties, including a $4-billion legal payout over sexual abuse that has been marred by fraud allegations and a screwup surrounding Measure G, the 2024 ballot measure that will expand the number of county supervisors but also is on track to inadvertently repeal a criminal justice reform measure.

On top of that, there’s the secret $2-million payout to the county’s top executive.

Horvath said she’s seen recent polling that makes clear that “there’s an appetite for change” among Angelenos. Community leaders, residents of her supervisorial district and “those longing for a better Los Angeles” have been asking her to run, she said.

“I am listening carefully and seriously both to those who are urging me to enter this race, and to those who are eager to continue the work we have begun together at the County,” she said in a statement.

A spokesperson for the Bass campaign said he does not comment on prospective candidates. Pratt, for his part, said he’s rooting for Horvath to jump in so that “voters can see two career politicians calling each other out for the failed policies they both promoted.”

“Lindsey Horvath and Karen Bass are both responsible for the decline of our city, and the more they talk about each other, the more the public will see why we need a complete reset,” he said in a statement.

Even if Horvath doesn’t run, it looks like her relationship with the mayor will be rocky for the foreseeable future. The first-term supervisor has emerged as one of Bass’ most outspoken critics, highlighting an array of issues at City Hall.

Earlier this month, Horvath told The Times that she hears regularly from Angelenos who complain that they’re not getting basic services. She said that support within City Hall for Inside Safe, the mayor’s program to combat homelessness, is eroding.

Horvath has also taken aim at the city’s response to the Palisades fire, pointing out in a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom that the Fire Department’s after-action report was watered down and then disavowed by its author. A day later, she told CBS2 that Bass was not being truthful about the county’s new homelessness agency.

Bass also has her own bully pulpit. On Friday, she stood outside federal court and railed against the indictment of independent journalist Don Lemon, calling it an “assault on our democracy.” Prosecutors have accused Lemon of violating federal law while reporting on a protest inside a Minnesota church.

The strained relations between Bass and Horvath are noteworthy given the mayor’s heavy focus on collaboration early on in her administration, when she triumphantly declared she was “locking arms” with a wide array of elected officials — including county supervisors — in the fight against homelessness.

Bass has attempted to stay above the fray, mostly avoiding direct conflict with other politicians — at least in public. But the Palisades fire, which destroyed thousands of homes and left 12 people dead, showed things weren’t always amiable behind the scenes.

Two weeks after the fires, Horvath and Bass were at odds over their joint public appearances, with Horvath complaining via text message that the mayor’s approach didn’t feel “very ‘locked arms.’”

Months later, Horvath and her colleagues on the Board of Supervisors voted to pull hundreds of millions of dollars from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, moving the money to the new county homelessness agency.

Horvath said the change was urgently needed in the wake of highly damaging reports about LAHSA’s financial oversight. Bass, in turn, warned the move would create a “monumental disruption” for the city’s effort to bring unhoused residents indoors.

Last month, Bass published an opinion piece in the Daily News criticizing the county, pointing out that its new homelessness agency was already proposing cuts to programs that have served the city’s unhoused population.

Bass echoed that criticism in a recent interview, saying the cuts were proposed a year after voters approved a half-cent sales tax to fund homeless services.

Those reductions, if enacted, would scale back the operations of A Pathway Home, the county’s counterpart to Inside Safe.

“We are going to do the best we can without a full partner in the county,” Bass said.

Horvath, for her part, said she wants to scale back A Pathway Home because it is too costly — and is not achieving the success that county officials want.

State of play

— BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD: City Councilmember Nithya Raman fell short in her attempt to send voters a ballot proposal rewriting Measure ULA, the tax on property sales of $5.3 million and up. Councilmembers said they did not even want to discuss the idea until it had been vetted by her committee.

— PIT BULL PAYOUT: The city paid more than $3 million last year to a woman who adopted a dog from the South L.A. animal shelter, only to have it attack her two days later. She later found out the dog had bitten a grandmother’s face. The case is raising questions about the way some shelter dogs are promoted on Instagram and other platforms.

— HEADING TO TRIAL: After a weeklong hearing, a judge ruled on Wednesday that the criminal case against Councilmember Curren Price can proceed to trial. Price, who has been charged with embezzlement, perjury and violations of conflict-of-interest laws, is slated to leave office in December. His lawyer said he did not act with “wrongful intent.”

— CLEARING CASES: Los Angeles police solved more than two thirds of homicides citywide in 2025, in a year that ended with the fewest number of slayings in six decades, according to figures released Thursday.

— GIVING TO GIBSON DUNN: The council signed off on a $1.8-million increase to its legal contract with Gibson Dunn, which is representing the city in the seemingly endless L.A. Alliance case. The increase, which passed on a 9-4 vote, brings the contract to nearly $7.5 million.

— PAYOUT PAUSE: Los Angeles County will halt some payments from its $4-billion sex-abuse settlement, as prosecutors ramp up their probe into allegations of fraud.

— LAPD VS. PROTESTER: A tense exchange between an LAPD captain and one of the Police Department’s most outspoken critics has gone viral.

— BATTLING TRUMP, PART 1: President Trump signed an executive order to allow victims of the Los Angeles wildfires to rebuild without obtaining “unnecessary, duplicative, or obstructive” permits. The order, which is likely to be challenged by the city and state, was immediately derided by Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said Trump should provide FEMA relief.

— BATTLING TRUMP, PART 2: Trump also vowed to fight the construction of new low-income housing in the Pacific Palisades burn area. L.A. officials say no projects are planned.

Quick hits

• Where is Inside Safe? The mayor’s signature program to fight homelessness went to the area around Gage Avenue at St. Andrews Place, located in the South L.A. district represented by Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson.
• On the docket next week: Bass delivers the first of her two State of the City speeches, which has been billed as a “unifying celebration of Los Angeles.”

Stay in touch

That’s it for this week! Send your questions, comments and gossip to LAontheRecord@latimes.com. Did a friend forward you this email? Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Saturday morning.

Los Angeles County will halt some payments from its $4-billion sex abuse settlement, leaving many plaintiffs on edge as prosecutors ramp up an investigation into allegations of fraud.

L.A. County agreed last spring to the record payout to settle a flood of lawsuits from people who said they’d been sexually abused by staff in government-run foster homes and juvenile camps. Many attorneys had told their clients they could expect the first tranche of money to start flowing this month.

But the county’s acting chief executive officer, Joseph M. Nicchitta, said Thursday that the county would “pause all payments” for unvetted claims after a request by Dist. Atty. Nathan Hochman. These are claims that have been flagged as requiring a “higher level of scrutiny,” according to a joint report submitted Thursday by attorneys in the settlement.

The district attorney announced he would investigate the historic settlement after reporting by The Times that found some plaintiffs who said they were paid to sue. Investigators have found “a significant number of cases where we believe there is potential fraud,” according to a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office. The State Bar is spearheading a separate inquiry into fraud allegations.

On Jan. 9, Hochman formally requested the county pause the distribution of funds for at least six months, which he said would give his office “a reasonable opportunity to complete critical investigative steps.”

“Premature disbursement of settlement funds poses a substantial risk of interfering with the investigation by complicating witness cooperation, obscuring financial trails, and impairing my office’s ability to identify and prosecute fraudulent activity,” Hochman wrote in a letter to Andy Baum, the county’s main outside attorney working on the settlement.

Plaintiff lawyers argued the county was required to turn over money by the end of the month.

The county said it came to an agreement Thursday and plans to turn over $400 million on Friday, which would “cover claims that have already been validated,” according to a statement from Nicchitta. That money will go into a fund where it will be distributed when judges are finished vetting and deciding how much each claim is worth.

“No plaintiff was getting paid until the allocation process is completed,” said the county’s top lawyer, Dawyn Harrison. “The County is not overseeing that intensive process.”

The rest of the payments, Nicchitta said, will be on hold until the claims can “be appropriately investigated.”

“The County takes extremely seriously its obligations to provide just compensation to survivors. Preventing fraud is central to that commitment,” he said. “Fraudulent claims of sexual assault harm survivors by diluting compensation for survivors and casting public doubt over settlements as a whole.”

The uncertainty has sparked a sense of despair among those who spent the last few years wading through the darkest memories of their lives in hopes of a life-changing sum.

Andrea Proctor, 45, said the last few years have been like “digging into a scar that was healed.”

“The whole lawsuit just blew air out of me,” said Proctor, who sued in 2022 over alleged abuse at MacLaren Children’s Center, an El Monte shelter where she says she was drugged and sexually abused by staff as a teenager. “I’m just sitting out here empty.”

Proctor said she desperately needs the money to stabilize her life, the first part of which was spent careening from one crisis to the next — an instability she traces partially to the abuse she suffered as a minor.

Since a 2020 law change that extended the statute of limitations to sue over childhood sexual abuse, thousands have come forward with claims of abuse in county-run facilities dating back decades. The county resolved claims it faced last year through two massive payouts — the first settlement for $4 billion, which includes roughly 11,000 plaintiffs, and a second one last October worth $828 million, which includes about 400 victims.

Now, according to court filings made public Tuesday, the county faces an additional 5,500 claims of the same nature, leaving the prospect of a third hefty payout looming on the horizon.

“They’re telling me the ship has sailed,” said Martin Gould, a partner with Gould Grieco & Hensley, who said he wants this next flood of litigation to focus on pushing for arrests of predatory staff members still on the county’s payroll. “I don’t believe that.”

Gould says his firm, based in Chicago, represents about 70 victims in the new litigation. James Harris Law Firm, a small Seattle-based firm that specializes in big personal injury cases, has about 3,000. The Right Trial Lawyers, a firm that lists a Texas office as its headquarters, has about 700, according to an attorney affiliated with the firm.

These lawyers will be pleading their cases in front of a public — and a Board of Supervisors — at a moment when the conversation has shifted from a reckoning over systemic sexual abuse inside county facilities to concerns about the use of taxpayer money.

A series of Times investigations last fall found nine clients represented by Downtown LA Law Group, or DTLA, who said they were paid by recruiters to sue. Four said they were told to make up their claims.

All the lawsuits filed by the firm, which represents roughly a quarter of the plaintiffs in the $4-billion settlement, are now under review by Daniel Buckley, a former presiding judge of the county’s Superior Court.

DTLA has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and said in a previous statement that it “categorically does not engage in, nor has it ever condoned, the exchange of money for client retention.”

Several DTLA clients said they were unaware of the probes by the State Bar and the district attorney, though they were told this month to expect delays in payments due, in part, to “a higher-than-expected false claim potential.”

The delays have caused extra anguish for some plaintiffs who have taken out loans against their settlement.

Proctor took out loans worth $15,000 from High Rise Financial, an L.A.-based legal funding company, which collects a larger portion of her payout with each passing year. She now owes more than $34,000, according to loan statements.

Proctor said High Rise Financial recently inquired about buying her out of the settlement payment, which the county is expected to pay out over five years. The loan company told her she could get a percentage of her settlement up front in a lump sum, with the company pocketing the rest as profit. For example, she said, she was told if she received a $300,000 payout, she could get $205,000 up front.

“Conversations were held with consumers to assess their interest in a potential financial arrangement related to a possible settlement,” High Rise said in a statement. “No agreements were sent, nor were any transactions entered into.”

Proctor’s friend Krista Hubbard, who also sued over abuse at MacLaren Children’s Center, borrowed $20,000 to help her through a period of homelessness. She now owes nearly $43,000. She said she, too, got the same offer this month from High Rise of getting bought out of her settlement.

Hubbard, who is crashing at the home of her godfather in Arkansas, said she’s considering it.

“How much longer is it going to take?” she said. “Am I going to be able to not be homeless?”

The $828-million settlement, which includes just three law firms, is running into its own roadblock with lawyers belatedly learning that roughly 30 of their clients were also set to receive money from the $4-billion settlement despite rules barring plaintiffs from receiving money from both.

The overlap has led to a dispute over which pot of money should cover payments to those plaintiffs. Those in the $828-million settlement, which has a much smaller pool of plaintiffs, are expected to get much more.

“It reeks,” said Courtney Thom, an attorney with Manly Stewart & Finaldi, who said she believed the county should have flagged long ago that there were identical clients in both settlements.

“It is not for me to fact-check for the county,” she told Judge Lawrence Riff at a court hearing Wednesday. “It is not for me to cross-reference names.”

Some of these plaintiffs had two different sexual abuse claims against the county — for example, one lawsuit alleged abuse in foster care while a second involved juvenile halls. Other clients had identical claims in both groups and mistakenly believed the two firms that represented them were compiling the information into one claim, Thom said.

Baum, the outside attorney defending the county, told Riff he wanted to ensure the clients didn’t “have their hands in two cookie jars.”

UNION CITY, Ga. — FBI agents were executing a search warrant at the Fulton County elections office near Atlanta on Wednesday, an agency spokesperson confirmed.

An FBI spokesperson said agents were “executing a court authorized law enforcement action” at the county’s main election office in Union City, just south of Atlanta. The spokesperson declined to provide any further information, citing an ongoing matter.

The search comes as the FBI under the leadership of Director Kash Patel has moved quickly to pursue the political grievances of President Trump, including by working with the Justice Department to investigate multiple perceived adversaries of the Republican commander-in-chief.

The Justice Department had no immediate comment.

Trump has long insisted that the 2020 election was stolen even though judges across the country and his own attorney general said they found no evidence of widespread fault that tipped the contest in Democrat Joe Biden’s favor.

He has long made Georgia, one of the battleground states he lost in 2020, a central target for his complaints about the election and memorably pleaded with its then-secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the contest.

Last week, in reference to the 2020 election, he asserted that “people will soon be prosecuted for what they did.” It was not clear what in particular he was referring to.

Fulton County District Atty. Fani Willis in August 2023 obtained an indictment against Trump and 18 others, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging scheme to illegally try to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. That case was dismissed in November after courts barred Willis and her office from pursuing it because of an “appearance of impropriety” stemming from a romantic relationship she had with a prosecutor she had appointed to lead the case.

Brumback writes for the Associated Press.