DTLA

It felt like the kind of thing that must happen in Hollywood all the time: a hundred bucks to be a movie extra.

Austin Beagle, 31, and Nevada Barker, 30, said they were trying to sign up for food stamps this spring when someone offered them a background role outside a county social services office in Long Beach. They thought the gig seemed intriguing, albeit a bit unusual.

The offer came not from a casting director, but a man hawking free cellphones. The filming location was, oddly enough, a law firm in downtown Los Angeles.

Like many DTLA clients, Austin Beagle and Nevada Barker signed a retainer agreement that entitles the firm to 45% of their payout.

(Joe Garcia / For The Times)

Maybe this was how actors were recruited here, they figured. The couple had recently moved from the remote ranching town of Stinnett in the Texas panhandle, and the recruiter seemed to appreciate their Southern drawl. They hopped on a bus, excited to make $200 between them.

“They said we’d be extras,” said Beagle, who was unemployed at the time. “But when we got to the office, that’s not what it was at all.”

The couple said they arrived at the lobby of Downtown LA Law Group. A Times investigation published earlier this month found seven plaintiffs represented by the firm who claimed they received cash from recruiters to sue the county over sex abuse, which could violate state law. Two said they had never been abused and were told to manufacture their claims.

Downtown LA Law Group has denied any involvement with the recruiters who allegedly paid plaintiffs. The firm said in a statement it would never “encourage or tolerate anyone lying about being abused” and has been conducting additional screening to remove “false or exaggerated claims” from its caseload.

Four days after The Times’ investigation was published, the firm asked for a lawsuit on behalf of Carlshawn Stovall, one of the men who said he fabricated claims, to be dismissed with prejudice, meaning the case cannot be refiled.

The firm requested a second case spurred by Juan Fajardo, who said he made up a claim using the name of a family member, to be dismissed with prejudice on Sept. 9 after Fajardo says he told lawyers he wanted to drop the lawsuit.

Now, with Beagle and Barker, two more have come forward to allege they were told to invent the stories that led to their lawsuits.

Austin Beagle and Nevada Barker said they’d been in Southern California only a few months when they were flagged down outside a social services office where they were hoping to enroll in food stamps. The couple have since moved back to Stinnett, Texas.

(Joe Garcia / For The Times)

The couple said that when they arrived at DTLA’s offices in April, a man came down to the lobby with a clipboard and gave them a piece of paper to memorize before going upstairs. They assumed this was the role they’d be playing — with room to go off script.

“They told us to say that we were sexually abused and harassed by the guards in … Las P? I can’t think of the institution’s name,” said Beagle, who added he was told to say the incidents occurred around 2005.

“The worse it was the better,” he recalled being told.

On April 29, Downtown LA Law Group filed a lawsuit against the county on behalf of 63 plaintiffs, including Beagle and Barker, who claimed they were abused at Los Padrinos, L.A. County’s juvenile hall in Downey. The couple are now part of the $4-billion settlement.

Allegations of potential fraud and pay-to-sue tactics have rocked both L.A. County government and powerhouse law firms, which are scrambling to figure out how to salvage the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history.

Perhaps no group has been shaken more than sex abuse victims themselves, who fear allegations of false claims could derail what they hoped would be a life-changing settlement.

“I just couldn’t believe it,” said Jimmy Vigil, 45, who sued the county in December 2022 for alleged sexual abuse by a probation officer at a detention camp in Lancaster.

Vigil said he was repeatedly molested as a 14-year-old and forced to masturbate in front of other teens while the guard watched.

“It makes me feel disgusted,” said Vigil, now a mental health case manager in Ventura County. “You have absolutely no clue what I went through. You have no clue how hard I have strived in life to make it to where I am at today.”

Jimmy Vigil, now a mental health case worker in Ventura, said he was repeatedly molested as a teenager and forced to masturbate in front of other teens.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Barker and Beagle said that after memorizing the card with the basics of their story, they were taken upstairs to a room at DTLA’s office where about 20 people were waiting. Everyone seemed confused, they said.

They “were asking us ‘Hey, did y’all promise to get paid? And we said ‘Yeah, somebody told us that we’d get paid $100 if we come in,” Beagle said. “Everybody was just concerned about getting paid whatever they were promised.”

DTLA said in a statement it has “never directed, nor do we have any knowledge that anyone was ever paid, hired, or brought to the DTLA office, or was asked to memorize a script of any kind under the guise of filmmaking,”

“We are not filmmakers,” the firm said. “No one authorized on behalf of the firm has ever promised or implied movie extra work as a means of retaining clients.”

Beagle and Barker said they were called in together to a glass cubicle where a woman spent 15-20 minutes asking them questions about their story of abuse. Barker said she struggled to come up with details because “it was all made-up stuff.”

Beagle said he thought maybe the staffers in the law firm were also acting, pretending not to know this was “a fake thing.”

“Like, they were testing us all out to see if we knew how to act — just play the part,” Beagle said. “Like, this was a trial thing.”

The couple said they were befuddled at the interaction but figured they’d done enough to get their money; the receptionist told them to come back in a few hours to collect.

The firm said, in some circumstances, it provides “interest free loans to clients once they have retained our services.”

Beagle and Barker said they frittered away two hours at Pershing Square a few blocks away until around 4 p.m. It was only when they came back to the firm, they said, that it became clear there was no movie.

A man named Kevin paid them $100 each, and told them they were part of a massive settlement involving juvenile halls they’d never heard about until that afternoon. The man told them they could get $100 for each additional person they referred to go through the same process, Beagle said.

“We walked out thinking I don’t know how legit this is and we might even get f— in trouble for it,” Beagle said.

Like most sexual abuse lawsuits, the suit was filed using only plaintiffs’ initials. The Times reviewed paperwork that DTLA provided to Beagle and Barker, which they signed in order to become clients on April 21 and to opt into the L.A. County settlement on May 29.

Under the settlement, each plaintiff could be eligible for anywhere from $100,000 to $3 million. Retainer agreements for Beagle and Barker reviewed by The Times show DTLA would get 45% of their payout.

Beagle and Barker said they aren’t banking on getting any money from L.A. County. After all, they said, they grew up in Texas, more than a thousand miles away from the abuse-plagued facilities.

“We need it, but it’s not ours. It’s like finding a wallet,” Barker said. “Return it.”

A Times investigation published earlier this month found plaintiffs represented by Downtown LA Law Group who claimed they received cash from recruiters to sue L.A. County over sex abuse. Four now say they were told to make up the claims.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Among some survivors, there is a palpable fear that the fraud allegations will steamroll the settlement, overshadowing the fact that many county-run facilities were home to unchecked abuse and torpedoing their chance of receiving a life-changing sum.

The Times interviewed eight victims for this article represented by Slater Slater Schulman, ACTS LAW Firm, McNicholas & McNicholas, and Becker Law Group. Many said they were aghast at learning the worst years of their life may have become fodder for quick cash.

“It felt like a kick in the gut,” said Trinidad Pena, 52. “For somebody just to lie about it was just sickening.”

On Sept. 18, Pena said, she was eating a pancake breakfast at a homeless services center in Long Beach when she learned she had something in common with a woman sitting on the picnic bench next to her.

Both had filed lawsuits against L.A. County alleging sexual abuse at county-run facilities. Both of them were part of the county’s $4-billion settlement. But she was the only one, she believed, who had actually been abused.

The woman told her she’d been paid $20 to sue by a woman who hung around on the sidewalk outside the community center clutching a clipboard, she said.

The Times could not reach the recruiters allegedly responsible for paying plaintiffs for comment.

Trinidad Pena, who sued in 2022 over sex abuse, said she was jarred to find herself at breakfast with a woman who told her she’d been paid to sue the county.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

Pena sued L.A. County in December 2022 over an alleged rape when she was 12 by a staff member at MacLaren Children’s Center, a shuttered youth shelter now infamous for predatory staff. No amount of cash is going to erase the scars from that, she says. But it would help.

Last month, Pena traded in her New Orleans shotgun apartment for the streets of Southern California, where she was raised. The move was, she said, a Hail Mary attempt to get medical treatment through the state’s public benefits for a cyst sprouting behind her right eye that made her vision wobble and her head crackle with pain.

She is currently living on $1,206 a month in and out of her van with a failing shunt in her head, which doctors implanted to treat her cyst. She eats mostly the nonperishable Trader Joe’s snacks she brought from Louisiana.

A six- or seven-figure settlement could help save her life, Pena said.

“I’m going to have myself a hell of a Charlie Sheen party and take a nosedive off a balcony at the Chateau Marmont if I do not get some sort of relief,” said Pena, who says she grew up in foster care near the legendary West Hollywood hotel.

Part of what has made the false claims so infuriating, victims say, is that L.A. County youth detention facilities were indeed home to horrific abuse decades ago.

Kizzie Jones, 47, said she’s on antidepressants as a result of a female probation officer who allegedly molested her twice a week and groomed her with bags of chips and bottles of conditioner.

Robert Williams, 41, says he has no friends — a near-total isolation he said traces back to repeated sexual assaults in the shower he suffered as a teen.

Mario Paz, 39, said a guard molested him under the guise of soothing his genitals with milk after he was pepper sprayed while naked. The abuse, he says, has left him traumatized to the point that he is unable to change his children’s Pampers.

All three of them filed lawsuits against the county alleging sexual abuse by county probation officers.

Mario Paz, 39, said his time at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall left him traumatized and damaged the relationship he has with his own children.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

“For someone to capitalize on something that they never endured or never experienced, I think it’s a travesty,” said Cornelious Thompson, a 51-year-old community health worker, who sued the county in December 2022.

When he was around 13 at Los Padrinos, Thompson says he was put on psychiatric medication that knocked him out. He woke up in his unit sore with his pants hanging by his knees, bleeding. It took him years to tell anyone.

He said he recently lost his job with a contractor for the county’s health department due to budget cuts. The county had to slash spending, in part, to pay for the $4-billion settlement.

It was “bittersweet,” he says, losing his job because the county was finally paying for what he said he endured as a teenager.

Only now, a new fear has crept in as two more people say they made up claims: Will he still be believed?

Every day, some of L.A.’s poorest residents line up outside the county benefits office in South Central, weaving their way through a swarm of salesmen hawking deals that feel too good to be true.

Would you like $15 for a quick blood pressure exam? A free phone? Perhaps, $2 for a COVID swab?

How about cash to sign up to sue L.A. County for sexual abuse at juvenile halls?

Over the last year, a Times investigation found a practice of paying for plaintiffs among a nebulous network of vendors, who usher people desperate for cash toward a law firm that could profit significantly from their business.

The Times spent two weeks outside the county social services office in South Central Los Angeles, where a constant flow of people applied for food stamps and cash aid, and spoke with seven people who said they were paid there within the last year to sue the county for sex abuse.

Most said they were abused inside the county’s juvenile halls, but had not planned to sue until they were flagged down on the sidewalk and offered cash. Two people said they were told to fabricate stories of abuse.

All the claims involving alleged payments were filed by Downtown LA Law Group, a pivotal player in the county’s recent $4-billion settlement for sex abuse inside its juvenile halls and foster homes — the largest such payout in U.S. history. Of the roughly 11,000 plaintiffs in the settlement, The Times found that nearly one-fourth were represented by the firm.

Marlon Bland, 31, said he got $200 — half in cash outside the county’s social services office and the other half when he went to meet with lawyers from Downtown LA Law Group, or DTLA. The receptionist there handed him a $100 check, he said. DTLA sued the county on his behalf Aug. 23, 2024.

Kevin Richardson, 59, whose suit was filed by DTLA on Oct. 15, said he got $50 outside the social services office.

Quantavia Smith, 38, whose suit was filed by DTLA on April 29, said a vendor drove her to the office of a downtown law firm and then gave her $200.

The Times could not reach the vendors for the story, and DTLA attorneys declined to be interviewed. The law firm strongly denied paying people to sue and said no representative of the firm had been authorized to make payments.

“We do not pay our clients to file lawsuits, and we strongly oppose such actions,” the law firm said. “If we ever became aware that anyone associated with us, in any capacity, did such a thing — we would end our relationship with them immediately. We want justice for real victims.”

California law bans a practice known as capping, in which non-attorneys directly solicit or procure clients to sign up for lawsuits with a law firm.

DTLA did not answer questions about how the people who said they were paid to sue ended up with the law firm.

The firm’s statement said all their cases go through an intense review process “that tests for truthfulness and has many checks and balances.”

“As a result of this stringent quality control, we have rejected clients whose cases did not meet our criteria,” the firm said. “We are confident that the claims we have filed are valid and will withstand judicial scrutiny.”

For the last year, a mystery has vexed veteran sex abuse attorneys: How did a law firm best known for representing victims of auto accidents attract so many sex abuse plaintiffs in less than two years?

According to a Times analysis of court records, DTLA has amassed more than 2,700 people to sue L.A. County, more than nearly any other law firm involved in the settlement. The firm will get nearly half the payout for each client, per retainer agreements viewed by The Times.

Two legal experts warned, speaking generally, that offering people cash to sue, particularly those who are financially on the brink, could invite fraud into the historic sex abuse settlement.

“Of course, it makes the chance of fraudulent claims more likely,” said Richard Zitrin, a legal ethics professor at UC Law SF.

Some plaintiffs say they were explicitly told to make up claims.

“They tell you what to say,” said Carlshawn Stovall, 43, who said he was given about $20 by a vendor outside the benefits office to sue. “You’re supposed to make it up.”

Stovall said he gave the vendor his cellphone number and was told a lawyer would call him soon and ask him a few questions: What facility were you in? What year? How were you abused?

The vendor handed him a postcard-sized “script” of how to respond, he said. He didn’t need to worry about getting fact-checked, the vendor told him, as the county had no records of who was in its facilities decades ago. It seemed “a good way to get some quick money,” he said.

By the time the call came, he said, he’d lost the script, so he ad-libbed that probation officers watched him masturbate in the shower. The call, he said, lasted less than ten minutes and he never heard from them again.

On Nov. 7, DTLA filed a lawsuit on his behalf alleging he was “sexually harassed and abused” by staff in Central Juvenile Hall. Stovall said he was never in juvenile hall — much less abused there.

“I was a good kid,” he said, laughing.

Juan Fajardo said he used to sell phones next to the lawsuit vendors. He said he would watch a man pull up outside the social services office in a Tesla most Fridays and hand the recruiters cash, which they would dole out the following week to potential plaintiffs. The recruiters told him they were paid per person they signed up, he said.

“‘Just make up a story, say you got touched, here’s $50,’” Fajardo recalled the recruiters who set up shop next to him saying. “They’ll give it to you and then say, ‘Hey you never know, you might even get a lawsuit.’”

One recruiter also sold phones, he recounted. When someone wanted to get a phone, he said, he’d watch the recruiter first take a call on the new phone and make up a story of abuse under the customer’s name. The recruiter would then hand the customer their new phone and pocket the $50 for himself, Fajardo said.

After a few months of watching, Fajardo said, he decided to make up a story, too. He didn’t want to give his real name, so he gave the recruiter the name of a family member and a fake birthday. He said he took $50 and later got a call from a law firm. Ten minutes after the call, he said, he was told his case had been accepted.

DTLA filed the lawsuit under the family’s member name on Aug. 28, 2024. Fajardo said he doesn’t feel right trying to collect the money.

“I said something like, ‘They videotaped us while we’re in the showers, touching us while they pat us down,’” he recounted. “That’s what everyone was saying. I was like, ‘I’ll just use that instead of trying to make up a whole different lie.’”

Most plaintiffs The Times spoke with only knew the first names of the vendors, which some referred to as “recruiters” for the law firm, and said they hadn’t seen them for a few months.

They would usually hang around the people offering free phones right next to the entrance to the county building, according to some who said they were paid.

“It’s been three different people that I’ve seen. They come randomly, maybe once or twice a month,” said Oscar Garcia, who sells cigarettes on the sidewalk. “They promise them $50 to sign.”

Like most sexual abuse cases, all of DTLA’s lawsuits that are part of the massive settlement were filed using only the victim’s initials — JOHN DOE A.R., JANE DOE M.P. The Times confirmed the seven people who said they were paid had lawsuits filed by DTLA through sources with access to plaintiffs’ real names and case numbers.

After The Times reached out to DTLA for comment, the firm called two people The Times had spoken with on the record into its office on Sept. 11 and told them to stop speaking with the reporter.

One man, whom The Times is not naming as he later asked to not be included in the story, called The Times the morning of Sept. 11 and said the firm had ordered him a ride from the broken down car he was living out of in South Central to the firm’s office. He said an attorney had warned him that The Times was doing a “smear article” and didn’t want plaintiffs like him receiving any money from the settlement.

Mitchell Langberg, a defamation lawyer retained by the firm, sent The Times a sworn declaration from the man later that day, accusing the reporter of pretending to be a representative of DTLA to lure him into speaking freely.

The man had saved the reporter’s number in his phone as belonging to the “LA TIMES,” had his picture taken by a Times photographer, sent emails to the reporter’s L.A. Times email account and texted asking when the story would run in the paper.

Shortly afterward, some of the DTLA clients interviewed for this story received a text from the firm, they said, warning them against speaking with reporters:

“If you have been contacted, please notify our office immediately,” the text read.

The litigation floodgates opened in 2020 after California passed a law allowing survivors of childhood sexual abuse to sue the perpetrator even though the statute of limitations had passed on their cases.

Since then, law firms have hunted aggressively for lucrative cases, flooding social media with ads and quietly tapping third parties to find former occupants of county-run juvenile halls and foster homes. The effort has met little resistance from L.A. County officials, who say they threw out relevant records long ago.

This spring, the county agreed to pay $4 billion to settle thousands of sex abuse claims dating back to the 1950s without taking depositions or knowing the names of thousands of plaintiffs. Rather, the vetting had been done almost entirely by attorneys who stand to walk away with more than a billion dollars in fees.

It is a lopsided system that, some attorneys concede, risks squandering taxpayer money meant for victims who suffered egregious abuse as children in the county’s custody.

“The whole thing just stinks,” said John Manly, a longtime sex abuse lawyer who served as a lead attorney in the settlements against USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar and USC gynecologist George Tyndall. “It looks to me like a third of these cases are total bull—, and [the county] is paying for no reason.”

As a state lawmaker, Lorena Gonzalez pushed for AB 218, which gave victims a new window to sue over childhood sexual abuse. Gonzalez, now the president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, said she believes plaintiff lawyers have taken advantage of the law change.

(K.C. Alfred / San Diego Union-Tribune)

Manly’s law firm, Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, is one of three prominent law firms that sued the county under the law change, but did not join the settlement.

DTLA was started by two cousins, Daniel Azizi and Farid Yaghoubtil, and their childhood friend Salar Hendizadeh, the partners told commercial real estate company CoStar after expanding in 2023 to a new Banksy-adorned office building downtown. Attorneys focus on the typical cases for most personal injury firms — dog bites, falls and auto accidents.

The firm became the scourge of ride app companies such as Uber, which sued DTLA and another law firm in federal court in July. The ride app giant alleged that the firms had filed a flurry of “fraudulent claims” and colluded with an Encino-based doctor to inflate the cost of plaintiffs’ medical expenses. The lawsuit is ongoing. In an Instagram post, DTLA called it a “calculated attempt by a billion-dollar corporation” to suppress legitimate claims.

In an interview in June before The Times learned of the alleged vendor payments, attorney Andrew Morrow, the lead attorney in nearly all the firm’s sex abuse cases against the county, said DTLA’s success was due to the reputation he had cultivated as “the therapy guy … out in the streets of downtown LA.” Clients called him, he said, because they knew the firm would connect them with a therapist.

“And I said, Well, let me ask you this, do you have a lawsuit? Were you a victim?” Morrow said of the calls. “We were filling a void in the marketplace.”

Some of the DTLA clients The Times interviewed said they spoke with a therapist provided by the firm. Four said they never heard from the firm after the day they signed up for a lawsuit.

Morrow said sexual abuse cases were “a little bit of a new frontier” for him. He had previously specialized in real estate, entertainment and insurance litigation at a firm he founded before switching to DTLA in 2023, according to his old bio.

He is now one of the region’s most prolific filers of sexual abuse cases. His cases, he said, are vetted for fraud through mental health professionals.

“I’m sure there are firms that still have cases like that,” he said. “We don’t because, like I said, ours go to therapy, and our doctors identify that stuff.”

For thousands of sex abuse victims, the law worked as intended.

With the passage of AB 218 in 2020, survivors had until they were 40 rather than 26 to sue their abuser, giving them a chance to get financial compensation for horrors they were far too young to grapple with — much less sue over — as children. Stories of abuse that had been hidden for decades surfaced, as did the names of prolific abusers, some of whom were still working with minors.

But it also put a massive target on the budgets of government entities, which had long ago thrown out records that could be used for a defense. Former state lawmaker Lorena Gonzalez, who spearheaded the law, says she’s been disturbed by how it’s panned out.

“It’s clear that the State Bar and attorneys themselves cannot hold themselves accountable,” said Gonzalez, now the president of the California Federation of Labor Unions. “What they’re doing, I think, to the cities and counties is deplorable.”

Following the law change, firms began amassing thousands of clients to sue the county through social media campaigns promising payouts and privacy.

“You’re going to be a Jane Doe or a John Doe,” Morrow told potential clients in a video posted to the firm’s TikTok page last year. “No one’s ever going to know your name.”

The cases are lucrative for attorneys, many of whom will receive 40% of their clients’ payouts, according to retainer agreements viewed by The Times. That includes New York City-based Slater Slater Schulman, which has roughly 3,700 clients; Boca-Raton-based Herman Law, with about 800 clients; and Los Angeles-based Becker Law Group and McNicholas & McNicholas, for which The Times found a combined 1,100 plaintiffs. Todd Becker, with Becker Law Group, said their fee differs from plaintiff to plaintiff.

DTLA has the highest contingency fee The Times found, requiring 45% of any payout. DTLA said its fee structure is “entirely standard within the industry.” These fees typically range from 33% to 40%, according to the American Bar Assn.

With most retainers on the higher end of the range, some attorneys involved in the settlement estimate $1.5 billion in taxpayer money could easily flow to lawyers — close to what the county Fire Department spends in a year.

As the county prepares to start dispensing money in January, some firms say they’ve started to find a few flaws in their caseload.

Becker Law Group said in a July court filing that four of the firm’s clients recently told the firm they weren’t abused. Patrick McNicholas, who co-counsels cases with the firm, said the lawsuits were weeded out as part of the firm’s vetting process.

Slater Slater Schulman, which has filed more cases than any other law firm, stated in a September filing that client John Doe J.S. “should not have been included.” The firm previously said in a lawsuit that he had been sexually assaulted at Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall in Downey beginning in 2006 when he was 13.

Slater Slater Schulman has found similar problems in its avalanche of sex abuse cases against the Boy Scouts of America. On Sept. 9, retired U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Barbara Houser, who is overseeing the $2.4-billion victim settlement trust, singled out Slater Slater Schulman for a pattern of “irregularities” and “procedural and factual problems” among its plaintiffs. The firm previously said it represented roughly 14,000 victims.

The firm was asked to pay for an “independent third party” to investigate its cases for fraud before going through the trust’s standard vetting process. Clifford Robert, an outside attorney representing the firm in its issues with the Boy Scout cases, said Slater Slater Schulman is “working tirelessly” to address the issues and that justice for survivors is its top priority.

Tammy Rogers, 56, hired the Slater firm in 2022 to sue after a staff member at MacLaren Children’s Center, a county-run children’s facility now infamous for abuse, allegedly molested her when she was about 9. She said she’s grown unnerved by the financial incentive lawyers like hers have in amassing unwieldy numbers of clients.

“You can’t get ahold of them,” she said of her firm, which has filed cases on behalf of hundreds of new plaintiffs since the settlement was finalized. “I called them repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly.”

Tammy Rogers, 56, said a staff member at MacLaren Children’s Center sexually abused her when she was 9, an incident that sent her spiraling toward drugs and tortured relationships with men. She sued the county in 2022.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

County and plaintiff lawyers nailed down the $4-billion figure on Oct. 30. Since then, thousands more plaintiffs have been added.

“[Firms think] ‘there’s a fund out there, and I’m going to do everything in my power to get as much as I can,’” said one attorney suing the county over sex abuse, who declined to be named, fearing professional repercussions.

It’s a fund, critics say, with few safeguards for fake claims.

The cases will be reviewed by retired Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Louis Meisinger, who mediated similar settlements for the victims of the 2023 Maui wildfires and the 2017 Las Vegas concert mass shooting. Any plaintiff who wants to skip that vetting process can take $150,000 in a lump sum at the start of next year.

Meisinger will distribute the remaining money after reviewing fact sheets from the victims. If Meisinger believes a case is fraudulent, the county can either give the plaintiff $50,000 to resolve it or get it booted from the settlement, meaning it would work its own way through the court system, according to an allocation protocol reviewed by The Times.

Otherwise, the minimum amount a client can get is $100,000, according to the protocol. The most is $3 million, far less than some victims who suffered egregious abuse feel they deserve.

“I spent two years being tortured by some grown ass men. I mean, I even gave them names,” said a man who was granted anonymity to discuss his case. “It seems like, once again, I’m being taken advantage of.”

He said he had hoped to use the money to buy 60 acres of land for a group home that would give orphaned children the joy he says was snuffed out of him before he hit puberty. At age 10, he said, he was raped and forced to perform oral sex on a man at MacLaren Children’s Center. At age 43, he said, he can’t smell Pine-Sol without flashbacks to the supply closet favored by his abusers as a site for their assaults.

Trinidad Pena, 52, said she desperately needs the settlement money to pay for medical care, overdue bills and therapy. At age 12, she said, she was impregnated by a staff member at MacLaren Children’s Center — an assault that has haunted her since the 1980s.

“What kind of rights did I have as a 12-year-old to sign away another human being?” asked Pena, who recalls seeing the baby for seven minutes before the girl was given to a family in Laguna Hills through a closed adoption. “The lawyers are being made millionaires, but we are just going to be able to pay our back taxes.”

The county was never interested in a fight.

Once the deluge of lawsuits started, county lawyers had just one goal: to make the cases go away without the county going bankrupt.

They did not want to risk a trial. Early in negotiations, county lawyers understood they were looking at a number of cases of brutal rape and molestation that could easily make a disgusted jury award the type of budget-busting $135-million verdict that got handed to the Moreno Valley Unified School District in 2023 for the sexual abuse of two students by a middle school teacher. The district hired him despite a past arrest for molesting his foster son, according to the lawsuit.

Attorney John Manly said he believes the county did not do enough vetting of the cases. Manly’s law firm, Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, is one of three prominent law firms that sued the county under the law change, but did not join the $4-billion settlement.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

If there were even 30 cases that appalled the jury as much as that one, the county would risk paying far more than $4 billion. Better, the county lawyers reasoned, to come up with a total sum that wouldn’t drain coffers of the government, which is responsible for the social safety net for the poorest residents, and let someone else divvy it up among the thousands of victims. With a $45-billion budget, they could make $4 billion work if most county agencies trimmed their spending.

Andy Baum, the county’s outside attorney leading the defense effort, told a judge in a June hearing that he viewed it as an “inventory settlement.” There were simply too many cases, the county felt, to fight individually. And so lawyers conducted only basic vetting of the claims — most of which were filed in court with a pseudonym, an unnamed abuser, and a sentence or two about the abuse. They took no depositions, according to multiple lawyers involved in the settlement.

“We have thousands of cases, and we don’t even have the most fundamental information,” Baum said at the hearing.

The county also allowed many cases to become part of the settlement without the paperwork the law requires. Under state law, cases in which the victim is older than 40 must be filed with a certificate from a therapist, who can attest that there is a “reasonable basis” to believe the plaintiff was sexually abused.

DTLA, which specialized in these cases, filed many of its older lawsuits without the certificate, considered by the Legislature as a critical way to prevent fraudulent claims. The county lawyers never protested, explaining in the June court hearing that they wanted to make sure DTLA’s cases were quickly ushered into the nearly finalized settlement.

“We had a gun to our head,” Baum told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Lawrence Riff, who’s overseeing the juvenile hall abuse cases, when pressed by the judge on why he waived the rule.

DTLA said nearly all of its certificates have since been filed, but did not provide numbers on how many remain outstanding.

The paltry defense launched by the county has some rethinking the law that started the deluge.

Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz) tried to push through a bill this session intended as a lifeline to entities drowning in sex abuse lawsuits by limiting the window victims would have to sue. He pulled it last month after outcry from victim advocacy groups that said it trampled on the rights of survivors.

Maryland went further after being flooded with sex abuse claims for juvenile facilities following a similar state law change in 2023. This spring, the state capped sex abuse cases against government entities at $400,000 and limited attorneys’ fees to 25% for cases resolved in court.

That’s not happening in California.

“It’s just, in my view, not politically viable,” Laird said.

Some lawmakers who try to change the law have faced brutal pushback by law firms, including Manly, Stewart & Finaldi, which has run ads branding such bills as “predator” protection.

“I don’t see the appetite,” he said.

For L.A. County, the pace of cases remains relentless.

Since the announcement of the $4-billion settlement, James Harris Law, a Seattle-based firm that specializes in mass torts, has been aggressively recruiting clients through social media ads that tell “abused juvies” they can qualify in 30 seconds for up to $1 million.

After The Times entered a reporter’s cellphone number in one of the firm’s ads on Instagram, a representative from the firm’s intake department called more than 38 times.

Harris said his firm runs a “straightforward public awareness campaign” and didn’t believe his ads contained dollar amounts. The sums were removed from the ads after The Times contacted Harris.

The marketing proved fruitful. This summer, months after the county announced the settlement, Baum said, James Harris called him to discuss his brimming inventory: 2,500 new cases.

Baum said the newcomer acknowledged he was “late to the party.”

Sean Greene and Gabrielle LaMarr LeMee contributed to this report.

A sprawling social club centering on racquet sports — the ubiquitous pickleball and rising padel, a blend of tennis and squash — is making its way to downtown L.A. next summer.

With the cheeky name Ballers, the club will be housed in the former Macy’s building at The Bloc, which spans 100,000 square feet. It will be equipped with 18 pickleball courts and four padel courts — marking the first pickleball and padel courts to open in the DTLA area, according to the founders. The club will also feature five golf simulators, two soccer pitches, a high-end retail shop, two full bars, a restaurant and a recovery zone outfitted with a sauna and cold plunge area.

Membership packages for the social sports club will start at $99 per month and come with perks such as advanced booking windows, access to the recovery lounge and invites to exclusive events. Nonmembers will still be welcome to enjoy the social spaces and book courts for fees between $15 to $25 per hour.

“[We wanted] to bring the country club to the city in an elevated, fun way,” said Ballers CEO David Gutstadt.

Ballers L.A. will be the third Ballers location — the first will debut in Philadelphia later this month and the second will open in Boston later this year. The founders, who are behind hospitality projects like the Fitler Club and Equinox Hotels, have plans to expand to 50 locations across the country within the next seven to 10 years. Ballers has received financial backing from an all-star roster of professional athletes including tennis icons Andre Agassi, Kim Clijsters and Sloane Stephens, pickleball champion Connor Garnett and 76ers star Tyrese Maxey.

Earlier this year, Macy’s at the Bloc was deemed one of the retailer’s “underproductive” locations and closed its doors, leaving downtown L.A. without a department store for the first time in over 150 years. This evolution of the space follows a trend of retail stores transforming into “experiential” spaces — companies are tapping into consumers’ hunger for communal experiences and new hobbies. In 2023, indoor pickleball venue Pickle Pop opened in Santa Monica, in part to try to revive ailing Third Street Promenade.

When designing Ballers’ Los Angeles club, co-founder and chief creative officer Amanda Potter said it was important that the venue be accessible in location and price so that anyone could visit and try the racquet sports.

In addition to sports offerings, the venue will feature a restaurant and two full bars.

(Ballers)

While the popularity of pickleball has skyrocketed since the COVID-19 pandemic, Potter said not everyone is familiar with it, citing a 2023 study by the Association of Pickleball Professionals which found that less than 10 percent of Angelenos had tried the sport that year. “It’s a sport that people are still getting acquainted with, so we don’t want to have that barrier to people trying our sports by saying it’s members-only,” Potter said.

Garnett, who started playing pickleball about three years ago, said he was eager to become involved with the Ballers’ project.

“You don’t have to be great at pickleball to come out here,” he said. “You don’t have to be great at padel. It’s just really an inclusive way to get people active and on their feet.”

While there is no set opening date for Ballers L.A., the founders say it will launch in the late summer of 2026.

The Mayan, a popular music venue and nightclub in downtown L.A., announced Monday morning that it will be closing under its current management after a 35-year run.

“It is with heavy yet grateful hearts that we announce The Mayan will be closing its doors at the end of September, after 35 unforgettable years,” read a statement from the venue’s Instagram page. “To our loyal patrons, community and friends: thank you for your unwavering support, your trust and the countless memories we’ve created together. You made every night truly special.”

The announcement also called on longtime and potentially new patrons to celebrate the club’s final months in fashion, with weekly Saturday dance nights through Sept. 13.

It is currently unknown what, if anything, the historic venue will be used for after the Mayan shutters.

The Mayan did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for information.

The Mayan Theater — located at 1038 S. Hill St., next door to the Belasco — first opened Aug. 15, 1927, with a performance of George Gershwin’s Broadway musical “Oh Kay.” As its name alludes to, the theater is one of the best known examples of the Mayan Revival architectural movement that took place in the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s, which drew inspiration from pre-Columbian Mesoamerican structures.

As The Times reported in 1989, the giant bas-relief figures on the venue’s exterior are of the Maya god Huitzilopochtli seated on a symbolic earth monster. The three-tiered chandelier in the theater — rigged for red, blue and amber lights — is a replica of the Aztec calendar stone found near Mexico City. The design of tapered pillars was inspired by the Palace of the Governors at Uxmal, a Maya ruin on Yucatán Peninsula dating from AD 800.

Mexican anthropologist and sculptor Francisco Cornejo assisted the architects to craft a building that was based on authentic designs of pre-Columbian American societies.

During the Great Depression, the theater was rented out to the Works Projects Administration, which operated it as an Actors Workshop theater. In 1944, Black producer, director and entrepreneur Leon Norman Hefflin Sr., staged a production of the popular and well-reviewed musical “Sweet ‘N Hot,” which starred Black film and stage icon Dorothy Dandridge.

The Fouce family gained ownership of the theater in 1947 and shifted the venue’s programming toward Spanish-language film screenings and performers. By the early 1970s, Peruvian-born filmmaker and actor Carlos Tobalina gained ownership of the theater and changed the programming to focus on pornographic and X-rated films.

In 1990, the Mayan was brought under new management and inhabited its current form as a nightclub and music venue. The city has since declared the building as an official L.A. Historic-Cultural Monument.

The Mayan has been used as a shooting location for many film productions, including the 1992 box-office smash “The Bodyguard,” starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston; the 1998 skit-to-feature film “A Night at the Roxbury;” the 1979 Ramones-led musical comedy “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School;” and, most recently, the Netflix wrestling-themed series “GLOW.”

In recent years, the Mayan has played host to the cheeky lucha libre and burlesque show called Lucha VaVoom de La Liz and has held concerts by acts such as Jack White, M.I.A. and Prophets of Rage.