Sacramento County is paying $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit that alleged a child was sexually assaulted while in foster care in the 1990s.
The lawsuit, filed in 2022 in Sacramento Superior Court, alleged the county placed a 5-year-old child in a foster home from 1993 through 1995, where the child was sexually assaulted multiple times by two men who lived in the home. The suit alleged one of the men forced the child to watch him masturbate and that one of the men fondled the child’s genitals.
Then from 1997 to 2001, the county had the child in a new foster home, where the child was sexually assaulted by two different men who lived in that home, the suit alleged. In the second home, the men rubbed the child’s genitals, made the child watch porn and perform oral sex.
The child told a county social worker and police about the abuse, but the county took no action, and the assaults continued, the suit alleged.
“Maltreatment of children in foster care, particularly sexual abuse and assault, has been a chronic problem that (the county has) failed to address in any reasonable manner consistent with their duties to children in foster care,” the suit alleged.
The settlement, signed in July and obtained by The Sacramento Bee from a California Public Records Act request, is the most recent payout in the Sacramento region regarding foster care.
Last year the county paid a $6 million settlement after twin toddlers drowned in a pool while at a foster home in Roseville.
Earlier this year, Placer County and its Office of Education paid a $4 million settlement to a man who alleged a then-special education teacher sexually assaulted him in the early 2010s.
Sacramento County is self-insured, meaning it paid the settlement directly out of its own budget using taxpayer funds.
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Theresa Clift is the Regional Watchdog Reporter for The Sacramento Bee. She covered Sacramento City Hall for The Bee from 2018 through 2024. Before joining The Bee, she worked for newspapers in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin. She grew up in Michigan and graduated with a journalism degree from Central Michigan University.