New details are coming out about what happened the night former Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner allegedly molested his daughter.
His 17-year-old son Robert Scrivner joined his mother, Christina Scrivner, in Sacramento on Tuesday to support a bill authored by Sen. Shannon Grove (R–Bakersfield) to reform mental health diversions.
The backstory: Zack Scrivner was arrested in April 2024 and later charged with child abuse and possessing assault weapons.
State prosecutors alleged that he got into bed with one of his children and touched the child inappropriately. Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said at the time that Zack Scrivner was stabbed in the torso by one of his children who was defending another child.
Flashback: A Kern County Superior Court judge granted Zack Scrivner’s request for a mental health diversion last December.
That means he will have all charges dropped against him if he completes a treatment program.
The decision drew immediate outcry from local elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
Grove proposed Senate Bill 1373 in response to the decision, which would expand the list of crimes that prohibit a defendant from being placed in a diversion program to include murder, kidnapping, carjacking, human trafficking and child abuse, among other crimes.
What they’re saying: Christina Scrivner said her estranged husband attended a Kern County Board of Supervisors meeting on April 23, 2024, and later went to his Tehachapi home and took a cocktail of drugs.
Robert Scrivner gave a frank assessment of what happened that night.
“On April 23, 2024, my dad came home from work and later crawled into bed with one of my younger siblings and molested them,” Robert Scrivner said. “My sibling came downstairs crying to me that their own father had done the unspeakable. I then walked upstairs to confront my father, to protect my sibling, and in an altercation I had to take a firearm away from him with my brother. After that I had to have surgery on my right arm, after the physical abuse at my father’s hands.”
Christina Scrivner questioned how the mental health diversion will actually prevent Zack Scrivner from committing crimes in the future. She said antidepressants and therapy did not prevent her husband from committing heinous acts against his own children.
Christina Scrivner said, “If those methods didn’t prevent him from harming his own children, how will mental health diversion prevent future crimes?”