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In what’s likely to be one of the most contentious issues facing the California Legislature in 2026, lawmakers are again debating whether to reform a 2020 law that lifted the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse lawsuits. That law, Assembly Bill 218, sparked a blitz of costly litigation against schools and other public agencies.
The debate over the law pits childhood abuse victims and their advocates seeking justice for long-ago and life-damaging assaults, and public agencies counting every dollar in an uncertain economy and shaky budget year. A similar effort stalled last year.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas has assigned a group of lawmakers to “explore solutions that strike the right balance on this critical issue,” his spokesperson wrote in an email.
Among possible reforms sought by school districts and other public agencies are a state-paid settlement through a victims’ compensation fund, a cap on payouts to victims who file claims, a limit on attorney fees, and a higher legal standard to prove a claim, say those who support the change.
Since AB 218 became law, school districts have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to settle such suits in which people have claimed they were sexually abused by teachers, principals and school workers as far back as the 1960s. Scores of similar allegations, which often take years to resolve, remain pending in courts across the state.
Advocates and attorneys for victims are concerned that any changes could cut off justice for those who suffered abuses.
“I think they are going to try to go for the kill shot,” Thomas Moore, a prominent Irvine plaintiff’s attorney, said of lawmakers seeking reforms. “What they really want to do is to drastically limit the ability of present and future child sexual abuse victims to sue public entities and achieve just compensation.”
A spokesperson for Rivas, who declined to be interviewed, wrote in an email that the speaker is “a steadfast advocate for survivors of childhood sexual assault, and any claim to the contrary is unequivocally false.”
Assemblymember Dawn Addis, D-Morro Bay, an advocate for abuse victims and the right to sue, said she is one of the lawmakers Rivas assigned to work on the matter.
“I’m driven by wanting to make sure that victims are represented,” she said. Rivas’ spokesperson declined to identify other lawmakers the speaker has asked to work on the issue.
As lawmakers begin their work, the clamor from public agencies seeking relief is growing louder.
Reform is “the top priority” amid rising costs, Faith Borges, a lobbyist for the California Association of Joint Power Authorities, told EdSource. Known as JPAs, these authorities are obscure public agencies that school districts use to pool money to fund liability costs and ultimately pay the bulk of settlements.
“Any solution must keep victims at the forefront,” she said, but “must also balance the reality that resources are limited and coming out of classroom settings.”
Liability insurance for all districts is one of the fastest growing expenses in a district’s budget, and the impact of AB 218 cases has driven that growth. For example, over the past decade, one small district, the Buckeye Union School District, with 4,200 students in El Dorado County, saw an increase of 146% over a decade. It’s paying $389,000 in 2025-26 for liability insurance compared with $158,000 in 2017-18.
The settlements are “all public money” flowing through JPAs, said Eric Bengtson, a San Jose lawyer who has defended school districts in abuse cases. There are no private insurance companies “out there cutting checks. People need to understand that,” Bengtson said.
AB 218 and the #MeToo movement
Sponsored by former Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez, AB 218 grew out of the #MeToo movement, which went viral in 2017 with allegations of decades of sexual abuse and assault by the now disgraced Hollywood film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
The law allows people to sue over childhood sexual abuse up to the age of 40 and later in life if that’s when they remember the abuse or discover its psychological effects. The previous cutoff age was 26. It also created a three-year “look-back window” to file suits that were previously blocked by statutes of limitation.
A related 2024 law, Assembly Bill 452, which Addis authored, eliminated any statute of limitations to sue for childhood sexual assault that occurred after Jan. 1, 2024. It may also be part of reform discussions. Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, who pushed for reforms last year, said some members of the Assembly “wanted, in essence, a repeal” of Addis’ bill as part of the reforms.
Almost all of the claims brought so far have been settled out of court, some for more than $5 million, records show. The few that have gone to jury trials have resulted in large awards for plaintiffs, which were later reduced in negotiations that ended appeals of the verdicts.
In 2023, a Riverside County jury awarded $135 million to two former students of the Moreno Valley Unified School District, who it found were molested by a middle school teacher, Thomas Lee West, in the 1990s. West was sentenced to 52 years in state prison. The district eventually settled with the plaintiffs post-trial for $45 million, the case’s settlement agreement shows.
The Roseville City School District in Placer County took an AB 218 suit filed in early 2020 to trial in February of last year. The jury awarded the victim slightly more than $3 million, records show. But when the district appealed the verdict, negotiations led to a $1.5 million settlement, records show.
In a pending, closely watched AB 218 case, records show the Long Beach Unified School District is facing claims from 18 former students who say that they were abused by former teacher Mark Anthony Santo in the 2000s. Santo was convicted of sex crimes in 2022 and sentenced to 80 years to life in state prison. He lost an appeal of that verdict last year.
As lawsuits piled up, Laird said he became willing to put forward reforms after hearing concerns from school leaders in his district. That included a $4.5 million settlement that the Santa Cruz City School reached with two victims who alleged a teacher abused them in the late 1980s. Laird told a local news outlet, Lookout Santa Cruz, that his reform effort was “politically thankless.”
The legislation he introduced easily passed the Senate, but stalled in the Assembly. It would have made it more difficult for a person older than 40 to prove abuse claims. It would also have raised the legal standard to prove claims. In an interview last month, Laird expressed frustration over his bill’s demise because of disagreements between those who backed his reforms and wanted to go further, and supporters of victims’ rights.
“It’s a mess,” Laird told EdSource. “I’m standing back. The Assembly has to figure this out.”
False Claims
Also fueling calls for AB 218 reform is a criminal fraud investigation into alleged false claims brought against Los Angeles County and its juvenile detention and foster care facilities.
Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman is investigating allegations that a law firm allegedly paid people to fabricate abuse claims when the county allocated nearly $5 billion to settle cases unrelated to school districts. The Los Angeles County Counsel’s Office is also investigating fraud allegations involving the Downtown LA Law Group. It has settled more than 2,700 abuse cases with the county. Its principals have denied any wrongdoing.
The Los Angeles fraud investigation looms large as lawmakers consider what to do, Addis said.
“Something went really wrong” with how cases were vetted, she said. “Certainly, more transparency is needed and more accountability from bad actors.”
But she said she was concerned that the scandal casts aspersions on victims with legitimate claims.
“We don’t want to lean into this dangerous narrative that victims are the problem. That’s an age-old trope that really got us here in the first place, that victims shouldn’t be believed or victims aren’t to be trusted,” Addis said.
Assemblymember Chris Ward, D-San Diego, is talking with others in the Assembly about possible reforms, his spokesperson said. The spokesperson added that he didn’t know if Ward is part of the group Rivas assigned to the matter.
Abuse victims and advocates, concerned that Ward will push reforms limiting victims’ rights, protested outside his district office last month. In responding to the protest, Ward said in a statement he intends to “take input from a wide range of stakeholders as we address critical issues like exploding liabilities and the risks these pose to public services in our schools, cities, and counties.”
‘Existential Threat’
For school districts and school boards, the pain of ongoing cases and the threat of settlements means there may be less money for student instruction and other services.
Andy Sheaffer, the vice president of the Carpinteria Unified School District board in Santa Barbara County, wrote in an EdSource commentary in July that AB 218 is “an existential threat to public education in California.”
Lawsuit costs are “being pulled directly from classroom budgets, not state reserves or insurance payouts. In some cases, the claims predate any known documentation, witnesses, or even the existence of current staff or board members,” he wrote.
The California School Boards Association is “open to addressing reforms that will provide some relief for school districts while still respecting that wrong has been done in these cases, and the victims deserve compensation,” association spokesperson Troy Flint said.
“But just not at the risk of the district’s financial solvency and its ability to meet student needs.”
Little Tracking of Lawsuits
It’s unclear how many lawsuits and settlements there have been related to AB 218. There is little tracking of suits and school districts. Dave George, the CEO of a large insurance pool that insures hundreds of districts — the Schools Excess Liability Fund, or SELF — said it makes no public announcements of settlements. School districts routinely don’t announce settlements either, he said.
But what is known comes from media reports, court records, and settlement agreements released by school districts and JPAs.
In many cases, the abuse allegations date back decades.
In one case settled last year, a woman who sued alleging abuse by a San Francisco Unified School District teacher from 1963 to 1969 received a $750,000 settlement. The Oakland Unified School District paid $1.1 million combined to settle four suits that alleged assaults on children by school employees in the 1970s, records show.
The records also detail some of the assaults victims alleged they suffered as children, including a star high school athlete who said she was raped by her coaches. Another involved an intellectually disabled boy who was abused by a school van driver. One was a third grader who said in court papers that his teacher invited him to a sleepover and then assaulted him.
The best estimate of a statewide cost to school districts comes from the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, or FCMAT, which helps school districts with financial emergencies. It projects that the total could eventually exceed $4 billion.
“We didn’t quite know what would happen with AB 218,” Caroline Heldman, a professor of gender, women and sexuality studies at Occidental College, and a founder of Stand With Survivors, a sexual abuse survivor group, told EdSource. “The sheer volume and extreme trauma was not something that we could have predicted. What we are encountering in terms of anticipated payouts and the anticipated cost of compensating survivors is higher than what was predicted when the bill passed.”
State Victims’ Compensation Fund
FCMAT recommended that one reform could be a state-paid victim’s compensation fund.
David Levine, a UC Law San Francisco professor, who has written about AB 218 in legal publications, said the law is essentially “an unfunded mandate” on local agencies because “lawmakers just willy-nilly opened up the statute of limitations without thinking it through” and “without providing any mechanism to at least help public entities pay for this thing.”
One solution could be the type of a victims’ compensation fund, he said, roughly like one set up to pay 9/11 victims and large cases such as the one where people were poisoned by the herbicide Roundup. Those funds “typically impose some caps, particularly on non-economic damages and often on attorneys’ fees,” he said. That helps keep numbers down while ensuring victims get paid, he added.
But trial lawyers are vehemently opposed to a victims’ fund, said Moore, the Irvine lawyer who represents victims.
“Victim compensation funds don’t work in general and absolutely would not work in a child sexual abuse situation, mainly because these cases have huge differences in them in terms of the nature of the abuse, the nature of the injuries,” he said.
Moore, who said his firm’s standard contingency fee in abuse cases is 40%, said a fund will only hurt victims and remove public accountability from the process by eliminating the investigative work that goes into a lawsuit.
With a state fund, “you have no discovery against the school district,” he said, referring to the legal process through which plaintiffs’ lawyers in abuse cases obtain school district records and testimony from district officials.
“Almost every single time a child says they were abused and the predator is arrested, the school district’s first statement to the press is, ‘We had no idea that this guy was molesting kids.’ But through litigation, we’re told that this teacher knew, the principal knew,” he said. “And all of a sudden, we have a completely contrary explanation of what happened in the case.”
Addis said she is skeptical that a victims’ fund could be supported in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s proposed $348.9 billion budget, given that the state will likely operate in a deficit for the coming fiscal year. Newsom’s press office did not respond to questions.
In fact, Addis said the state’s financial issues should not be a reason to cut off the ability of people to file claims in childhood sex abuse cases.
“The most harmful thing we can do to victims right now is to stop them from having access to justice,” she said. “We didn’t get here because nobody’s been victimized.”
EdSource Data Journalist Daniel J. Willis and Editor-at-Large John Fensterwald contributed to this story.
