Sacramento County has agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a lawsuit alleging a child in its foster care system was sexually assaulted by multiple men across two different foster homes between 1993 and 2001. The settlement, signed in July, is the most recent in a string of costly foster care payouts to hit the county's budget in recent years.
According to the Sacramento Bee, which obtained the settlement through a California Public Records Act request, the lawsuit 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 living there, per the lawsuit. The county then placed the child in a second foster home from 1997 through 2001, where two different men allegedly made the child watch pornography and perform oral sex, the lawsuit claims. One of the men is also accused of fondling the child's genitals and forcing the child to watch him masturbate, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed in Sacramento Superior Court in 2022, alleges the child told a county social worker and police about the abuse, but that the county took no action in response, and the assaults continued afterward, according to the lawsuit. The suit further alleges that maltreatment and sexual abuse of children in foster care was a chronic problem the county failed to address reasonably. Sacramento County paid the $1.5 million settlement directly from its budget using taxpayer funds, as the county is self-insured, the Bee reports.
A Legal Window Opened by State Lawmakers
The lawsuit was made possible by California's Assembly Bill 218, passed in 2019, which extended the civil statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims to age 40 and opened a three-year lookback window, running from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2022, allowing previously time-barred claims against public entities like counties to move forward, according to Advocate Magazine. California later went further: under Assembly Bill 2777 and subsequent legislative updates, the state eliminated the statute of limitations entirely for childhood sexual abuse claims arising on or after January 1, 2024, per Cutter Law P.C. Separately, California Code of Civil Procedure section 340.1 exempts these claims from the standard presentation deadlines under the state's Government Tort Claims Act, according to Keenan, meaning survivors can sue counties directly without first clearing shorter administrative filing windows.
The AB 218 lookback window unleashed a wave of abuse litigation against public entities statewide. Los Angeles County approved a record $4 billion settlement in April 2025 to resolve more than 6,800 abuse claims tied to foster care and juvenile detention facilities, according to CalMatters. That massive payout has since drawn scrutiny: in June, the Los Angeles County District Attorney requested a judicial freeze on distributing the settlement funds, citing an active criminal investigation into allegations that up to 81 percent of the claims were fraudulent, per Helping Survivors.
A Pattern of Costly Settlements in the Sacramento Region
Sacramento County's $1.5 million payout joins a growing list of local settlements tied to its foster care system. The county paid $6 million in 2025 to settle a case involving twin toddlers who drowned in a pool at a Roseville foster home, a case Hoodline detailed in its report on the Roseville foster twins' pool tragedy. Nearby, Placer County and its office of education paid $4 million in 2026 to settle allegations that a special education teacher sexually assaulted a man during the early 2010s, per the same Bee account.
These are not the county's first legal reckonings over foster care failures. Sacramento County agreed to a $475,000 settlement in March 2015 resolving civil claims that staff abused nearly two dozen minors in county custody between 1998 and 2010, and the county previously paid $6.28 million in 2006 over juvenile facility strip-search practices, according to Helping Survivors. State regulators also warned the county in May 2023 that housing foster children in cells at the former Warren E. Thornton Youth Center violated state law and risked retraumatizing youth, officials noting the jail-like setting violated a foster child's right to a comfortable living environment, per Levy Konigsberg.
Oversight Gaps Persist Even as Caseloads Shrink
The legal liabilities are mounting even as Sacramento County's overall foster youth population has shrunk substantially. The county's 2024 Year in Review reported the total number of local youth in foster care declined by 58 percent since 2015, crediting expanded family stability and prevention initiatives, according to the Sacramento County Public Information Office. Yet a Sacramento County Civil Grand Jury report released in June found that while the Department of Child, Family and Adult Services made progress on past mandates, weak licensing, spotty data sharing, and uneven safety protocols continued to leave vulnerable foster youth at risk, as Hoodline reported in its coverage of the grand jury's 90-day deadline for corrective action plans.
Those oversight concerns have collided with tightening county finances. In July, local advocates and foster families protested $17 million in budget cuts to the Department of Child, Family and Adult Services, which included eliminating a $450,000 foster youth transportation program that had helped children remain in their schools of origin, according to CBS News. The combination leaves county leaders facing pressure from two directions at once: paying out escalating sums for decades-old institutional failures while trying to fund adequate protections for the foster children still in the system today.
