Long Beach Unified School District has reached a tentative settlement with a woman identified in court papers as Jane Doe 3, who says she was sexually abused as a middle schooler by former teacher Mark Anthony Santo — a man now serving 80 years to life in prison for abusing multiple students. Attorneys for Jane Doe 3 notified Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Wendy Chang of the conditional resolution, and she is expected to request a dismissal of her case by December 7, 2026.
The settlement is one of several civil cases that emerged after Santo's criminal conviction, according to MyNewsLA.com. The terms of the deal remain undisclosed, and it is unclear whether the LBUSD Board of Education must formally approve the settlement before the court deadline. Jane Doe 3, who was a student at Lindbergh Middle School, alleged 11 causes of action stemming from Santo's conduct, and her case was one of several filed against the district, Santo and his wife Jennifer Santo, an LBUSD teacher at Rogers Middle School.
Abuse Allegations at the Santo Home
According to Jane Doe 3's attorneys, Santo abused her in a bathroom at his home in September 2018, after Jennifer Santo pressured her to come over by claiming the couple was hosting a taco night. Jane Doe 3's attorneys allege that Jennifer Santo, a mandated reporter, concealed her husband's ongoing abuse rather than reporting it.
The attorneys further allege that Jennifer Santo instructed her minor daughter to covertly record a phone call with Jane Doe 3, a recording attempt the attorneys say was intended to protect Mark Santo and treat the alleged statutory rape as a household matter rather than a crime. Jane Doe 3's attorneys described the case as a catastrophic failure by institutional and individual defendants to protect a vulnerable student, alleging that the district operated under deliberate inaction and willful blindness while Santo groomed and sexually abused students.
Warning Signs Dating Back to 2013
Court papers cited in the case show a school principal learned in February 2013 that Santo was using the Instagram username msanto69 and had liked two Instagram posts of young females, after which the principal told him to stop following students on the platform. LBUSD's attorneys have contended that Santo's alleged actions were outside the scope of his employment and not attributable to the district, arguing that while Santo crossed professional boundaries and had private social media communications with students, those communications were unknown to administrators and not reasonably observable by them.
Jane Doe 3's attorneys counter that LBUSD administrators failed to take reasonable measures to protect students despite what they allege was notice of Santo's predatory propensities. That February 2013 warning predates a separate February 2018 meeting in which Santo admitted to Jordan High School Principal Veronica Coleman that he had engaged in a one-time sexual act with an 18-year-old former LBUSD student, according to EAGnews. That meeting had been called after another teacher overheard students discussing Santo's physical contact with them.
A Criminal Case That Took Years to Build
Santo was ultimately convicted in June 2023 in Long Beach Superior Court on two counts of lewd act on a child under 14 and one count each of forcible sexual penetration, forcible oral copulation, assault with intent to commit forcible oral copulation, and assault with intent to commit forcible penetration, though two of the assault convictions were later vacated because they involved the same conduct as more serious charges. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Laura Laesecke sentenced him to 80 years to life that October, calling him a predator and noting that a pre-trial 24-year plea deal offered by prosecutors proved insufficient once trial evidence emerged, according to the Long Beach Post. Laesecke also noted that Santo forced young victims to relive intimate details of their abuse during trial.
California's 2nd District Court of Appeal upheld Santo's convictions in an 18-page ruling in May 2025, finding that trial testimony about uncharged social media interactions and improper physical touching with students was properly admitted; the appellate judges emphasized that Santo held positions of authority over all his young victims as either a teacher or father figure. The California Supreme Court denied Santo's petition to review his sentence that July, exhausting his state-level appeals when he was 56 years old.
The prosecution itself had been delayed for years. Santo was first arrested in May 2020 for a 2015 assault on a 13-year-old family friend, after police had previously been unable to prosecute a 2018 forced oral copulation complaint because they lost contact with the victim. Additional charges involving former middle and high school students followed his initial arrest.
A Separation Deal That Limited Disclosure
When Santo resigned from LBUSD in 2018 amid sexual abuse accusations, the district signed a separation agreement limiting what it could tell prospective employers — agreeing to state only that he had resigned pending misconduct allegations if he applied to teach minors, and barring any disclosure at all if he applied to teach adults. That agreement is what allowed Santo to land a new teaching job at North Orange Continuing Education in 2020, before his criminal arrest.
Jane Doe 3's case follows a broader wave of litigation against the district. In December 2023, seven former female students filed a multi-plaintiff lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court against LBUSD, Santo, and Jennifer Santo, alleging sexual battery, sex trafficking, negligence and civil conspiracy; that complaint alleged Jennifer Santo actively aided and abetted her husband's misconduct while working as an LBUSD teacher. It remains unclear how the six other co-plaintiffs' claims against the district and Jennifer Santo are proceeding.
State Law Opened the Door to Older Claims
The civil claims against LBUSD are possible because of Assembly Bill 218, a 2019 California law that extended the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse lawsuits to age 40 and opened a temporary three-year window reviving previously expired claims against public institutions. That law, according to CalMatters, generated more than 1,000 civil lawsuits against California public school districts statewide.
The Santo case is not the only teacher misconduct matter drawing scrutiny at LBUSD this year. In May, Hoodline reported that school board trustee Maria Isabel López's husband, an LBUSD teacher, was placed on administrative leave following a separate historic abuse lawsuit; López publicly denied the allegations against her husband. Together, the cases have kept pressure on the district over how it discloses and responds to misconduct warnings involving its teachers.
