Riverside County has paid $2 million to settle a claim alleging that former sheriff’s deputy Kevin Duffy sexually abused a 13-year-old boy he recruited into a department youth outreach program, according to the Daily Bulletin. The payment is the second settlement tied to Duffy’s name in five years, bringing the county’s total payout over his alleged conduct to $2.9 million.
The plaintiff, identified in court records as Doe #3, says he met Duffy in 2008 or 2009 at age 13 while skateboarding, and Duffy then recruited him into the Sheriff’s Activities League youth program, as reported by the Daily Bulletin. Over nearly two years, Duffy allegedly took the boy on roughly 50 trips, almost all unsupervised, including go-karting outings, a wrestling event, an American Gladiators show, jet-skiing in Oceanside and along the Colorado River, and visits to the Ocotillo Wells off-highway vehicle area and the Staples Center in Los Angeles. The lawsuit alleges Duffy molested the boy repeatedly through age 15, including on an overnight trip and at a roadside stop near Idyllwild, with abuse that included genital touching and masturbation, and that Duffy became angry when the boy told him to stop.
Doe #3 was one of four plaintiffs named in the lawsuit against Riverside County. He accepted the settlement offer on March 27, 2026, and the county paid out on July 21, 2026, per the newspaper’s reporting. The status of settlements for the other three plaintiffs in the case was unclear as of the report.
Who Was Kevin Duffy
Duffy joined the sheriff’s department in 1982 and founded the Hemet Sheriff’s Activities League, a youth program meant to steer kids away from drugs and violence and serve vulnerable children, according to the same account. His last assignment was the Hemet station in Valle Vista, and in 2007 he received the Law Enforcement Appreciation Committee’s Excellence in Community Service Award. He was never criminally charged with any crimes.
The Riverside County Sheriff’s Department has said its own investigation, launched Jan. 12, 2009, after deputies from the Hemet station received an allegation that Duffy had molested a minor, substantiated crimes against one child in 2007 and 2009. The department said investigators interviewed more than 90 people, including 75 minors, and served more than 20 search warrants, according to a statement posted via Nixle. Duffy was placed on administrative leave on Jan. 15, 2009, and the department has said the case was never referred to prosecutors because Duffy had died before it concluded.
Duffy died by suicide at age 51 on Jan. 25, 2009, at a motel in Hemet while the investigation was still underway, according to a statement reported by NBC Palm Springs.
A Second Settlement, Years Apart
This is not the first time Riverside County has paid out over allegations against Duffy. In 2021, the county paid $900,000 to settle a federal lawsuit brought by three men and a woman who alleged Duffy sexually abused them as children, as reported by the Press Enterprise. That lawsuit, filed in July 2020, also named former Sheriff Stan Sniff, Duffy’s estate, and several police activities leagues as defendants, and accused Sniff of covering up Duffy’s misconduct and allowing him to go free despite probable cause to arrest him. A county spokesperson said that settlement was finalized in July 2021. Sniff has denied the cover-up allegations, calling them baseless and politically motivated.
One plaintiff in that earlier case, Jane Doe #1, alleged Duffy began sexually abusing her while he was a San Jacinto police officer. Plaintiffs’ attorneys in the broader litigation have alleged that county law enforcement officials knew or should have known of Duffy’s abuse, failed to investigate and intervene adequately, and allowed him continued access to children.
Defense Tactics Draw Criticism
Attorneys for the plaintiffs have also said the county hired Marc Cohen to examine the plaintiffs, and that Cohen suggested childhood sexual-abuse victims might experience sexual gratification and that plaintiffs’ failure to report such feelings or confusion was inconsistent to some degree with genuine abuse. In court filings, county attorneys characterized Duffy’s alleged abuse of a 15-year-old female police cadet as a “teenage love affair.”
Attorney Jim Quadra called that characterization outrageous, saying it was wrong to describe an adult officer’s rape of a 15-year-old girl in those terms. Quadra said Doe #3 deserved protection as a child and that the county failed to provide it, and he said the resolution could mark a step toward accountability for remaining plaintiffs and other Duffy victims.
Attorney Sydney Desman said the county had finally paid meaningful compensation for Doe #3’s harm, but argued that remaining survivors should not face efforts to minimize their experiences before their claims are addressed. Desman said the county should extend the same meaningful accountability to those survivors still awaiting resolution. Litigation involving the remaining plaintiffs is continuing.
The Duffy settlements arrive alongside another costly abuse case for the county. Riverside County recently paid $5.5 million to settle a separate lawsuit in which a man said a foster parent sexually abused him starting around 1990 and again from about 1993 until he graduated high school, according to the Daily Bulletin. That lawsuit was filed in December 2022, underscoring a pattern of large payouts tied to child sexual-abuse claims against county institutions in recent years.
