Manly and colleagues obtained an $88 million settlement last month for 30 sexual abuse victims at two Los Angeles Unified School District locations in Pacoima and Wilmington. "We tried two bellwether cases and got $3.1 million for each child," Manly said. "In each case, the jury was just outraged - and those were the two that the district thought were its best cases. So the district could see the writing on the wall." Both abusers, former employees of the district, are serving prison sentences.
After a career representing hundreds of victims of Catholic clergy abuse, Manly said he thinks he's made a difference. "We are seeing a fundamental change in the way the church does business," he said. "We hope the same thing is happening here" in school abuse cases.
But it is uphill work, he said. "Public schools in California assert that this can't be happening," he said. "Or they say the victims aren't that hurt. It isn't surprising that there are pedophiles in education - pedophiles go where children are. What is surprising is that school administrators fail so miserably to come to grips with it."
To make a case against a school district, Manly must do more than produce a victim. "It's not hard to show abuse happens, sadly," he said. "We have to prove negligence or active knowledge on the part of school administrators." In the notorious Miramonte Elementary School scandal involving a teacher arrested in 2012 and a dozen victims, LAUSD settled for $175 million after Manly got involved. "They paid out just $400,000 per victim in the first round, before we got there," he said. "We got $1.8 million for each of our clients."
After that, Manly's phone kept ringing. "We got a lot of calls as a result of Miramonte," he said. "My phone rings every day with stories of abuse victims. We can help a small fraction." Investigation takes time. "You knock on doors, follow leads," he said. "Who knew about this? When did they know? The Miramonte children were third graders. And this is how the district dealt with it: they hid the truth and made the victims and their parents the enemy. They argued that limitation statutes should limit damages. It was abhorrent."
The problem is so prevalent that Manly said it is common during voir dire in abuse cases to have potential jurors acknowledge that they have been abused. "I see judges toss those jurors, and that is a terrible mistake," he said. "Leave them on. They bring common sense to the jury room. They know what I'm talking about when I speak of abuse as emotional murder."
- John Roemer
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