California
Jury awards $2.28 billion in child sex abuse lawsuit
RIVERSIDE, Calif. (AP) — A Southern California jury has awarded $2.28 billion to a woman who was molested for years by her stepfather, her attorneys announced.
The panel in Riverside County Superior Court awarded damages on Tuesday to a woman described in court papers only as Jane Doe who said she was sexually assaulted by her stepfather from the age of 5 until she was 14, according to an announcement by the law firm of Gary A. Dordick.
The lawsuit alleged that beginning in the 1980s, the stepfather sexually abused the girl.
The assaults took place at their Lake Elsinore home and at events, meetings and property of the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in which both parents were active, the lawsuit said.
“These ongoing acts of abuse brought Plaintiff to the brink of suicide,” according to the lawsuit.
In addition to the stepfather, the negligence and sexual abuse suit also named the church and the woman’s mother. It alleged that the woman repeatedly told church officials, including local bishops, about the sexual abuse but they failed to report it to law enforcement in violation of church policy and also used “intimidation and shaming tactics” to keep her from telling anyone outside the church.
The AP is not naming the stepfather nor the mother to shield the identity of the victim.
The stepfather was finally arrested in 1997 after Jane Doe told her high school basketball coach about the abuse, the suit said. He pleaded guilty to committing lewd acts with a child under age 14 and spent three years in state prison, according to the lawsuit.
While denying wrongdoing, the church settled its part of the lawsuit for $1 million last December and the woman’s mother settled for $200,000 in February, according to the woman’s lawyers.
The stepfather failed to appear at trial on the first day of jury selection and withdrew his answer to the lawsuit rather than face a warrant for his arrest and “accordingly, his attorney was not able to participate in the trial,” the law firm said in an email.
An email to the stepfather’s attorney wasn’t immediately returned on Wednesday.
California
Former UCLA gynecologist gets 11-year sentence in sex abuse case
LOS ANGELES (AP) — A former gynecologist at the University of California, Los Angeles was sentenced Wednesday to 11 years in prison for sexually abusing female patients, in a criminal trial that came after the university system made nearly $700 million in lawsuit payouts connected to the case.
Dr. James Heaps, 66, has been in custody since a jury convicted him in October of three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual penetration of two patients.
After sentencing Heaps, Judge Michael D. Carter ordered him to register as a sex offender, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said.
Heaps, a longtime UCLA campus gynecologist, had pleaded not guilty to 21 felony counts in the sexual assaults of seven women between 2009 and 2018. The jury found him not guilty of seven of the 21 counts and was deadlocked on the remaining charges.
Heaps was indicted in 2021 on multiple counts each of sexual battery by fraud, sexual exploitation of a patient and sexual penetration of an unconscious person by fraudulent representation.
In the wake of the scandal that erupted in 2019 following the doctor’s arrest, UCLA agreed to pay nearly $700 million in lawsuit settlements to hundreds of Heaps’ patients — a record amount by a public university amid a wave of sexual misconduct scandals by campus doctors in recent years.
UCLA patients said Heaps groped them, made suggestive comments or conducted unnecessarily invasive exams during his 35-year career. Women who brought the lawsuits said the university ignored their complaints and deliberately concealed abuse that happened for decades during examinations at the UCLA student health center, the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center or in Heaps’ campus office.
Heaps continued to practice until his retirement in June 2018.
New York
Fox to hand over documents for 2nd voting machine lawsuit
NEW YORK (AP) — Fox News agreed Wednesday to hand over thousands of documents to voting machine company Smartmatic, which is suing the network for defamation in a case similar to Dominion Voting Machines’ just-settled lawsuit.
Smartmatic says Fox bears financial responsibility for airing false allegations that the company rigged the 2020 presidential election against former President Donald Trump.
Last week, Fox agreed to pay Dominion nearly $800 million to avert a trial, although the ultimate cost to the media company is likely to be much lower.
Smartmatic wants a $2.7 billion judgment, which far exceeds the $1.6 billion Dominion sought in its suit. No date has been set, and the case might not go to court for a couple of years.
Smartmatic said in court filings that Fox “slow-rolled its production” of transcripts and other material that were created during the Dominion suit, and that Smartmatic had received just a small fraction of the more than 52,000 documents it requested as part of the discovery process.
Among the documents Smartmatic hopes will bolster its case are deposition transcripts for Fox founder Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, as well as documents related to company executive Raj Shah and lawyer Viet Dinh.
In a statement, Fox News said it was ready to defend itself in “this case surrounding extremely newsworthy events.”
“As a report prepared by our financial expert shows, Smartmatic’s damages claims are implausible, disconnected from reality, and on its face intended to chill First Amendment freedoms,” the network said.
The Dominion case pulled back the curtain on how Fox and its on-air personalities — including Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and now-fired Tucker Carlson — promoted conspiracy theories and Trump’s baseless effort to overturn the election.
The network suffered an array of embarrassing revelations from emails that showed Fox executives and personalities saying they knew the accusations were untrue, even as the falsehoods were aired on programs.
Because Florida-based Smartmatic’s machines were only used in Los Angeles during the 2020 election, the company had little influence on the presidential race. Still, Fox’s on-air personalities sometimes conflated Dominion and Smartmatic.
Smartmatic’s lawyer, Erik Connolly, has said the Dominion case “exposed some of the misconduct and damage caused by Fox’s disinformation campaign. Smartmatic will expose the rest.”
Minnesota
Minneapolis NAACP sues city over police spying allegations
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Minneapolis NAACP sued the city of Minneapolis on Wednesday over allegations that police officers used phony social media accounts to spy on activists without a legitimate public safety purpose.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court, alleges that the Minneapolis Police Department discriminated against the NAACP and violated its members’ constitutional rights when it singled out the organization for surveillance “on the basis of race.”
“These are accounts that are supposed to be used for official investigations. There were none,” Liliana Zaragoza, director of the University of Minnesota’s Racial Justice Law Clinic and attorney for the NAACP, told the Star Tribune.
Minneapolis officials have denied the allegation of social media abuse since it first appeared in a scathing Minnesota Department of Human Rights report alleging racially biased policing a year ago. But state Human Rights Commissioner Rebecca Lucero stood by the allegation last month when both sides announced a court-enforceable settlement that calls for a series of reforms for the police department in the city where George Floyd was murdered by an officer nearly three years ago.
City officials told reporters they couldn’t find evidence to support the social media allegations.
“Our findings are correct,” Lucero insisted at the same news conference. “MPD uses covert social media to target Black leaders, Black organizations and elected officials without a public safety objective. That remains true.”
Minneapolis and state leaders have declined to release the underlying evidence, citing data privacy laws.
Zaragoza said the city ignored the NAACP’s request for the data, leaving Black community members to only guess as to how deep the surveillance has gone.
“We don’t how sinister this is,” she told the newspaper.
The NAACP hopes to learn the full extent of the surveillance through the lawsuit’s discovery process, including the names of officers and whether any social media spying translated to any real-life action.
The city has not yet been served with the lawsuit, spokeswoman Sarah McKenzie said.
Hawaii
No release for woman accused of using dead baby’s identification
HONOLULU (AP) — A woman accused with her husband of living in Hawaii under the stolen identities of dead babies will remain behind bars pending their trial, a U.S. magistrate judge ruled Wednesday.
According to prosecutors, Walter Glenn Primrose and Gwynn Darle Morrison are the real names of the couple who have been fraudulently living for decades under the stolen identities of Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague. Prosecutors say Primrose spent more than 20 years in the Coast Guard as Bobby Fort, where he obtained secret-level security clearance. After retiring in 2016, he used the secret clearance for a job as a U.S. defense contractor, prosecutors said.
There is no indication in court documents why the couple in 1987 assumed the identities of deceased children, who would have been more than a decade younger than them.
Previous rulings have kept them detained.
At a hearing Wednesday asking a judge to release the wife, she identified herself as “Lyn Montague.”
“I understand the court’s concern — the allegation is my client has used a false and fraudulent name for almost her entire life and we cannot verify who she is,” her attorney Megan Kau said.
Kau said she is not accused of committing a crime using an allegedly stolen identity.
As Kau’s client was led out of the courtroom after U.S. Magistrate Judge Kenneth Mansfield’s ruling, she said, “As expected.” She referred to the situation as, “this whole idiotic thing.”
A hearing for a similar request by her husband hasn’t been scheduled. He has a new attorney who said Tuesday that he won’t be ready in time for the couple’s May 22 trial date. The newly appointed lawyer, Marc Victor, said he doesn’t think he will be ready anytime this year.
Kau said she is contemplating requesting a separate trial from her client’s husband.
There was no mention in court Wednesday of Russian spy intrigue prosecutors introduced when the couple were arrested last year.
A search of the couple’s home in Kapolei, a Honolulu suburb, turned up Polaroids of them wearing jackets that appear to be authentic KGB uniforms, an invisible ink kit, documents with coded language and maps showing military bases, prosecutors said at the time.
But prosecutors last month asked that jurors not hear about the uniforms, and a judge last week agreed.
The couple have pleaded not guilty to conspiracy, false statement in a passport application and aggravated identity theft.
