DA Nathan Hochman is asking a court to freeze nearly $5 billion in child sex abuse settlement payouts, saying a criminal probe has found that up to 81 percent of the claims may be fraudulent.
The numbers are hard to read. Los Angeles County approved two settlements totaling $4.8 billion between April and October 2025, covering more than 11,000 alleged childhood sex abuse cases tied to county juvenile halls and foster care facilities. On June 2, District Attorney Nathan Hochman filed a motion asking a Superior Court judge to halt payments until at least the end of 2026. His office believes as many as 81 percent of the claims are fraudulent. A hearing is set for June 15.
The alleged scheme is not abstract. According to the DA's office and reporting by the Los Angeles Times, recruiters approached people, including some standing outside social services offices, and paid them small amounts of cash to file false lawsuits against the county. In at least some cases, those recruited claimants were handed scripts detailing what to tell attorneys. Hochman's investigators have zeroed in on potential misconduct by claimants, lawyers, medical professionals, and third-party recruiters. His office has offered immunity to individual claimants who come forward voluntarily, a carve-out that explicitly does not extend to the attorneys or fixers who may have run the scheme.
Hochman, who won the 2022 Republican nomination for California attorney general before registering as no party preference, defeated progressive incumbent George Gascón in the November 2024 election. He has framed the intervention as a defense of actual victims. "This intervention is critical to safeguarding the rights of the legitimate child abuse survivors, including preserving the integrity of the settlement process," he said in court filings, according to the DA's official press release. The 34-page motion argues that paying out claims now would obscure financial trails and impair the office's ability to identify and prosecute fraudulent actors.
The legal architecture enabling this potential fraud runs through California Assembly Bill 218, a 2019 state law that lifted the statute of limitations on childhood sexual abuse lawsuits against government agencies. The law was intended to give long-silenced victims a path to court. What Hochman's investigation has exposed, if his allegations hold up, is that it also created a window for mass fraud, one where the bar to file is low, the payout per claim substantial, and the county's ability to scrutinize decades-old allegations limited by the sheer volume.
The county approved the original $4 billion settlement in April 2025 and added an $828 million agreement in October, covering cases stretching back as far as 1959. Approving both without a rigorous vetting mechanism, Hochman's team argues, turned a sympathetic payout vehicle into a fraud target. The DA's office first announced its criminal probe in November 2025, but the county began processing payments anyway, which is why Hochman returned to court in June seeking a second freeze on disbursements.
The question AB 218 raises does not stop at the Los Angeles County line. The law applies statewide, and if attorney-driven fraud at this scale was possible here, similar schemes could exist in other California jurisdictions. No statewide legislative review has been announced, and state legislators have not moved to address any structural fixes.
What Comes Next
The June 15 hearing will determine whether a judge halts payments while the criminal investigation runs its course. If the court agrees, thousands of claims, including those filed by people who may be genuine survivors, will face added delay. That is the sharpest edge of what Hochman is alleging: widespread fraud, if proven at the scale his office describes, would harm real victims too, either by draining the settlement fund or by poisoning the credibility of every claim in it.
The immunity offer gives false claimants a narrow exit before charges arrive. What cooperating witnesses reveal about the attorneys and recruiters at the top of the alleged scheme will determine how far the investigation reaches. Hochman's office has not yet named specific law firms or individual lawyers in public filings.
For California's Democratic legislative majority, which passed AB 218 and celebrated the county settlements as a long-overdue reckoning, the fraud allegations are an uncomfortable inheritance. The Board of Supervisors approved both agreements. It took a former Republican turned independent prosecutor to look at the claims and ask whether the people signing them had ever been abused at all.
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