What to know about the Los Angeles Catholic Church's $880M settlement with sexual abuse victims

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has agreed to pay $880 million to hundreds of victims of clergy sexual abuse dating back decades.

The settlement with 1,353 people who allege that they were abused by local Catholic priests is the largest single child sex abuse settlement with a Catholic archdiocese, according to experts. The accusers were able to sue after California approved a law that opened a three-year window in 2020 for cases that exceeded the statute of limitations.

The Archdiocese of Los Angeles has previously paid $740 million to victims. With the settlement announced Wednesday, the total payout will be more than $1.5 billion.

Attorneys still need to get approval for the settlement from all plaintiffs to finalize it, the Plaintiffs’ Liaison Committee said.

The agreement brings to an end most sexual abuse litigation against the largest archdiocese in the United States, though a few lawsuits against the church are still pending, attorneys for the victims say.

Here are some things to know about the settlement:

It took a year and a half to reach an agreement

Negotiations began in 2022, lead plaintiff attorney Morgan Stewart said Thursday.

Attorneys wanted their clients to get the highest settlement possible while allowing the archdiocese to survive financially, Steward said. California is one of at least 15 states that have extended the window for people to sue institutions over long-ago abuse, leading to thousands of new cases that have forced several archdioceses to declare bankruptcy, including San Francisco and Oakland.

California's law also allowed triple damages in cases where abuse resulted from a “cover-up” of previous assaults by an employee or volunteer.

“One of our goals was to avoid the bankruptcy process that has befallen so many other dioceses,” Stewart said.

The plaintiffs were abused 30, 40, or 50 years ago, Steward said.

“These survivors have suffered for decades in the aftermath of the abuse,” Stewart told the Los Angeles Times. “Dozens of the survivors have died. They are aging, and many of those with knowledge of the abuse within the church are too. It was time to get this resolved.”

The Los Angeles Catholic Church previously paid $740 million

The archdiocese has pledged to better protect its church members while paying hundreds of millions of dollars in various settlements.

Archbishop José H. Gomez apologized in a statement.

“My hope is that this settlement will provide some measure of healing for what these men and women have suffered,” the archbishop added. “I believe that we have come to a resolution of these claims that will provide just compensation to the survivor-victims of these past abuses.”

Gomez said that the new settlement would be paid through “reserves, investments and loans, along with other archdiocesan assets and payments that will be made by religious orders and others named in the litigation.”

Hundreds of LA clergy members are accused of abusing minors

More than 300 priests who worked in the archdiocese in Los Angeles have been accused of sexually abusing minors over decades.

One of those priests was Michael Baker, who was convicted of child molestation in 2007 and paroled in 2011. In 2013, the archdiocese agreed to pay nearly $10 million to settle four cases alleging abuse by the now-defrocked priest.

Confidential files show that Baker met with then-Archbishop Roger Mahony in 1986 and confessed to molesting two boys over a nearly seven-year period.

Mahony removed Baker from ministry and sent him for psychological treatment, but the priest returned to ministry and was allowed to be alone with boys. The priest wasn’t removed from ministry until 2000 after serving in nine parishes.

Authorities believe that Baker molested more than 40 children during his years as a priest, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Church officials say they've made changes

The church now enforces strict background and reporting requirements on priests and has extensive training programs for staff and volunteers to protect young people, said Gomez, who succeeded Mahony after he retired as archbishop of Los Angeles in 2011. Mahony remains a cardinal.

“Today, as a result of these reforms, new cases of sexual misconduct by priests and clergy involving minors are rare in the Archdiocese,” Gomez told the Los Angeles Times. “No one who has been found to have harmed a minor is serving in ministry at this time. And I promise: We will remain vigilant.”

As part of the new settlement, the archdiocese will disclose more of the files it kept that documented abuse by priests.

“I’m not excusing anything, but the fact remains that today the archdiocese is a much, much different place than it was 40, 50, 60 years ago,” said Kirk Dillman, an attorney representing the archdiocese. “The understanding of abuse is much different and more sophisticated than it was then. So we have put in place programs beginning in the 1990s, zero-tolerance policy.”