A Southern California woman awarded what may be a record-setting judgment in a U.S. sexual-assault case — $2.28 billion — said she told her attorney at the beginning of the civil trial in Riverside federal court not to discuss with her how much money he planned to seek.
“I didn’t want to be distracted from what the goal was,” she said.
But when jurors on April 25 announced that her stepfather would be ordered to pay $836 million in general damages and $1.44 billion in punitive damages for the assaults that she says began when she was 5 years old and lasted for a decade, the woman, now 41, was overcome with emotion.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said in an interview on Wednesday, May 3. “I was bawling and hugging my wife, who was also crying. I think there is going to be positive change, and that’s the goal.”
The Southern California News Group does not identify victims of sexual assault in most cases, and it also is not identifying her stepfather and her mother, who was also a party to the lawsuit, because doing so could serve to identify the woman, her wife and their children.
The woman’s lead attorney, Gary A. Dordick, told jurors that if Fox Corp. agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle the defamation lawsuit concerning the damage absorbed by the voting-machine company, then his client was entitled to at least $1.6 billion for suffering physical abuse.
Out of the $2.28 billion, the woman said she might receive only $5,000 to $10,000 from her stepfather because he is in his 70s and works in a Riverside County shop.
Some of the abuse took place after the stepfather became an elder at The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Lake Elsinore. The church has already paid the $1 million settlement it agreed to before the trial, Dordick said. And the woman’s mother has paid the agreed-upon $200,000, Dordick said.
The victim, who now works as a chef, said she hasn’t paid much attention to…
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