County Tactics in Rape Victims’ Suit Questioned

The crimes against the two young girls have never been disputed: Both were repeatedly raped while wards of Los Angeles County by the son of their foster mother, beginning when they were only 11. County social workers failed to protect them over a three-year period.

One of the girls was impregnated by their “foster brother” three times and had two abortions--one at the request of her foster mother. Ultimately, at age 14, she bore her assailant, Anthony Colbert, a son.

Although the girls’ allegations that Colbert also beat and tortured them were never proved, he was convicted of various counts of sexual assault in 1995 “relating to his repeated rapes of the kids,” and is now in prison, Principal Deputy County Counsel Roger Granbo confirmed Tuesday. The foster mother, Karla Jarrett Coleman, also was convicted of child endangerment.

So why did the county’s team of lawyers take more than three years and spend almost $230,000 of the taxpayers’ money defending the case before agreeing to a $950,000 out-of-court settlement approved by the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday?

Why, for that matter, did county lawyers, including private counsel John Collins, try to force the two girls to testify about their sexual histories, in apparent contravention of the state law shielding rape victims from such questions?

And why, when that legal tactic appeared headed for failure, did the county’s lawyers move to have a psychiatrist ask the girls about their sex partners?

The answers are contained in the county lawyers’ settlement memo.

In it, Granbo, Collins and another top county lawyer note, almost boastfully, that the aggressive legal tactics “were a major factor” in discouraging the plaintiffs from going to trial, where the county could have faced a potential jury award of more than $4.7 million. They also credited themselves with persuading the plaintiffs to lower their original settlement demand of $3 million.

The tactic worked.

Lawyers for the two girls recently agreed to a deal in which the county would pay $475,000 to each of the girls, who are both 19 now. The board voted 4 to 0 Tuesday to approve the settlement.

Collins had no comment Tuesday on the county’s legal strategy. Granbo defended it: “I think our attorneys handled it very professionally. We did not overstep our bounds.”

Granbo said that because the girls were alleging emotional distress as a result of the rapes and alleged beatings by Colbert, county lawyers had a duty to pursue whether the girls had been raped or sexually assaulted before or after their stay with the foster mother in question to see if those contributed to their distress.

He said that an aggressive defense of the case merited questioning whether at least some of the instances of sex were “consensual.”

“We were exploring all defenses and trying to figure out what the relationships were,” Granbo said. “But none of it was good; the kids were victims in this and there is no way to make that sound right.”

To some observers, the hardball legal tactics may have saved taxpayers money but at too high a cost.

Linda Wallace Pate, the Dependency Court-appointed lawyer representing one of the victims, said the two remain traumatized, almost as much by their legal ordeal as by the initial assaults.

The county lawyers, she said, “knew the perpetrator . . . had been raping [the girls] on an almost daily basis for three years--and they still tried to say that it was [a matter of] consent.”

“It appears as if they are blaming the victims,” Pate said. “It adds to their emotional trauma, it lowers their self-esteem, and it re-victimizes children who are the most vulnerable children in society--those who are removed from their parents and placed under the care of the government and then abused.”

The county lawyers persuaded Superior Court Judge Reginald Dunn to go along with their demands to question the girls. But Pate and other lawyers appealed to the state Court of Appeal, which ruled in July that the state’s decade-old rape “shield law” protects victims’ rights to privacy about their sex lives.

Pate said she has seen similar legal tactics employed in more than a dozen Dependency Court cases in which she has represented sexual assault victims in county foster homes, including one that the Board of Supervisors agreed to settle last year for $1.2 million.

Granbo denied that the county routinely questions rape victims about their sexual history.

The two girls were in the foster care system in 1989 when they were placed with Coleman, who then was a social worker at a group home where the girls had been living previously.

But Coleman lived in San Bernardino with her teenage son, and it was a violation of state and county law to place foster children outside the county where their birth mothers live, Pate alleges.

It also was improper for Coleman herself to remove the two girls from the group home; that should have been done only by the Department of Children and Family Services, especially because the home appeared to be a good place for them, one county litigation memo concedes.

Once the girls were placed in the home, county social workers rarely visited them, although they were required to do so once a month. What’s more, county lawyers concede, social workers ignored allegations of sexual abuse and never reported them to the Juvenile Court judges presiding over the girls’ cases.

In 1992, Coleman asked the county to take away both girls because she was having a nervous breakdown. It wasn’t until two years later that the investigation into the rapes began.

On Tuesday, none of the four county supervisors who approved the settlement would returns calls seeking comment on the case.