LAUSD to settle suits involving teacher notorious for semen ‘tasting’ games

The Los Angeles Unified School District will pay $3.55 million to two more individuals who allege they were abused as students by former teacher Mark Berndt, attorneys said Monday.

One of the former students at Miramonte Elementary School, where Berndt taught for decades, will receive $1.85 million and the other will get $1.7 million under terms of an agreement announced by attorney Morgan Stewart.

Their lawsuits alleged that Berndt sexually harassed, abused and molested them on multiple occasions from about 2004 to 2008.

L.A. Unified did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The settlements did not include any admissions of wrongdoing by the district.

Berndt, a former third-grade teacher, was arrested in 2012 and pleaded no contest the following year to 23 counts of lewd conduct. The allegations against him included that he fed children his semen in what he called a “tasting game.”

He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and remains behind bars.

Berndt taught at Miramonte from 1979 to 2011, when investigators began to look into his conduct based on photos turned in to police, some of which showed schoolchildren blindfolded, with tape over their mouth, authorities said.

The lawsuits that were settled allege Miramonte administrators and LAUSD officials ignored multiple complaints by parents, students and teachers regarding Berndt’s sexual misconduct with children dating to the early 1980s.

In 1983, a parent complained that Berndt, then 32, had dropped his pants during a student field trip to a museum.

In 2014, the LAUSD agreed to pay about $139 million — believed to be the largest payout ever by a school system in a child abuse case at the time — to resolve legal claims from 69 Miramonte parents and 81 students who accused Berndt of lewd acts. The district also paid about $30 million in claims to the families of 65 Miramonte students.

“This settlement represents one more chapter in a horrendous scandal,” Stewart said. “Ten years after the largest sexual abuse settlement against a public school district, it is a continuing reminder of the damage that results when school officials choose to ignore red flags and complaints by students and parents of a serial sexual predator.”

In the wake of the Miramonte scandal, then-Supt. John Deasy removed more than 200 teachers from their classrooms across the district. The entire staff at Miramonte was temporarily replaced in the second half of the school year, and all employees were required to review the rules on abuse reporting.