The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved paying $7.5 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of several girls who were sexually assaulted by a former Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy.
The settlement comes six months after Sean Essex — who worked for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for more than two decades — was sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing the three young daughters of a woman he was dating, and he allegedly abused another girl he met several years earlier.
The girls were between ages 4 and 13 at the time of the abuse, which spanned from at least 2006 until the time of Essex’s arrest in 2022.
Later that year, attorney Spencer Lucas filed a lawsuit on behalf of the three sisters, who were listed as Jane Does in court filings. Lucas did not immediately offer comment on the board’s approval of the settlement.
In an emailed statement, the Sheriff’s Department said this week that it immediately opened a criminal investigation upon learning of the allegations two years ago.
“This individual’s egregious actions do not align with the values upheld by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department or the dedicated law enforcement professionals who serve our communities with pride every day,” the statement said. “Department members who engage in any misconduct, particularly criminal behavior targeting vulnerable populations, will be thoroughly investigated, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
An attorney for Essex did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Before the abuse came to light, the girls’ mother had dated Essex for roughly five years, according to the Sheriff’s Department’s summary of the case. After the relationship ended in 2018, the girls’ mother still let them go on outings with him.
Then on April 4, 2022, one of the girls told her mother that Essex had sexually abused her, the Sheriff’s Department wrote in its summary of the case, which was included in the board agenda. Another of the girls called Essex a pervert, which prompted their mother to ask more questions.
The girls said Essex sexually assaulted them between 2014 and 2022. According to the department’s summary, he frequently stopped by the family’s home in uniform and took the girls out to get food in his patrol car.
As the family’s attorney previously told The Times, that was where some of the abuse happened.
“He would pick up the girls individually in his L.A. County sheriff’s patrol vehicle, and he would take the girls and he would abuse them in the patrol car,” Lucas said in 2022, adding that some of the abuse occurred in a Sheriff’s Department parking lot.
The 33-count indictment filed against Essex in August 2022 alleged that he abused the sisters at various points from 2013 until five days before his arrest. One of the girls was younger than 10 at the time of the sex acts, prosecutors said, and the other two were younger than 14.
The indictment also included charges stemming from the alleged abuse of another girl in 2006, which the district attorney’s office declined to prosecute at the time and who is not included in the settlement.
“It’s absolutely shocking to us that the county didn’t do more to investigate and bring this terrible perpetrator to justice in 2006,” Lucas told The Times in 2022. “This whole terrible abuse that these poor little girls went through should have been stopped.”
Previously, the Sheriff’s Department said it had tried to fire Essex following an internal affairs investigation in 2018, but the county’s Civil Service Commission overturned his termination and ordered the department to reinstate him.
He ended up separating from the department in late 2022, several months after his arrest.
This year, L.A. Superior Court records show, he pleaded no contest to four felony charges and was sentenced to prison. In October, the state deemed him no longer eligible for certification as a peace officer in California in light of his criminal convictions.
In its summary of the case, the department also laid out corrective actions and missteps in the handling of the matter. One “root cause” was “the Department’s failure to thoroughly investigate previous sexual misconduct allegations,” the document said.
Another was “a Commander’s failure to thoroughly investigate/read all pertinent documentation” related to Essex’s previous misconduct.
