Last Updated: March 2026
For decades, Cesar Chavez was regarded as one of the most beloved and consequential figures in American civil rights history. He co-founded the United Farm Workers, led grape boycotts, endured grueling fasts, and gave generations of Latino farmworkers a political voice they had never had before. Schools were named after him. Streets bore his name. His birthday became a state holiday in California. A bronze bust of him sat in the Oval Office.
Then, in March 2026, The New York Times published the findings of a year-long investigation, and the image began to collapse.
The investigation found extensive evidence that Chavez had groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in his movement, beginning in the early 1970s. Two women, Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas, both now 66 years old, say Chavez sexually abused them repeatedly when they were 12 and 13 years old, respectively. And in a revelation that shook the civil rights world, Dolores Huerta, the celebrated activist who co-founded the UFW alongside Chavez and coined the rallying cry “Si, se puede,” publicly disclosed for the first time that Chavez had sexually assaulted her, and that two of her children were fathered through those encounters.
Huerta is 95 years old. She had kept that secret for nearly 60 years.
The Cesar Chavez sexual abuse story is heartbreaking on multiple levels. It is a story about the abuse of power. It is a story about a movement that protected its icon at the expense of the women and girls he harmed. And it is a story about why survivors, particularly those whose abusers are powerful and widely revered, so often wait years, decades, or an entire lifetime before they are able to speak.
The Times interviewed more than 60 people for its investigation, including former aides, relatives, and longtime UFW members. Reporters reviewed hundreds of pages of union records, confidential emails, photographs, and hours of audio from UFW board meetings.
Ana Murguia says she was 13 years old when Chavez first summoned her to his office. He locked the door, brought her to the yoga mat he kept for meditation, and sexually abused her. He told her afterward: “Don’t tell anyone. They’d get jealous.” She says she was summoned for sexual encounters with him dozens of times over the next four years. By the time she was 15, she had attempted to end her life multiple times.
Debra Rojas says she was 12 when Chavez first groped her in that same office in 1972. She still has a letter she wrote to him in January 1974, at age 13, preserved in a university archive. In it, she shifts between childlike school updates and declarations of devotion that reflect exactly the kind of emotional grooming that predators use to manipulate their victims. She says he told her the Flamingos song “I Only Have Eyes for You” was their song. He told her to stay away from boys because he’d get jealous. He told her they would move to Mexico together someday. At 15, she says, he arranged for her to stay at a motel during a California march and raped her.
“He did his grooming very well,” Rojas told the Times. “He should get an Academy Award for all he did.”
Dolores Huerta’s statement, released the same day the investigation published, was equally shattering. She described two separate sexual encounters with Chavez. In the first, she said, she was manipulated and pressured into having sex with him. In the second, she says, she was forced against her will. She writes: “I had experienced abuse and sexual violence before, and I convinced myself these were incidents that I had to endure alone and in secret.” She kept the secret, she explains, because she believed exposing the truth would damage the farmworker movement she had devoted her entire life to.
Both pregnancies that resulted from those encounters were kept secret. Huerta arranged for the children to be raised by other families.
“I have never identified myself as a victim,” Huerta wrote, “but I now understand that I am a survivor.”
In 2026, survivors of sexual abuse still face a deeply-skeptical world when they come forward. It does not matter how credible they are, how much evidence supports their account, or how much they have suffered. There is a predictable script of cynical questions that often gets deployed against them, and it is worth naming those questions directly, because understanding why they are so damaging is part of understanding why survivors so rarely feel safe enough to speak.
Questions that are almost exclusively posed to victims of sexual assault commonly include:
These questions are almost never asked in good faith. They are asked to create doubt. They are asked to shift the focus from the abuser to the credibility of the person he harmed. They are asked because powerful institutions and loyal followers of powerful men have a deep interest in not believing the person making the accusation. Moreover, they’re never asked to victims of robbery, physical assault, etc., etc.
What makes the Cesar Chavez sexual abuse story so striking, and so impossible to dismiss, is that not a single one of those questions applies here.
Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas are not seeking money. The legal window to file civil claims based on abuse by Chavez, who died in 1993, has long closed. They will receive no financial compensation for speaking out. They are not seeking publicity. Both women have kept their stories private for more than 50 years. They are not coordinating a political attack. Murguia came forward, in part, because she learned the city where she lives was planning to rename a street in honor of the man who abused her. She wanted the record to reflect the truth.
Huerta is nearly 96 years old. She has spent her entire life fighting for farmworker rights, for women’s rights, for dignity in the face of oppression. She had every reason, for 60 years, to stay silent and protect the movement she built. She finally spoke because she could no longer, in good conscience, allow young women who were abused by Chavez as children to feel alone. “My silence ends here,” she wrote.
These are not women chasing fame or fortune. They are women who bore an unbearable secret, in some cases for six decades, because speaking the truth felt more dangerous and more costly than continuing to carry it. And they are speaking now, in their 60s and 90s, because they finally believe the truth deserves to be told.
The pattern in this investigation is one that sexual abuse survivors and their advocates will recognize immediately. The abuser is not a shadowy stranger. He is a beloved figure, someone the victims admired, trusted, and in some cases loved. He holds power, not just institutional power but moral and cultural authority. The victims are young, often without support systems, often dependent on the very community the abuser leads.
In that environment, speaking out is not simply a matter of courage. It can mean losing your family’s standing, your community, your sense of self. For the women in this investigation, speaking out meant risking the legacy of an entire civil rights movement for which their own parents had marched. Ms. Rojas posted briefly about her experience in a private Facebook group for former Chavez organizers more than a decade ago. She was accused of jeopardizing everything their parents had worked for. She deleted the post days later.
This is how silence is enforced. Not always by direct threats, though those happen as well. Often, it is enforced by the weight of collective loyalty to a figure who has been elevated to near-sainthood. The survivors are told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are the problem – that their truth is an inconvenience, that the movement is bigger than their pain.
Huerta herself internalized this framing for 60 years. She channeled everything she had into advocacy because “building the movement and securing farmworker rights was my life’s work.” The man who assaulted her was her partner in that work. Exposing him would have meant dismantling something she believed in with her whole being.
None of this means the survivors were wrong to stay silent. It means the circumstances that produced their silence were deeply unjust. It means the systems that protect powerful men at the expense of the people they harm are real, entrenched, and costly. And it means that when survivors do finally come forward, often after years or decades of internal struggle, they deserve to be believed.
The evidence supporting these survivors is extensive. It includes decades of corroborating interviews, archived letters written by the victims as children, contemporaneous accounts from people they confided in, internal UFW emails discussing the allegations, and the first-person testimony of Dolores Huerta, one of the most respected civil rights leaders in American history.
When the Times published its findings, the United Farm Workers canceled its annual Cesar Chavez birthday celebrations, citing accusations it called “profoundly shocking.” Marches honoring Chavez were called off in Austin, Tucson, and elsewhere. Governor Gavin Newsom of California said he intended to discuss with legislators whether to rename Cesar Chavez Day. Officials in multiple states said they would consider renaming streets and schools.
These institutions did not respond this way because they were being pressured by activists. They responded because the evidence was thorough, because the sources were credible, and because the survivors had done everything right, including consenting to a year-long independent investigation by one of the most respected news organizations in the world.
This is what is required, in 2026, for survivors of sexual abuse to be believed. It should not take this much. No survivor should have to wait 50 years. No survivor should have to produce a year’s worth of investigative journalism before people take their pain seriously. But the fact that these women did all of that, and are still speaking, still insisting, still standing up to say that what happened to them was real and wrong, is an act of extraordinary courage.
If reading about the Cesar Chavez sexual abuse investigation has stirred something in you, if it has brought back memories of your own experience or made you wonder whether you have the right to speak or to seek help, we want you to know something: you do.
Survivors of childhood sexual abuse and sexual assault carry their trauma in ways the world often fails to account for. They carry shame that was never theirs to carry. They carry silence that was imposed on them, not chosen. They carry the accumulated weight of every time someone implied that their experience was an inconvenience, a liability, or something to be managed in service of a more important cause.
That is not justice. And you deserve justice.
At Dordulian Law Group, we work exclusively with survivors. We do not judge when or why you are coming forward. We understand that trauma does not follow a convenient timeline, and that the circumstances that delay disclosure are almost always the same circumstances that made the abuse possible in the first place: power, secrecy, and the fear that no one will believe you.
We believe you. And we are here to help you understand your options.
To speak confidentially with our team, call us at (866) GO-SEE-SAM. We are available 24/7.
Dordulian Law Group is a California-based personal injury and sexual abuse law firm founded and led by Sam Dordulian, a former sex crimes prosecutor and Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County. Sam spent years on the prosecution side of sexual abuse cases, which means he understands intimately how these crimes are committed, how evidence is built, and what survivors go through when they are finally ready to seek accountability.
DLG’s Survivor Advocacy & Justice Experts (SAJE) Team specializes in representing survivors of childhood sexual abuse, institutional abuse, clergy abuse, and adult sexual assault in all its forms. The firm has a 98% winning record and has recovered more than $150 million for victims and their families.
Los Angeles sexual assault attorney Sam Dordulian has more than 100 jury trial victories to his name. He knows how to fight for survivors, and he knows how to win. Moreover, he understands that every client who comes through our doors has already endured something the legal system cannot fully repair. Our job is to do everything in our power to secure the justice and compensation they deserve, and to make sure they are treated with the dignity and respect they have always been owed.
If you or someone you love is a survivor of sexual abuse, contact our team today. Call (866) GO-SEE-SAM for a free, confidential consultation. We will listen. We will believe you. And we will fight for you.
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