In the past month, numerous cases of sexual abuse have been reported in various schools around Southern California. On February 1, Brett Mohr, a teacher at Glendale Adventist Academy since 1998, was arrested and charged with multiple felony accounts related to inappropriate conduct with students. It’s not the first time Glendale Adventist Academy has been in the news for sexual abuse claims.
In 2013, Valerie Jane Gonzales, a private vocal instructor at Glendale Adventist Academy, was sentenced to a year in county jail for allegedly engaging in lewd acts with a male high school student. The age of the student involved was not released, but Gonzales was initially charged with four counts of felony lewd act on a child and four felony counts of oral copulation of a person under 16. Gonzales, of El Monte, California, was 29 at the time, and the relationship with the underage student reportedly lasted from June to November 2012.
In 2018, another Glendale teacher from Salem Lutheran School was arrested for committing a sex crime with an underage student. Jacqueline Nicole Muller, 26 at the time, was arrested in August 2018 for having unprotected sex on multiple occasions with a 14-year-old student during a field trip to Washington D.C. Muller had reportedly been teaching at the school for approximately one year before the arrest. Muller, a chaperone on the field trip, was charged with first-degree child sexual abuse.
Additionally, earlier this month an assistant principal at Oak Hills High School in San Bernardino County was arrested and charged with continuous sexual abuse of a young girl, including lewd and lascivious acts with a child under 14 (the victim was reportedly 7 and 8 years old at the time of the alleged abuse).
Another story of school sex abuse that made headlines last week involved a former student of an elite La Jolla private school who came forward to announce a civil lawsuit claiming she had been repeatedly sexually abused by a former teacher. Allegations of sexual abuse within The Bishop’s School in La Jolla first came to light in 2018, when it was discovered that more than a dozen alleged incidents of sexual misconduct had been made over the course of 30 years. A 2019 lawsuit by a former student alleged two years of abuse by a teacher while he attended the school in the 1990s. That lawsuit alleges that the plaintiff, identified only as John H. Doe, was repeatedly sexually molested and harassed by a female computer science teacher beginning when he was a 16-year-old student (the female teacher was reportedly 32 years old at the time).
In 2019, the La Jolla Light reported that The Bishop’s School conducted a 2017 investigation into sexual misconduct after an alumna disclosed her “experience of sexual assault committed many decades ago by a former, now deceased, member of the school staff.” The alumna told the publication she engaged in “what was then viewed as a sexual relationship with a teacher in the 1980s.”
In 2018, The Bishop’s School issued a letter disclosing that seven alumni had come forward and described 15 separate incidents following a year-long investigation – five of which were first-hand accounts of sexual misconduct or a “boundary violation” committed by a school employee beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s.
As of May 2019, an attorney representing The Bishop’s School confirmed 14 alumni had come forward to report incidents of sexual misconduct. The reports dated as far back as 1972, with the most recent allegation of misconduct occurring in 1998.
The latest lawsuit filed last week against The Bishop’s School seeks damages for intentionally inflicting emotional distress, sexual harassment, sexual battery, negligence, negligent supervision, and negligent failure to warn, train, or educate. School officials say they are reviewing the lawsuit but are not commenting at this time given the pending litigation.
Sadly, there are countless additional incidents of sexual abuse that have impacted various schools throughout Southern California in recent years. But this is not merely a local problem. A rash of sexual misconduct incidents are plaguing schools nationwide.
A recent study issued by the Education Department confirmed that reports of sexual violence in schools rose more than 50% between the 2015-2016 school year and the 2017-2018 school year. With school sexual abuse impacting more and more children of all ages and genders, parents are overwhelmed with concern and rightfully demanding answers. Since publishing recent blogs on the Glendale Adventist Academy and Oak Hills High School cases, many concerned parents have reached out to Dordulian Law Group for advice on how to help keep their children safe at school.
Accordingly, we sat down with two members of our SAJE Team (Sexual Abuse Justice Experts) – DLG’s Founder and President, Samuel Dordulian, a former sex crimes prosecutor as Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County, and Moses Castillo, our Chief Investigator and a retired LAPD detective in the elite Sexually Exploited Child Unit. The two SAJE Team members participated in a question and answer session tackling the topics of combatting school sexual abuse and keeping children safe from predators. Both Dordulian and Castillo have handled hundreds of sex crime cases throughout their careers, many of which involved school sexual abuse.
Ready to file a claim and pursue justice through a financial damages award? Our expert attorneys are available online or by phone now.
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