Interview with attorney Jim Lewis regarding sexual abuse cases
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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Robert Mansour:
All right. I think it's working now. Hello everyone. This is Attorney Robert Mansour. And today, I have a special guest. He's one of my referral partners. I've worked with Jim several times in the past. Jim Lewis has joined us and he handles all kinds of injury cases. But one of the areas that he does practice, which is kind of a niche area and a bit sensitive in many ways, is the area of sexual abuse cases.

So Jim, welcome to this interview and thank you for spending some time with me. Let's educate our audience today, okay?

Jim Lewis:
All right, well thanks so much for having me.

Robert Mansour:
So Jim, how long, just basically how long have you been doing this area? I know injury cases for a long time, but this area in particular, how long have you been working in this area?

Jim Lewis:
Sure. Sexual assault and sexual abuse cases have been something that I've been focused on for about 12 years.

Robert Mansour:
Okay, very good. And you are currently handling several of these types of cases, right?

Jim Lewis:
That is probably 90% of what I do on a daily basis is work on sexual assault and sexual abuse cases.

Robert Mansour:
Okay. So now for our audience, let's break it down a little bit. Can you explain to us, because you hear these terms, sexual abuse, sexual assault, what is the difference? Is there a difference? Can you shed some light on that? What is it exactly?

Jim Lewis:
Sure. Sexual assault and sexual abuse are primarily one and the same. A sexual assault can be something that can be actionable without any touching. That's kind of one of the things that's unique about sexual assault as opposed to like a sexual battery, for example. Sexual battery requires actual physical contact, whereas sexual assault can be anything from an attempted sexual contact, for example.

Robert Mansour:
Oh, so well, can you give us an example of what a sexual assault might look like?

Jim Lewis:
Sure. And I mean the term legally speaking, sexual assault encompasses anything from an attempt to sexually assault somebody. So for example, it can be an adult such as a teacher for example, sending text messages to a student trying to solicit the student to engage in some type of sexual activity with the adult. At its base, that can be a sexual assault all the way up to and including any type of sexual misconduct towards a child, for example, would be sexual assault. So touching body parts and anything going up from there.

Robert Mansour:
All right, so now let's take it to the broader term sexual abuse. So what is sexual abuse? What does the law consider sexual abuse?

Jim Lewis:
Sure. And sexual abuse is basically encompassing the same thing as sexual assault, more or less. It's basically all the way from an adult in a position of power. For example, trying to solicit sexual activity from a child or engaging what's called, for example, grooming behavior, meaning giving a child gifts, for example, giving a child cards, writing letters to a child, text messaging a child in order to let the child think that this is normal and relax the child to the situation so then the adult can solicit them for increased inappropriate conduct.

Robert Mansour:
So sexual abuse, can it also be among adults? Because you've mentioned children so far, what about husband and wife or a girlfriend and boyfriend? Can there be sexual abuse there too?

Jim Lewis:
There can be sexual abuse between two adults as well. Absolutely. So for example, some of the cases that I handle in that regard might be somebody's at work and their boss essentially touches them improperly at work, for example. Or somebody gets pulled over by the police and a police officer while in uniform at a traffic stop grope somebody in some fashion or sexually assault somebody, that would be sexual abuse and sexual assault as well.

Robert Mansour:
Okay. So let's talk about types of cases you generally handle. If you took a sampling of the types of cases that you're currently involved in, what, just give us some rough idea of what they look like.

Jim Lewis:
Sure. I would say 60% of the cases or so that I handle are against public school districts. That would involve children being sexually assaulted by, for example, it could be an employee at the school who works in the cafeteria. It could be a teacher, could be a school principal, anything along those lines. And then I have other cases where I represent children who were put into foster care, for example, at an institution and they were abused at a foster care facility-

Robert Mansour:
Oh, dear.

Jim Lewis:
For example. And then I also represent children that were put into, or they were incarcerated for example as kids, put into facilities and then abused while they were incarcerated in a facility. That makes up right now a pretty substantial portion of the cases that I work on.

Robert Mansour:
In the cases where, let's focus on the kids and maybe even adults to some extent. How does the person even know that they are a victim in some of these cases? For example, if this has been normalized and the kid thinks, oh, this is just normal, do the kids... How does it all come to light? Is it a kid going home to their parents and saying, "This is kind of weird, this happened"? Or do they discover it years later when they kind of contemplate what they went through? How does this stuff come to light?

Jim Lewis:
That's an excellent question and it's one of the questions that we, I guess, or I guess one of the topics that we see on a daily basis is that frequently people that were sexually abused, especially as children or for example, by somebody in a position of power as an adult, they frequently don't even realize that they were sexually abused possibly for years, decades, even later could take 20 years, 30 years. I've represented people who were sexually abused as children who are now, for example, in their sixties. They didn't realize what happened to them for years and years and years.

And then sometimes what happens is something triggers a memory years later. So for example, somebody's watching the news on TV and they see a person that they used to see on a daily basis at a youth organization on the news being arrested for abusing maybe dozens of people, for example. And then they go, wow, I remember that guy did this to me. Oh my gosh, I was abused too. So I've had that exact scenario happen many, many times where something like that, there's usually some kind of event that somebody realizes all of a sudden it's almost like an epiphany sometimes that wow, I guess I was abused as well. So that's very, very common for it to take years to realize that you were abused.

Robert Mansour:
And in some cases, I suppose in a child's case, the parent might discover something abnormal or something is wrong, something is happening?

Jim Lewis:
That happens. For example, a child can go home from school and just be upset. For example, they're in their room crying and a parent goes, what happened? The child's hesitant usually to talk about what happened. And sometimes, the parent continues to ask questions and all of a sudden they say, "Well, my teacher did this weird thing to me at school today and I didn't want to tell anybody," because either they're embarrassed or they're ashamed. That can happen also. And then when the child disclosed that to the parent, frequently that's reported to the school or the entity where the abuser works and then frequently it goes to law enforcement for an investigation.

Robert Mansour:
See, that leads to my next question here, which is what role does the law enforcement community, what role do the police or investigators have in cases like this? What role do they play?

Jim Lewis:
It's a really important role. It's critical in most cases. Now, just because a case wasn't investigated by law enforcement, it doesn't mean someone's not going to win that civil case later on down the road. However, when there is an investigation by law enforcement, it's hugely important and hugely helpful in most civil cases because the law enforcement officer frequently goes to wherever the abuse happened, interviews people at the time, gets their recorded statements, documents it in a police report.

And then therefore, we have a log essentially of the officer's investigation frequently where it contains adults that knew potentially about the abuse who were interviewed. Other potential survivors of abuse from the same perpetrator, for example, can be documented. And it sometimes gives you a roadmap of where to go in a civil case when you file a civil case. So, it's hugely important.

Robert Mansour:
It's interesting you mentioned a civil case, but there would be perhaps a criminal component to this as well. Can you talk about the difference between the civil part and the criminal part?

Jim Lewis:
Sure, and that's a really key important point that comes up all the time. The difference in a civil versus criminal case in this context is that the criminal case is we can't do anything from my standpoint for a criminal case to happen other than talk to our clients and suggest that they go forward and talk to law enforcement. But law enforcement takes the ball. They do a full workup typically, investigated. And then they either recommend to the district attorney's office that charges should be filed or they basically close their case and may not recommend that charges be filed to the district attorney's office.

And that's not uncommon either that charges are not filed, it doesn't mean you do not have a civil case or you may not... It doesn't mean you won't win your civil case if there's no criminal case, but it's hugely helpful if there is a criminal case. So with regard to the criminal case, sometimes there's no criminal case filed because the burden of proof is so high in a criminal case. The burden of proof is much lower in a civil case, like the cases that I handle and the differences in a criminal case, it has to be beyond a reasonable doubt as the standard of proof, which is really, really, really high.

And in the civil case, it's basically 51% of the evidence has to prove your case in order for you to win. So there's a different standard, so to speak, of what the evidence has to prove in a civil case versus a criminal case. And that's why even if there's no criminal case filed, you can still win your civil case potentially.

Robert Mansour:
When you get a call from somebody who suspects that they've been a victim, especially maybe a parent calling on behalf of a child or something like that, do you find that they are very hesitant to even call you and to proceed with this? In other words, they are worried about what the road ahead might look like and what do you tell folks about that? Or is there much to tell them at all to, I guess the word I'm looking, assure them that things are going to be okay? What kind of hesitancy do you see when it comes to victims?

Jim Lewis:
Yeah, that is a very good question and very on point. Many, many people, or I could even say probably most people that end up coming forward with a case like this, they are hesitant to come forward. And it's not uncommon. It's actually very common for that to be the case. Sometimes when somebody calls our office, they've never told anybody on the planet about what happened to them 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago potentially.

And so we talk to them and tell them, give them an overview of the process. And what I typically tell people that I talk to is I can't guarantee you that this is going to result in, for example, the person who did this being put into prison or jail because of maybe the statute of limitations, which is the timeframe to do something by the law enforcement's already passed, for example.

But what I tell people is most of the time after the end of the day when a case like this is wrapped up, most people say that they feel empowered because they finally came forward and had their voice heard, brought the abuse to light and took a step towards the healing process for themselves. When frequently people who have been through something like this keep it bottled up inside for years or decades, and it helps them move forward with a healing process typically is what the end result is.

Robert Mansour:
Now we've talked a little bit about bad behavior in certain entities like schools and employers and things like that, or law enforcement who act inappropriately. What if it is just, excuse me, two adults, man and a woman dating or whatever, but the man, I mean, he doesn't work for a public entity. Let's say he acts inappropriately but the woman who was harmed, the victim wants to do something about it. But from a civil perspective, there isn't much to pursue because this guy may not have any assets, he may not have any money.

What limitations do you find or do you have to evaluate as a lawyer running a business? How do you advise a client like that who maybe the guilty party, if you will, the victimizer doesn't have the resources for her to be able to pursue a case against him?

Jim Lewis:
Yeah, that's an unfortunate reality frequently is that when you have, for example, as you've given two people in a relationship and one person sexually assaults the other person, for example. Often, and I would say most of the time if you file a civil lawsuit against such a person, they do not have any assets to recover for the most part. I mean there can be exceptions. For example, let's just say somebody owns a hotel that's a very famous hotel or something like that, it makes a lot of money or they're a celebrity or something like that.

Sometimes, there can be recovery against very high net worth individuals. But frequently, even if somebody owns a house for example, and they have a car that they be leased and their house has a mortgage against it, even though from outside appearances it seems like they have money, they typically don't have that much money and especially they don't have money that they can usually or voluntarily pay to settle a case like that. And then the unfortunate part is by the time you go through the litigation process, the cost gets so high that there's nothing left to really get any compensation.

So yeah, the thing that I always tell people in that situation is even if the incident happened years ago, if you're comfortable, you want to go report it to law enforcement and there's always the chance, depending on what happened and how old you were and how old the person was, for example. There's always a chance that a criminal case could be pursued at even a couple of years or a handful of years after the fact depending on the statute of limitations for the particular type of conduct.

Robert Mansour:
So this is a very, it's almost like you're feeding me the questions because my next question was going to be about the statute of limitations. And for people who might not know what that means, that is a timeframe within which you have to bring a claim or file a lawsuit. And if you don't file within that timeframe, you could be out of luck. So for example, in a car accident case, at least currently in California, it's a two-year window. So if the accident happens on this day, you got two years from that day to file a lawsuit or else you're basically barred from doing so. You mentioned things that are happening years or decades ago. So let's say somebody had that happen to them, should they just assume that, oh, it was years ago, there's really nothing for me to pursue or it is too late now, I shouldn't even bother.

Jim Lewis:
Yeah, no, you raised another good point there. In California, the statute of limitations as of today, so if something happened today, there is no statute of limitation if you are a child today and something happens. The date of that going into effect was January 1, 2024.

Prior to January 1, 2024, the statute of limitations that applies to most situations that are going to be brought in a civil case today is you have to be younger than 40 years of age to file a civil case in California for childhood sexual abuse. So if something happened when you were a child and you're now 39, you could still bring claim-

Robert Mansour:
Under 18. Under 18, what you mean?

Jim Lewis:
Correct. Exactly. Yeah, you have to be under 18. So if you were under 18 and you were abused, but you're 39 today, you could still file a timely case in California for childhood sexual abuse. For the adult side of things, for adult sexual assault cases, the statute of limitations generally is 10 years. There's some exceptions there, and one of those exceptions is if you are suing a public entity that is not a law enforcement entity. So if you're suing a public entity but it is not against a police officer or a correctional officer, generally speaking, the statute of limitations for adults still can be six months, meaning you have to file a government tort claim within six months of the date of the incident.

So if you're an adult and something happens, your timeframe, you want to really jump on looking into if you have a timely case, given the potential that you might have to file a tort claim within six months of the date of the incident. Now there are exceptions to that now too. And so against the public entity, if you're an adult, the statute of limitations can be anywhere between six months and 10 years depending on the circumstances.

Robert Mansour:
So it's best to get legal advice and act quickly rather than waiting and waiting until it could be too late.

Jim Lewis:
You definitely want to go talk to a lawyer as soon as possible given statutes of limitations. The other thing that I will say, there are even exceptions for if you are an adult and let's just say you're 41, there are certain exceptions where you still might be able to file a claim. It gets tougher to do it after you turn 40, but it's still possible.

Robert Mansour:
Okay. So let's say somebody comes to you, you decide to take the case, is their word good enough or have you found that their word is not enough and you need a lot more than that? In other words, what evidence do you need to help this person prove their case?

Jim Lewis:
That's an excellent question. So is it possible that somebody's word is enough? It's possible. However, typically when you're suing or when you filed a lawsuit under these types of circumstances, you typically need law enforcement documents. You need employee personnel files for the perpetrator, for example. You need witness statements, so you need the law enforcement documents, the police reports. Criminal case files, for example, if there was a criminal case, you get a copy of the criminal case file from the court, for example. You can get criminal case court transcripts sometimes.

All of these things are extremely useful because what you're really looking for there is, unlike a car accident case for example where it's car A rear ends car B, typically car A is going to be at fault. It's not usually that difficult to prove liability in certain circumstances, and it can be, but the difference in these cases is there's usually no smoking gun. You need a lot of circumstantial evidence, which means you need a lot of witnesses because what you have to prove is not only that the incident happened, that's the easier part because then it's a credibility issue between usually the person who was abused and the perpetrator.

But in order to recover against the entity who was usually the employer of the perpetrator or somebody who had some control of the perpetrator in that situation, you have to prove that the entity that oversaw the perpetrator knew or should have known that the perpetrator shouldn't have been either employed or shouldn't have been an independent contractor under certain circumstances.
So you have to prove all of that. And usually, there's no document that says we knew that this person was a bad person. So you're looking for who can we find that is going to be honest and talk about what they knew at the time and be able to say, "No, I saw this person do X, Y, and Z, and they should have been fired," for example, before or during this abuse. So that's what we're looking for.

Robert Mansour:
Maybe they hired an individual to work at their establishment and they didn't do a proper background check, for example, especially in a school setting.

Jim Lewis:
That's definitely something that can happen. What I see more so is that there were numerous complaints about somebody in a personnel file. For example, maybe it starts off as a sexual harassment complaint and then it escalates over time. And I've even had cases at a school situation where, for example, a superintendent's writing letters to the perpetrator saying, "This is the fourth time you molested children. You need to stop," for example.

And in order to get those documents, because the defendants are always trying to protect those documents from disclosure, every case that we handle like this has a lot of times where we have to go to the court and file what's called a motion to get an order releasing a lot of documents and compelling the defendants to give us those documents under court order because frequently they're not willing to give them up without a court order. So there's always this fight in every one of these cases to get documents and it's a challenge. That's the biggest challenge in these types of cases.

Robert Mansour:
Which again dovetails perfectly to my next question, which is aside from getting the appropriate documentation and the defense fighting you on that, and you always have to go to court to get the judge to order them to turn over such things. What are some of the other challenges that you find maybe two or three other challenges in these types of cases that make it difficult for somebody who is pursuing a case like this other than the documentation that you were talking about?

Jim Lewis:
Sure. A major one, especially if the case is 15, 20 years old for example, is finding people. Even if you get the right documents, you go to try to depose that person because just because you find a document doesn't mean you're going to be able to use it. You have to have somebody to talk about the things that are in the document and say, "Yeah, that's all true," or, "I wrote this document." And in certain cases, it's really difficult to find people who are still living that wrote certain documents, for example. And then you've got to think, well now if that person's no longer alive, who can I go and find who might be able to talk about that issue who's still alive?
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And the other thing that's really, really tough is identifying even the names of people who are around sometimes in cases that are a little bit older. So how do you even find out who the witnesses were? Your client may say, "Well, I was in sixth grade and now I'm 40." The case has been filed for a year and we're in the middle of the case trying to prove the case. And I say, "Okay, well who should we talk to?" And they go, "Well, there was a lot of kids around, but I don't know who they are." So for example, that can be very difficult to identify even the names of the people. And then once you find their names, if it's a common name like John Smith, you got to find something else out because there's so many John Smiths, it's really difficult to identify even that person, for example.

So those are really significant challenges that we face all the time. They're not insurmountable, and we're typically looking for a needle in a haystack type of situation where all we need is one or two people who corroborate what our client says and can say, "You know what? Yeah, I saw, this is what I saw. I saw the perpetrator around the client all the time, and I saw him put his hand on her shoulder all the time, and I saw him eat lunch with her all the time." Those are the types of things that we need people to testify about in a lot of situations, especially when there's an adult and a child involved.

Robert Mansour:
So those are some of the bigger challenges that you face. So what about other than the defense giving you a hard time to provide documents to you, what are some of the most common defenses that you see to these types of cases other than stonewalling you and not providing you with documents? What are some of these typical defenses that are raised?

Jim Lewis:
The most common defense, and it's a pretty good defense in some circumstances, is we as either the employer or the party that was overseeing the perpetrator, we had no idea that this guy ever would do something like this. He came to work every day, he put his head down, he did his job great. Everybody liked this guy. And so how are we supposed to know anything? What could we have done?

And fortunately, there is a really good response to that in the state of California, which is there's some case law that stands for the proposition that you can't just put your head down and not look around and say, "I didn't see what was going on, so I don't know anything." In California, there's some really good law that basically says if you have a certain kind of relationship and in California, it's a legal term called a special relationship. So for example, if you're a student at a school, for example, the school district is kind of acting like your parent according to the law. And therefore, they have to look around to protect a child. They can't just put their head in the sand and say, "We didn't see anything."

So the questioning to get around their defense frequently involves, or what we do is we basically position the case to say, okay, well, for example, what affirmative steps did you take to supervise the plaintiff, for example, the person that was harmed? And what specific steps did you undertake to supervise the perpetrator, for example? And frequently what you'll find is their policies and procedures and training about supervision were lacking. And then so you can prove the case that way even if nobody ever saw anything happen and it happened at school in a particular corner of the school, for example. You could still potentially prove your case.

Robert Mansour:
So before I let you go, and thank you for the time that you've spent with us today. I'm looking over my notes here to see if there's anything that we haven't really talked about, but it looks like we covered a lot of material. Is there anything that you think folks should know that we haven't talked about yet? Anything that, any two or three things that you really want the viewers or the people who are listening to this to know before we conclude the interview?

Jim Lewis:
Well, what I would just say is I think the law in the state of California has increasingly broadened to allow people who have been abused by someone in a position of power to come forward over time. So when I started doing these cases, for example, you frequently had to, even if you were a kid, when something happened to you, you had to file a claim within six months. Otherwise, your case was time-barred.

So the law has continually broadened since then. And what that recognizes is it is difficult for people to come forward. It's difficult for people to talk about these things, and people that handle these cases on a regular basis understand all of that. They understand that it's difficult to come forward. Well, some people feel shame and they shouldn't for coming forward, or some people feel shame because they're going to talk about something that they haven't wanted to deal with or couldn't deal with for years and years and years.

And so we understand that completely. We don't push people when they come forward. We try to empower people to speak their truth about what happened to them and how this has made them feel and how this has affected their life. And one of the things that is really something that tugs at me is that the harm that I see time and time again that these individuals have suffered because of the abuse, it's not uncommon for people to have been, for example, had struggles with alcohol, had struggles with maintaining jobs, and had struggles with keeping housed, for example.

Those are all things that we commonly see, and we understand that those situations usually come directly from what happened to them as children. So it's kind of one of the things that I find is my true calling as a lawyer is to handle these types of cases. And I really appreciate the opportunity to help people try to move past what happened to them as a kid and to get some compensation, some justice for what happened to them.

Robert Mansour:
So it's not just the original offense, it's the collateral damage from that offense that affect folks. So Jim, once again, everyone, this is Jim Lewis. He is one of my colleagues, one of my referral partners, and sexual abuse is one of the areas of practice that Jim does in addition to many other injury types of cases. You were about to say something, Jim?

Jim Lewis:
I was just going to say thanks a lot for talking to me today. I appreciate it.

Robert Mansour:
No, we appreciate your time and we're going to post this on the website and on the YouTube channel so that folks can learn. And if they need any help, they're free to contact my office and I will connect you with Jim to make sure that you get the help that you need. And I'm going to see if I can stop the recording now and if I have enough tech-savvy to do this, so let's see how it goes.
I'm going to push the button and let's see if this works.

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