City to Pay Police Explorer $50,000 in Sex and Hazing Case

By Jorge Casuso

The City of Santa Monica has agreed to pay $50,000 to a former Santa Monica Police Explorer Scout who claimed he was sexually assaulted and verbally abused by other scouts during a police-chaperoned cross country trip last year.

Attorneys for both parties discussed the case - which the City Council voted to settle on Tuesday -- despite a confidentially agreement that prohibited them from discussing the terms of the settlement.

Deputy City Attorney Jeanete Schachtner agreed to discuss the case, she said, after attorneys for the plaintiff "violated their own request and spoke."

Schachtner said most of the allegations were either exaggerated or false and that the city chose to settle the case in order to avoid a long and costly court trial.

"There wasn't any sexual assault," Schachtner said. "The plaintiff never complained of anyone groping him. What occurred was juvenile hazing. Things like throwing him in the shower. We deny those other things happened.

"We felt that the case was defensible and that if we ultimately took the case to trial, we would prevail," she said. "But we felt it would be a very costly case and that we had the opportunity to settle it early."

The boy's attorney, Paul Opel, who said he didn't recall who requested the confidentiality agreement, said the plaintiff had agreed to a settlement in order to avoid "opening new wounds."

"We have a client who doesn't want to have his name out continually in the news and (the City) didn't want him to go on the talk show circuit," Opel said. "The one thing about this kid is he wanted it behind him. It was daunting. It was opening new wounds to continue forward."

Opel has said that the terms of the settlement will require a shift in attitude among the police officers who supervise the scouts, but he said he could not go into any details of the settlement.

The suit alleged that Police Explorer Scouts had grabbed the boys genitals, stripped and beat him and called him racial names during a trip to the National Police Explorers' Conference in Washington D.C. in August 1998.

Supervising officers told the scouts to "tone it down" when they caught them groping the plaintiff, the suit claimed, but did nothing to stop the abuse, which continued in Orlando, Chicago, Miami, Dallas and Ft. Worth.

The suit against nine scouts, four officers, the city, the police department and police chief James T. Butts Jr. was filed in civil court in June.