By Jorge Casuso

July 29, 2025 -- The number of sex abuse cases against the City has been rising after Santa Monica's cash-strapped government paid $230 million in settlements more than two years ago.

On Tuesday, the City Council will take up a round of 19 cases in closed session filed on behalf of some 170 alleged victims, said attorney Catherine Lerer, who represents most of the plaintiffs.

The cases have been filed since April 2023, when the City Council hoped it had closed a "sad chapter in Santa Monica history" after settling with a total of 229 plaintiffs.

Like the previous lawsuits, those the Council will take up on Tuesday claim the alleged victims were sexually abused as children by former City employee Eric Uller over two decades.

Lerer's firm, McGee Lerer & Associates, has seen its plaintiff's list grow from 19 in April of last year to 87 alleged victims represented in the cases the Council will take up.

The number of plaintiffs represented by other firms has also surged, from 20 plaintiffs represented by one firm, to 83 plaintiffs represented by six firms.

That number could slowly grow, Lerer said, since most of the victims are under the age of 40 and fall within the statute of limitations that applies to childhood sexual abuse victims.

The pending lawsuits echo allegations made in the first case filed in March 2019 on behalf of six alleged victims against the City and the Police Activities League (PAL) claiming the defendants failed to protect them as children from sexual abuse.

Uller, a City IT employee who worked in the Police Department, allegedly molested his young victims from the late 80s until possibly 2010, when he had access to hundreds of children as a PAL volunteer.

Uller killed himself in his Marina del Rey Apartment in November 2018, one week after pleading not guilty to three counts of lewd acts upon a child, two counts of oral copulation of a person under 18 and one count of continuous sexual abuse.

But his alleged victims have continued coming forward as awareness of the case builds, said Lerer, who has placed ads with Uller's picture seeking possible victims.

"I'm getting calls from people who come across something on Facebook or other sites" and realize they were not the only victims," Lerer said.

"I expect more will come forward, (only) not at this rate or frequency," Lerer said.

Lerer acknowledges that it will be more difficult to negotiate settlements with the City, which has been tapping into reserves to balance the annual budget and is in the midst of a voting rights lawsuit had cost $14 million as of last November.

"The City is taking the position that they don't have the money," Lerer said. "It's not going to be easy to settle these cases."

But dragging out the cases is also costing the City, which Lerer said has hired two outside firms with multiple attorneys who are working on the cases.

"They're spending a lot of money," she said. "I'm sure he City would say, 'We'd like to get this done.'"