Goldstein-Street, J. (2025, September 10). WA ordered to pay $42M for negligence in child sex abuse case • Washington State Standard. Washington State Standard. https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2025/09/10/wa-ordered-to-pay-42m-for-negligence-in-child-sex-abuse-case/
The blatant failure of state agencies to correctly protect vulnerable children exposes them to unchecked physical abuse, severe emotional abuse, devastating sexual abuse, lifelong psychological damage, all of which result in tremendous personal injury claims. In an article about institutional negligence written by Jake Goldstein-Street from the Washington Standard, a Spokane County jury ordered the state of Washington to pay $42 million to a woman the state failed to protect from her stepfather’s sexual abuse during the 1990s. Following the stepfather’s 1990 conviction for raping the foster child’s older sister, both the Department of Corrections (DOC) and Child Protective Services (now the Department of Children, Youth and Families) allowed him to remain in the foster child’s life despite his suspended sentence strictly banning unsupervised contact with children. Even after Hilton’s mother, who suffered from severe alcoholism and was assigned as the stepfather’s state-assigned chaperone, reported witnessing him molesting the former foster child in 1998, and despite the child herself revealing the abuse, CPS concluded the child faced “little or no risk” and refused to remove her from the home. After a month-long trial in late August 2025, the jury attributed 70% of the negligence to CPS and 30% to the DOC.