California Senate OKs Giving Victims of USC Gynecologist More Time to Sue

The California Senate has passed a bill aimed at giving alleged sexual assault victims at the University of Southern California more time to file lawsuits.

The Senate voted 38-0 Wednesday to approve an Assembly bill giving some who fall outside the current window an additional year to sue.

The current deadline is 10 years from the last attack or three years from the discovery of an injury.

The bill, which now goes back to the Assembly, is a response to allegations by hundreds of women that former USC gynecologist Dr. George Tyndall sexually assaulted them during examinations. read more »

Rape, assault allegations mount against Lyft in what new suit calls 'sexual predator crisis'

The ride-hailing company Lyft is mishandling what amounts to a “sexual predator crisis” involving its drivers, a new lawsuit alleges, including failing to use its own technology to protect passengers and inadequately responding to reports of sexual abuse. 

The case was filed Wednesday on behalf of 14 women who say they were sexually assaulted by their drivers in 2018 and 2019. Five say they were raped, including one woman who is blind.

Only one of the 14 women whose stories underpin the claim says she was told by the company that her driver was removed from the app. Others have worried their drivers may have kept contracting with Lyft even after the women reported them to the company or the police.

Gladys Arce, 40, a mother of four, told USA TODAY she was kidnapped for hours by a driver who teetered between professions of love and threats of violence before raping her. Months after she filed a police report, she says, the investigator on her criminal case told her the man was still driving for Lyft.  read more »

Theodore McCarrick Still Won’t Confess

Last fall, God brought to Victoria an unexpected visitor: Theodore McCarrick, once the most powerful Catholic priest in America. From 2001–06, at the height of his career, McCarrick served as the archbishop of Washington, D.C. He stepped down at the standard bishop retirement age of 75 but remained a prolific fundraiser and jet-setting Vatican macher. And McCarrick wasn’t just influential—he was famous. He was the priest whom Meet the Press called to discuss the abuse crisis, and he participated in the funerals of William Rehnquist, Beau Biden, Ted Kennedy, and Tim Russert.

In the summer of 2018, McCarrick also suddenly became the country’s most well-known accused perpetrator of clerical sexual abuse. In June of that year, the Vatican abruptly removed him from public ministry, citing a credible accusation of sexual misconduct against a teenage altar boy in the 1970s.

The accounts of McCarrick’s abuse span decades. In addition to that first unnamed accuser—whose lawyer told the New York Times that McCarrick, measuring the victim for a special cassock for his duties as an altar boy, unzipped his pants and assaulted him—his accusers eventually included three men who said they were abused as minors, including James Grein, the first child McCarrick baptized in his career as a priest. Grein has said McCarrick’s abuse began in the 1960s, when Grein was 11. Other men said McCarrick harassed and abused them when they were young adult seminary students and he was a powerful church leader. Then-Bishop McCarrick owned a small beach house in Sea Girt, New Jersey, purchased in 1984 by the Metuchen Diocese at his request; accusers say he would invite small groups of seminarians there and instruct his favorite to share his bed. read more »

Placido Domingo accused by 11 more women of harassment

One woman claims Spanish opera singer groped her so hard she cried out in pain

Eleven more women have come forward to accuse the opera star Placido Domingo of sexual harassment, including one who alleges he groped her so hard she cried out in pain.

The new allegations come three weeks after the Associated Press reported that eight singers and a dancer had told it that they had been sexually harassed by the Spanish tenor in incidents that spanned three decades from the late 1980s. read more »