Business

Food truck rip-off? Supplier denies claims he exploited 'campesinos'

Published

2 years ago

February 23, 2024

Food truck rip-off? Supplier denies claims he exploited 'campesinos'

Guitars flutter, an accordion wheezes and a singer unwinds the triumphant tale of Fernando Ochoa Jauregui, a Modesto-area builder of food trucks and trailers.

“He still parties just because he feels like it,” the lyrics go. “But what he enjoys the most is partying with a banda at festivals in his town with a beautiful lady by his side.”

In a video accompanying the Spanish-language corrido, images flash of Ochoa beaming in front of shiny cars and atop jet skis. In some, he wears hats with the logo of his company: 8A Food Trucks. It ends with footage of stacks of cash and a money-counting machine.

The narrative ballad, titled “El del 8A” on YouTube, gives the impression that Ochoa is a kingpin at the helm of a burgeoning empire — one who “gives thanks to his father for making him a good kid.”

But unhappy 8A Food Trucks customers across California — from Sacramento to Salinas and San Bernardino — tell their own stories. They describe toiling as cooks, custodians and construction workers, saving for years to get a chance at starting their own business, only to have their dreams dashed. In a rough and tumble industry, largely secluded in poor, immigrant neighborhoods and farming communities, they allege Ochoa stands out for his callousness.

In lawsuits and interviews, former clients accused Ochoa and his company of not delivering trucks or trailers they ordered and refusing to return their partial or full payments. Others alleged that they received vehicles so poorly built that they couldn’t be used. And some have accused Ochoa of taking back trailers they’d purchased from him.

All told, 15 alleged victims claimed more than $475,000 in losses, according to a Times analysis.

In an interview, Ochoa, 28, disputed several of the allegations and acknowledged some mistakes, chalking them up in part to his inexperience in business, which he said led to delays in completing projects for customers. “I’m trying to deal with this scandal so I can make my business better again — I had a real company,” he said. “I’m not a business expert. I just know how to build trucks.”

Ochoa has become a symbol in Spanish media of the perils that lurk in the mobile food industry. In a 2023 report on him, a Univision news anchor warned those entering the business to exercise extreme caution. The controversy comes at a fraught moment for vendors in Southern California. Several in the L.A. area were robbed by gunmen last summer in brazen attacks that highlight the risks of selling food on Southland streets.

Alejandro Gonzalez was in a dispute over payment for a trailer when an old Toyota Camry pulled up to the drive-through window of Mi Casita Purepecha, his San Bernardino restaurant, on Feb. 1.

“Are you Alejandro?” the front-seat passenger asked Gonzalez, who was standing at the window.

The restaurateur said he was — and the man pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.

In the confusion of the moment, Gonzalez said, he turned to help customers inside the Mexican restaurant and the Camry sped away. Gonzalez, 44, didn’t recognize the men. But he said he fears that they are connected to Ochoa. Asked about the incident, Ochoa said he did not send armed men to Mi Casita Purepecha.

Gonzalez and his wife, Paulina Quintal, had contacted 8A Food Trucks in early January about building them two trailers so they could start a mobile food business. Ochoa delivered a trailer to their home two weeks later. Gonzalez said that he and his wife paid for it in full, and gave the builder a check for the down payment on a second one.

San Bernardino resident Alejandro Gonzalez said that this mobile food trailer, which he purchased from 8A Food Trucks, was stolen from his driveway in January.

(Alejandro Gonzalez)

Soon, however, men working for Ochoa appeared at Mi Casita Purepecha to dispute Gonzalez’s ownership of the trailer he’d bought days earlier, he said. Then, after the couple’s check for the second trailer didn’t clear, a third party passed along what Gonzalez said was a threatening voicemail from Ochoa.

On Jan. 21, Gonzalez said he returned from an errand to find his trailer had been stolen from his driveway. Seeking answers, he said he traveled to 8A Food Trucks’ headquarters in Ceres, Calif., but found the site deserted. The next day, Gonzalez said, the men with the gun visited him.

Gonzalez filed reports with the San Bernardino Police Department over the theft and the run-in at his restaurant. Regarding Ochoa, Gonzalez said, “I don’t know how he sleeps.”

Ochoa denied stealing the trailer from Gonzalez and Quintal’s home — “I would never do that,” he said — and alleged that they had not fully paid for it, saying that the check that bounced was meant to go toward the money they owed on it. Ochoa said he had sent two people to Mi Casita Purepecha to address those matters — and not to intimidate the couple.

“None of my people are armed,” he said. “We are businessmen; we dedicate ourselves to working and building trailers.”

Though the dollar amounts in most of the cases involving Ochoa are not large, for fledgling operators trying to break into the mobile food industry — many of them working-class immigrants — it’s enough to sidetrack their business dreams. And their predicaments highlight the vulnerability of California’s food industry workers, many of whom lack a financial safety net or the time and experience required to navigate the legal system. Some are undocumented and fear speaking to authorities.

“There were nights that we would cry, my husband and I,” said Adriana Nicanor, a San Joaquin resident. She and her husband filed a lawsuit against Ochoa and 8A Food Trucks last year that asserted he never delivered a trailer and claimed he refused to return their $20,000 deposit. They secured a default judgment, court records show, but have been unable to collect on it.

“It’s very frustrating,” Nicanor said. “My brother lent me that money. There were times we would struggle. Who asks for this?”

For many of Ochoa’s clients, making a down payment on a truck or trailer — both of which typically include kitchens — was an important first step in fulfilling a long-held entrepreneurial ambition. Some said that the alleged losses were especially painful because they came at the hands of one of their own: a Mexican immigrant who lived in the Central Valley and previously worked at an industrial shop before founding 8A Food Trucks in 2019.

He’s taking advantage of “the campesinos — the farmworkers,” said activist Alicia Espinoza, a Moreno Valley resident who has helped organize some of Ochoa’s accusers. “My dad, when he came to this country, he was a strawberry picker. It just hurts me that this guy could take advantage of people like him.”

Ochoa said he has many happy customers and has gone out of his way to help them achieve their aspirations, noting, for example, that he has sometimes accepted payment in installments. “Not many businesses do that,” he said. “You know, we’re not a bank.” As for the Nicanors, Ochoa denied that he failed to meet an agreed-upon deadline for delivery, and said he plans to pay them back.

Mi Casita Purepecha owner Alejandro Gonzalez said a car pulled up to the restaurant’s drive-through window and a passenger pulled a gun on him Feb. 1.

(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Several of those making allegations against Ochoa reside in Stanislaus County, an agricultural hub whose biggest city is Modesto. Wendell Emerson, a deputy district attorney for the county, confirmed that his office is conducting “an active criminal investigation” of Ochoa. He declined to comment further.

After the incident at Mi Casita Purepecha, Gonzalez closed the restaurant and left San Bernardino, relocating his family — he and his wife have three children — to a place they feel safe.

“I don’t know how long it is going to be,” Gonzalez said. “I feel like I lost everything.”

Lawsuits reveal a pattern

Ochoa is an entrepreneur of the internet age.

Food industry workers who’ve done business with the Colima, Mexico, native said that they found him via social media, where his posts depict a professional at the helm of a prosperous company.

The Instagram account for 8A Food Trucks includes several images of gleaming vehicles, their stainless steel kitchens spotless under bright lights. The “8A” in the company’s name is a play on words: pronounced in Spanish, it sounds like “Ochoa.”

A recently divorced father of two young girls, Ochoa has positioned 8A as a brand beyond the world of food services: There are Instagram pages for a hat company with 8A in the name, and another for a jet-ski rental service. It’s all part of a slick image that Ochoa has cultivated online, where it’s easy to find his self-aggrandizing corridos and photographs of him posing in front of his black Chevrolet Corvette.

“Now they see me living well,” the lyrics of one song go, “driving around in a Corvette, buzzing.”

Ochoa’s flaunting of his success has infuriated customers with whom he’s tussled.

For Norma Estevez and her husband, Sebastian Delgado, entering the mobile food trade was a step toward realizing an important goal: owning a business they could pass onto their three children. But Estevez and Delgado, both Mexican American, believe they lost more money than any of Ochoa’s other alleged victims.

The Salinas couple contacted Ochoa in 2021 to build a pair of trailers, selecting him, Estevez said, because he was Latino. “He didn’t have many clients,” she said, “and you could tell he has this aspiration to succeed.”

Estevez needed the trailers for a big opportunity: She had signed a contract with a produce company in nearby Watsonville to feed 70 field workers for 10 months beginning in February 2022. The owner had predicated the deal on her securing a trailer and having proper permits.

Ochoa told her that each trailer would cost $41,000, and promised to complete construction by the end of January, according to Estevez, who showed The Times invoices that documented the deal.

She and her husband sent Ochoa $60,000 over the course of several months, and as the deadline approached, they scheduled a day to pick up the trailers from 8A Food Trucks’ shop, Estevez said. But Ochoa canceled on them, she said, explaining that “his mother had arrived from Mexico and that he needed to pick her up from the airport.” They rescheduled, but he again put them off.

By then, Estevez’s contract with the Watsonville company had begun, and she scrambled to honor it. She was forced to buy meals for the workers, spending about $37 per person a day for the next week and a half — an all-in cost of nearly $26,000. Eventually, she rented a kitchen for $800 a week, and did so until the contract concluded, turning only a small profit on the deal.

And without the trailers, Estevez wasn’t able to renew the contract. “I felt embarrassed … like we had lost a great opportunity,” she said.

Ochoa acknowledged that he didn’t meet the agreed-upon deadline — and that the situation was similar to that of other clients who didn’t receive their vehicles on time. But, he said, others were willing to wait. “Norma’s situation was that if she didn’t get the trailers by a certain date, then she wasn’t going to need them,” he said.

Estevez and Delgado filed a lawsuit against Ochoa for breach of contract and other claims in July 2022. Months later, the parties agreed to a settlement that called for Ochoa to pay Estevez and Delgado about $70,000, including attorney’s fees, according to court documents. Estevez said that Ochoa has only paid $30,000, leaving her deeply disillusioned.

“We were like him, we came to this country to better our lives,” she said. “He knew our dream and ambitions — we told him how hard we worked for it.”

Gonzalez, meanwhile, isn’t the only person who alleged that a trailer purchased from Ochoa was later taken back by him.

Shelly Lopez and her husband, Jesus Avalos, said they paid Ochoa $37,000, and after nine months of delays — and their appearance in a Univision 19 Sacramento segment to discuss them — the Sacramento couple received a trailer in January 2023.

A man Shelly Lopez identified as Fernando Ochoa Jauregui came to her Sacramento home, she said, in February 2023 to take the trailer that 8A Food Trucks had recently sold her.

(Courtesy of Shelly Lopez)

After just a week, though, Ochoa told Lopez that he needed to take it back to his shop to make some adjustments, she said. A video that Lopez provided to The Times shows a man she identified as Ochoa connecting the trailer to the back of a pickup truck in February 2023.

“I didn’t want to let him take it,” Lopez said. “But my husband said, ‘It’s OK, he’ll make the repairs and bring it back to us.’”

It was the last time Lopez and Avalos saw the trailer.

“We had so many fights after that,” she said. “It would come up whenever we were driving and saw people running their businesses, selling food. I would blame him for it.”

Ochoa said that Lopez hadn’t paid for the trailer in full, and that she was making payments in installments. He said that he only retrieved the trailer after she told him it needed repairs. After seeing her negative public comments about him, Ochoa said that he decided to void the payment plan, and resolved to return her funds.

Lopez said she has not gotten the money back.

‘He’s been laughing at us’

In recent days, Ochoa has come under attack online by disgruntled customers — and his former mother-in-law.

Gisela Macias, 48, said that strangers began showing up at her Modesto home over the summer in search of Ochoa. They came, she said, to demand he pay them back for vehicles they’d purchased but never received. The visits were so frequent that she began recording interviews with some of the people to post on TikTok.

Ochoa said that the internet activism and local TV news stories have led to an exodus of clients, which has imperiled his ability to pay back customers like Estevez. He said that he can only make payments in $1,000 increments. “I know it’s not much,” he said, “but I have no business due to everything that’s being said about my company.”

He said he had to close 8A Food Trucks’ headquarters in Ceres because angry clients kept going there to confront him. But his braggadocio is still easy to find on the internet. A 2023 corrido about Ochoa titled “Por 8A Me Conocen” includes the boast that “business is steady and we’re never going to stop.”

“I fought hard and little by little grew the empire that I founded,” the singer trills.

It incenses Estevez. “He’s been laughing at us — the people who had dreams, who worked hard to save money to make those dreams a reality,” she said.

These days, the equipment that Estevez and her husband bought for their two trailers — ovens, cooking wares and more — is mothballed in their garage. It’s hard for her to enter the space without crying.

“That’s our dream right there, collecting dust,” she said.

Times researcher Scott Wilson and columnist Gustavo Arellano contributed to this report.

Business

Video: Uber Clears Violent Felons to Drive

Published

1 hour ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Video: Uber Clears Violent Felons to Drive

new video loaded: Uber Clears Violent Felons to Drive

Our reporter, Emily Steel, found that in many states, Uber’s guidelines allow people with serious criminal convictions to drive, as long as those convictions are more than seven years old. Some of those drivers have gone on to sexually assault or harass passengers.

By Emily Steel, Christina Shaman, Zach Caldwell, David Jouppi and Thomas Trudeau

December 22, 2025

Business

How private investors stand to profit from billions in L.A. County sex abuse settlements

Published

3 hours ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

How private investors stand to profit from billions in L.A. County sex abuse settlements

Walking out of a Skid Row market, Harold Cook, 42, decides to play a game.

How long after opening YouTube will it take for him to see an ad asking him to join the latest wave of sex abuse litigation against Los Angeles County?

“I can literally turn my phone on right now, something’s going to pop up,” said Cook, opening the app.

Within a few seconds, a message blares: “They thought you’d never speak up. They figured you was too young, too scared, too Black, too brown, too alone. … L.A. County already had to cough up $4 billion to settle these cases. So why not you?”

Since the historic April payout to resolve thousands of claims of sex abuse in county-run facilities, law firms have saturated L.A.’s airwaves and social media with campaigns seeking new clients. For months, government officials have quietly questioned who is financing the wall-to-wall marketing blitz.

The ad Cook heard was from Sheldon Law Group, one of several law firms active in sex abuse litigation in California that receive backing from private investors, according to loan notices and SEC filings. The investors, which often operate through Delaware companies, expect to profit from the payouts to resolve the cases.

Sheldon, based in Washington, D.C., has been one of the most prolific L.A. advertisers. The firm has already gathered roughly 2,500 potential clients, according to a list submitted to the county. The lawsuits started being filed this summer, raising the prospect of another costly settlement squeezed out of a government on the brink of a fiscal crisis.

“We act in the best interests of our clients, who are victims in every sense of the word and have suffered real and quite dreadful injuries,” a spokesperson for Sheldon Law Group said in a statement. “Without financial and legal support, these victims would be unable to hold the responsible parties, powerful corporate or governmental defendants, accountable.”

The financing deals have raised alarms among lawmakers, who say they want to know what portion of the billions poised to be diverted from government services to victims of horrific sex abuse will go to opaque private investors.

Kathryn Barger, a member of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors, said she was contacted by a litigation investor who sought to gauge whether sex abuse litigation could be a smart venture. “This is so predatory,” Barger told The Times.

(Juliana Yamada/Los Angeles Times)

“I’m getting calls from the East Coast asking me if people should invest in bankrupting L.A. County,” Supervisor Kathryn Barger said. “I understand people want to make money, but I feel like this is so predatory.”

Barger said an old college friend who invests in lawsuits reached out this spring attempting to gauge whether L.A. County sex abuse litigation could be a smart venture. Barger said the caller referred to the lawsuits as an “evergreen” investment.

“That means it keeps on giving,” she said. “There’s no end to it.”

The county has spent nearly $5 billion this year on sex abuse litigation, with the bulk of that total coming from the $4-billion deal this spring — the largest sex abuse settlement in U.S. history.

The April settlement is under investigation by the L.A. County district attorney office following Times reporting that found plaintiffs who said they were paid by recruiters to join the litigation, including some who said they filed fraudulent claims. All were represented by Downtown LA Law Group, which handled roughly 2,700 plaintiffs.

Downtown LA Law Group has denied all wrongdoing and said it “only wants justice for real victims.” The firm took out a bank loan in summer 2024, according to a financing statement, but a spokesperson said they had no investor financing.

Lawyers who take the private financing say it’s a win-win. Investors make money on high-interest rate loans while smaller law firms have the capital they need to take on deep-pocketed corporations and governments. If people were victimized by predators on the county’s payroll, they deserve to have a law firm that can afford to work for free until the case settles. Money for investors, they emphasize, comes out of their cut — not the clients’.

But critics say the flow of outside money incentivizes law firms to amass as many plaintiffs as possible for the wrong reasons — not to spread access to justice, but rather ensure hefty profit for themselves and their financial backers.

“The amount of money being generated by private equity in these situations — that’s absurd,” said former state lawmaker Lorena Gonzalez, who wrote the 2019 bill that opened the floodgate for older sex abuse claims to be filed. “Nobody should be getting wealthy off taxpayer dollars.”

For residents of L.A.’s poorest neighborhood, ads touting life-changing payouts have started to feel inescapable.

Waiting in line at a Skid Row food shelter, William Alexander, 27, said his YouTube streaming is punctuated by commercials featuring a robotic man he suspects is AI calling on him to sue the county over sex abuse.

Across the street, Shane Honey, 56, said nearly every commercial break on the news seems to feature someone asking if he was neglected at a juvenile hall.

In many of the ads, the same name pops up: Sheldon Law Group.

Austin Trapp says the ads recruiting plaintiffs for sex abuse cases in California are all over his Instagram feed.

Sheldon’s website lists no attorneys, but claims the firm is the “architect” behind “some of the largest litigations on Earth.” They list their headquarters online at a D.C. virtual office space, though the owners on their most recent business filing list their own addresses in New York. The firm’s name appears on websites hunting for people suffering from video game addiction, exposure to toxins from 9/11, and toe implant failure.

Sheldon Law Group was started by the founder of Legal Recovery Associates, a New York litigation funding company that uses money from investors including hedge funds to recruit large numbers of plaintiffs for “mass torts,” cases where many people are suing over the same problem, according to interviews with former advisers, court records and business filings.

Those clients are gathered for one of their affiliated law firms, including Sheldon Law Group, according to two people involved in past transactions.

Ron Lasorsa, a former Wall Street investment banker who said he advised Legal Recovery Associates on setting up the affiliate law firms, told The Times it was built to make investors “obscenely rich.”

“It’s extremely profitable for people who know what the hell they’re doing,” Lasorsa said.

The idea, he says, emerged from a pool cabana at a Las Vegas legal conference called Mass Torts Made Perfect in fall 2015.

Lasorsa had just amassed 14,000 clients for personal injury lawsuits in one year using methods that, he now says, were legally dubious. A favorite at the time: using call centers in India that had access to Americans’ hospital records and phoning the patients to see if they were feeling litigious.

Near the pool at a Vegas hotel, Lasorsa said Howard Berger, a former hedge fund manager barred by the SEC from working as a broker, asked if he could turbocharge the caseload of Legal Recovery Associates, where he worked as a consultant.

Lasorsa said he soon teamed up with the founders of LRA — Gary Podell, a real estate developer, and Greg Goldberg, a former investment manager — to create “shell” law firms based in Washington. The nation’s capital is one of the few places where non-lawyers can own a law firm, profiting directly from case proceeds.

Goldberg, who is not licensed to practice law in D.C., would become a partner in at least six D.C. law firms including Sheldon Law Group by 2017, according to a contract between Legal Recovery Associates and a hedge fund that financed the firms’ cases.

Sheldon, which said it was responding on behalf of Podell, said in a statement that all their partners are lawyers, though declined to name them. Goldberg did not respond to a repeated request for comment.

The Sheldon spokesperson said Legal Recovery Associates is a separate entity that engages in its “own business and legal activities.”

Investors typically make money on litigation by providing law firms with loans, which experts say carry interest rates as high as 30%, representing the risk involved. If the case goes south, investors get nothing. If it settles, they make it all back — and then some.

Lasorsa said he helped the company gather 20,000 claims using the same Indian call centers before a bitter 2019 split. He later accused the owners of unethical behavior, which led to a half-million dollar settlement and a non-disparagement agreement that he said he decided to breach, leading to a roughly $600,000 penalty he has yet to pay, according to a court judgment.

Lasorsa was also ordered to delete any disparaging statements he’d made, according to the judgment.

D.C. law firms with non-lawyers as partners must have the “sole purpose” of providing “legal services,” according to the district’s bar. Some attorneys have argued no such service was provided by the firms associated with Legal Recovery Associates.

Troy Brenes, an Orange County attorney who co-counseled with one of the firms over flawed medical devices, accused the company of operating a “sham law firm” as part of a 2022 court battle over fees.

“The sole purpose … appears to have been to allow non-lawyers to market for product liability cases and then refer those cases to legitimate law firms in exchange for a portion of the attorney fees without making any effort to comply with the D.C. ethics rules,” Brenes wrote.

A spokesperson for Sheldon and LRA noted in a statement that “no court or arbitration panel has ever concluded” that its business structure violates the law.

In the medical device cases, the affiliate firm, which was responsible for funding the marketing campaign, took 55% of recoverable attorney fees, according to an agreement between the two firms. The profit divide mirrors the 55/45 breakdown between Sheldon Law Group and James Harris Law, a two-person Seattle firm they have partnered with on the L.A. County sex abuse cases, according to a retainer agreement reviewed by The Times.

This summer, ads linking to a webpage with the name of James Harris appeared online, telling potential clients they could qualify in 30 seconds for up to $1 million. When a Times reporter entered a cell-phone number on one of the ads, a representative who said they worked for the firm’s intake department called dozens of times.

After The Times described these marketing efforts in a story, Harris emphasized in an email that he did not know about the ads or the persistent calls and said they were done by his “referring firm.” The landing page the ads led to was replaced with the name of Sheldon Law Group.

Harris said his firm and Sheldon, which he described as “functioning as a genuine and independent co counsel law firm,” have “been highly selective and have only prosecuted cases that we believe are legally and factually meritorious.”

“I continue to believe that lawyer advertising, when conducted ethically and without misleading claims, serves as a vital tool for raising public awareness about legal rights and available recourse, particularly for survivors of abuse seeking justice,” he said.

Over the last five years, experts say, the practice of funding big mass tort cases has boomed in the U.S.

Of the five main firms in L.A. County’s initial $4-billion sex abuse settlement, two took money from outside investors shortly before they began suing the county, according to public loan filings.

The loans to both Herman Law, a Florida-based firm that specializes in sex abuse cases, and Slater Slater Schuman, a New York-based personal injury firm, came from Delaware-registered companies. Deer Finance, a New York City litigation funding firm that connects investors with lawyers, is listed on business records for both companies.

The loan documents do not specify which of the firms’ cases were funded, but show each deal was finalized within months of the firms starting to sue L.A. County for sex abuse. Neither firm responded to questions about how the outside funding was used.

Slater, which received the loan in spring 2022, represents more L.A. County plaintiffs than any other firm, by far.

Slater’s caseload surged after the county signaled its plan to settle for $4 billion in October 2024. Several of the main attorneys on the case told The Times they stopped advertising at that point, reasoning that any new plaintiffs would now mean less money for the existing ones.

The next month, Slater Slater Schulman ran more than 700 radio ads in Los Angeles seeking juvenile detention abuse claims, according to X Ante, a company that tracks mass tort advertisements.

By this summer, the number of claims jumped from roughly 2,100 to 3,700, according to court records, catapulting Slater far beyond the caseload of any other firm.

Stacked bar chart showing how many plaintiffs were added by each firm before or after Oct. 2024.

This fall, another Delaware-registered company took out a lien on all of Slater’s attorney fees from the county cases, according to an Oct. 6 loan record. The law firm assisting with the transaction declined to comment.

“These are extraordinarily complex cases and litigating these cases effectively requires resources,” said an outside attorney representing Slater in a statement, responding to questions from The Times.

The firm, which also represents roughly 14,000 victims in the Boy Scouts sex abuse cases, was singled out by the judge overseeing the litigation this fall for “procedural and factual problems” among its plaintiffs. The firm was one of several called out by insurers in the litigation for using hedge fund money to “run up the claim number.”

The firm has said they’re working “tirelessly” to address the issues and justice for survivors is its top priority.

Many plaintiffs told The Times they were discouraged to see how much money stood to be made for others off their trauma.

April Mannani, 51, sued L.A. County after she said she was raped repeatedly as a teenager at MacLaren Children’s Center, a shelter now notorious for abuse. Mannani accepts that her lawyers are entitled to a cut for their work on the case, but said she was disheartened watching the numbers of cases suddenly skyrocket this year. With the district attorney investigating, a pall has been cast over the entire settlement.

“We’ve been made fools of and we were used for financial gain,” she said. “They all just see it as a money grab.”

That firm that represents her, Herman Law, has filed roughly 800 cases against L.A. County. Herman Law took out a loan in 2021 from a Delaware-registered company affiliated with Deer Finance, according to a loan notice. The firm said they use traditional bank loans for “overall operations.”

Stacked bar chart showing the number of plaintiffs by county and law firm.

Herman Law is the most prolific filer of county sex abuse cases outside of L.A. County since the state changed the statute of limitations.

Herman Law has filed about half of these roughly 800 sex abuse lawsuits that have been brought outside of L.A. County, according to data reviewed by The Times.

Herman Law has sued several tiny counties, where public officials say they’ve been inundated with advertisements on social media and TV looking for plaintiffs. Some counties say they threw out relevant records long ago and have no way to tell if the alleged victim was ever in local custody.

A judge fined Herman Law about $9,500 last month for failing to dismiss Kings County from a lawsuit despite presenting no evidence the county ever had custody of the victim, calling the claim “factually frivolous” and “objectively unreasonable.” An attorney for Herman Law said in a court filing the client believed she’d been in a foster home there, and the lack of records didn’t conclusively establish anything.

“There are not records. There’s nothing that exists,” said Jason Britt, the county administrative officer for Tulare County, which has been sued at least eight times by Herman Law. “Counties at some point are not gonna be able to operate because you’re essentially going to bankrupt them.”

The firm said its clients are always its top priority.

“No lender or financial relationship has ever influenced, directed or played any role in legal strategy, client decisions or case outcomes, including any matters involving the Los Angeles County,” the firm said. “Herman Law’s work is driven solely by our mission to advocate for survivors in their pursuit of justice and healing.”

Joseph Nicchitta, L.A. County’s acting chief executive officer, said he believed the region’s social safety net was now “an investment opportunity.” In an October letter to the State Bar, he called out the “explosive growth” of claims, arguing a handful of firms were “competing to bring as many cases as possible” to the detriment of their existing clients.

He estimated that attorney fees in the lawsuit would amount to more than $1 billion. “It begs reform,” he wrote.

Business

‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’ heats up the box office, grossing $88 million domestically

Published

15 hours ago

December 21, 2025

Press Room

The Na’vi won the battle of the box office this weekend, as “Avatar: Fire and Ash” hauled in a hefty $88 million in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend.

The third installment of the Disney-owned 20th Century Studios’ “Avatar” franchise brought in an estimated total of $345 million globally, with about $257 million of that coming from international audiences. The movie reportedly has a budget of at least $350 million.

Box office analysts had expected a big international response to the most recent film, particularly since its predecessor “Avatar: The Way of Water” had strong showings in markets like Germany, France and China.

In China, the film opened to an estimated $57.6 million, marking the second highest 2025 opening for a U.S. film in the country since Disney’s “Zootopia 2” a few weeks ago. (That film went on to gross more than $271.7 million in China on its way to a global box office total of $1.1 billion.)

The strong response in China is another sign that certain movies can still do well in the country, which was once seen as a key force multiplier for big blockbusters and animated family films but has in recent years cooled to American movies due to geopolitics and the rise of its domestic film industry.

Angel Studio’s animated biblical tale “David” came in second at the box office this weekend, with an estimated domestic gross of $22 million. Lionsgate thriller “The Housemaid,” Paramount Animation and Nickelodeon Movies’ “The Spongebob Movie: Search for Squarepants” and “Zootopia 2” rounded out the top five.

The weekend’s haul likely comes as a relief to theater owners, who have weathered a roller coaster year.

After a difficult first three months, the spring brought hits like “A Minecraft Movie” and “Sinners” before the summer ended mostly flat. A sleepy fall brought panic to the exhibition business until closer to the Thanksgiving holiday, when “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2” drew in audiences.