One Year Ago Today (November 24, 2020)…A 39-year-old woman is suing Los Angeles Unified, alleging she was repeatedly molested by a high school football coach beginning when she was 13 years old in the mid-1990s.
The woman is identified only as Jane Doe in the Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that also names the ex-coach, Michael Edmond, as a defendant. The complaint filed Monday seeks unspecified damages and alleges sexual assault of a minor, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent hiring, supervision and retention.
An LAUSD representative said the district has not been served with the complaint and does not comment on pending litigation.
Doe was a student at Gompers Middle School when she met Edmond, a Locke High School football coach who immediately began conditioning her, according to the suit.
“Edmond’s grooming was calculated with one goal in mind: to get plaintiff to trust him so he could then sexually exploit, manipulate and abuse her,” the suit alleges.
The plaintiff alleges that Edmond regularly molested her from the summer of 1995 until November 1996. She alleges his brother lived with his sibling and was an LAUSD teacher, but did not alert authorities about what he allegedly knew about the abuses.
Edmond kissed and touched the teen in front of other students and coaches and abused her in a Locke High administrator’s office at least three times, according to the suit, which also alleges he sexually abused her in his van parked at Locke High at least eight times.
Doe alleges the LAUSD “engaged in a concerted effort to hide evidence relating to childhood sexual assault, abuse and harassment perpetrated by Edmond” against other minors before her.
Unrelated to Doe’s suit, Edmond, 56, was charged in September 2019 with seven counts of forcible lewd acts on a child under 14 and one count of committing a lewd act on a child under 14. The charges stem from the time he worked as a cheerleading coach at Athens Park in Los Angeles and allegedly engaged in lewd acts with girls between June 1 and Sept. 1, 2019, according to prosecutors, who said the children range in age from 9 to 12.