Breaking Barriers to Justice
The real defendants — and the real coverage — are institutional. And California has developed meaningful law in two specific contexts that deserve serious attention from any attorney working in this space.
Sobalvarro v. Vibra Health Care, (2026) 119 Cal.App.5th 748, goes further. There, a stroke patient who was paralyzed and unable to speak alleged sexual assault by a male nursing assistant. The jury found the nursing assistant not liable — the details of the assault were genuinely disputed — but unanimously found the hospital negligent for failing to offer her the option of female care, in violation of the Patient's Bill of Rights under California Code of Regulations, title 22, section 72527. The Court of Appeal reversed the trial court's grant of JNOV and reinstated the $1 million verdict. The institutional liability survived even where the direct assault claim did not. Together, these cases stand for a critical proposition: in facility-based assault cases, the institution's liability is established on its own terms — through what the facility knew, what it failed to do, and what its regulatory obligations required — independent of whether every factual detail of the assault is proven. What makes these two cases particularly powerful together is what they do to the defense's most predictable opening move. In virtually every care facility assault case, defense counsel will argue — at demurrer, at summary judgment, and everywhere in between — that the entity cannot be held liable for the sexual assault or battery because the employee's conduct fell outside the scope of employment. That is often correct. It is also beside the point . Samantha B. and Sobalvarro make clear that institutional liability in these cases does not rest on respondeat superior or vicarious liability for the assault itself. It rests on the institution's own independent conduct: what it knew, what it failed to investigate, what its regulations required, and what its policies failed to protect. The entity's immunity from vicarious liability for the act does not insulate it from liability for the conditions that made the act possible.
Care Facilities and Dependent Adults
When sexual assault occurs inside a care facility — a psychiatric hospital, rehabilitation center, skilled nursing facility, or group home — California's Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act (EADACPA), Welfare and Institutions Code section 15600 et seq., provides an independent statutory cause of action that many civil litigators underuse. Sexual assault by a facility employee constitutes physical abuse under the Act. Where the plaintiff proves by clear and convincing evidence that the facility acted with recklessness, oppression, fraud, or malice, the EADACPA unlocks attorney's fees and costs— and MICRA's damages caps do not apply. Two recent cases illustrate the framework and, together, define what institutional liability looks like in this space. Samantha B. v. Aurora Vista Del Mar, LLC, (2022) 77 Cal.App.5th 85, involved former patients of an acute psychiatric hospital who were sexually abused by an employee. The court confirmed MICRA inapplicability and held that the hospital's failure to investigate or respond to misconduct reports constituted ratification of the abuse — enough, under the EADACPA's recklessness standard, to support the heightened remedies the Act provides. The holding matters because it establishes that institutional knowledge and institutional inaction are the building blocks of the recklessness finding, independent of proving every detail of the assault itself.
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Consumer Attorneys of California
FORUM July/August 2026
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