Irwin M. Zalkin

Jose Lopez was seven in 1986 when the Linda Vista Spanish Congregation in San Diego recommended Gonzalo Campos to his mother as a Bible study teacher. The evidence Zalkin presented for Lopez was that Campos had confessed to the congregation's elders in 1982 that he had molested a child, and that the elders neither reported him to law enforcement nor warned parents and went on recommending him. Superior Court Judge Joan M. Lewis ordered Watchtower to produce the responses to the 1997 letter; the Court of Appeal summarily denied its writ petitions on March 27, 2014, and the California Supreme Court declined to take the case. Watchtower still did not produce them. Judge Lewis struck its answer, and in October 2014 Zalkin proved Lopez's case over six days to an empty defense table. The Court of Appeal upheld the order to produce the documents on April 14, 2016, and in January 2018 Watchtower settled with Lopez without producing them.

Osbaldo Padron sued Watchtower and the Playa Pacifica Spanish Congregation, alleging that Campos had molested him in 1994 or 1995, when he was seven or eight, after Watchtower had learned of the molestations of 1982 and 1986. Judge Richard E. L. Strauss ordered the 1997 responses produced and, when Watchtower refused, imposed a sanction of $4,000 a day that began running in April 2016; on November 9, 2017 the Court of Appeal affirmed, writing that "Watchtower has abused the discovery process and cavalierly refuses to acknowledge court authority." More than $2 million had accrued by then, and the case settled in 2018. In Riverside County, J.W., born in 1997, was molested on July 15, 2006, at a slumber party at the home of Gilbert Simental, an elder. Judge Thomas A. Peterson ordered the 1997 responses produced on February 11 and May 13, 2014, and after nearly a year without them Judge Raquel A. Marquez struck Watchtower's answer on February 2, 2015 and entered a default judgment of $4,016,152.39. Justice Douglas P. Miller's opinion for the Court of Appeal affirmed it on December 10, 2018, holding that Simental's position as an elder "was a necessary antecedent of the molestation" and that "lesser sanctions were insufficient," and the Supreme Court of the United States denied Watchtower's petition for certiorari on October 7, 2019.

His firm had filed more than thirty cases against Watchtower and local congregations, in states including California, Oregon, Connecticut, New Mexico, Washington and Ohio, by February 8 and 9, 2020, when Oxygen broadcast The Witnesses, a two-night investigation produced with the Center for Investigative Reporting and its reporter Trey Bundy, with Zalkin among those interviewed.

One Hundred Forty-Four Claims

The Roman Catholic Bishop of San Diego filed for Chapter 11 late on February 27, 2007, hours before the first of its clergy-abuse trials was to begin. In the mediation that followed, United States Magistrate Judge Leo S. Papas appointed Zalkin mediation liaison counsel and lead negotiator for the survivors: 144 people whose claims reached back across decades, through different parishes, schools and assignments and different records, each of which had to keep its own place in the allocation. Bankruptcy Judge Louise DeCarl Adler warned that she would dismiss the case if the diocese did not settle, and on September 7, 2007 it agreed to pay $198.1 million for all 144 claims; she dismissed the bankruptcy that fall.

The Diocese of Orange had settled first, in December 2004, paying $100 million to 87 survivors in proceedings before Judge Owen Lee Kwong, with Zalkin on the team representing them. In Los Angeles more than 500 suits had been filed against the archdiocese after the Legislature reopened such claims for 2003, and Zalkin was preparing to try a fourteen-plaintiff case as a lead trial lawyer when the archdiocese agreed, on the weekend before the first trial was to begin before Judge Haley Fromholz on July 16, 2007, to pay $660 million to 508 claimants. That settlement also ended the archdiocese's opposition to releasing its clergy personnel files, a release his firm pressed for; on January 17, 2013, Judge Emilie Elias ordered about 30,000 pages produced with the names of church officials unredacted.

Sixty Days

Steven McVeigh sued a school he had attended and a former teacher on December 26, 2003, alleging that the teacher had molested him between 1980 and 1982. The Legislature had revived such claims for one year, and the window closed on January 1, 2004. Because McVeigh was older than twenty-six, section 340.1 of the Code of Civil Procedure required a certificate from his attorney and one from a licensed mental health practitioner, and a third certificate from the attorney allowed those two to be filed within sixty days of the complaint. Judge Daniel J. Buckley of the Los Angeles County Superior Court read the statute to require that third certificate with the complaint, within the limitations period, sustained a demurrer and dismissed the case. Zalkin, with Kevin R. McLean, took the appeal on the sequence of the filings and the words of the statute, and on April 18, 2006, the Second District, Division Five, reversed in an opinion by Acting Presiding Justice Armstrong, joined by Justices Mosk and Kriegler: "The subdivision (h)(3) certificate may be filed with the (h)(1) and (h)(2) certificates." The decision returned McVeigh's claim to the trial court and kept the screening the Legislature wrote without adding a deadline it had not written.

Zalkin came to that appeal from trial work. He took a bachelor's degree in political science at UCLA in 1976 and his law degree in 1979 at California Western School of Law in San Diego, where he received the American Board of Trial Advocates' Trial Attorney's Award in moot court, and he was admitted in California the same year. He completed the National Institute for Trial Advocacy's program in 1981 and the Medi-Legal Institute at the University of California, Irvine, medical school in 1983, and took cases of brain and spinal-cord injury and amputation; one, a six-week jury trial for a woman left paraplegic by a fall from an unguarded pier, ended in an $8 million judgment. He is the founding partner of The Zalkin Law Firm in San Diego, is admitted in California, New York and the District of Columbia, in the Southern and Central Districts of California and before the Ninth Circuit, and has appeared pro hac vice in Utah, Indiana, Oregon and Colorado.

Two Hundred Ninety-One Parcels

In September 2019 the Diocese of San Diego transferred 291 parcels of real estate, with an assessed value of about $453 million, to separate corporations formed for its parishes; the Legislature's second revival window for childhood-abuse claims opened on January 1, 2020 and ran through 2022. By February 2023 nearly 400 people had sued the diocese, more than 100 of them represented by Zalkin, and that month he sued the bishop and every parish in the diocese, alleging that the transfers were fraudulent conveyances made to keep the property from survivors; the bishop's statement that the parishes had always held the property in trust was, he said, "absolute fiction." After nearly a year of mediation, the diocese filed for Chapter 11 a second time on June 17, 2024, with 457 lawsuits pending. Zalkin, who had negotiated the diocese's 2007 settlement, said he would keep working with the diocese and its insurer toward a settlement for the survivors in bankruptcy court: "The ball is very much in the Diocese and its insurance company's court."