The
mixed verdict in the sexual abuse trial of Dr. James Heaps, 65,
who retired in 2018 after more than 30 years at UCLA, was
announced in a statement by the Los Angeles County District
Attorney's Office.
Sentencing was set for Nov. 17. A prosecutor said Heaps faces
more than two decades in state prison and must register as a sex
offender, according to the Los Angeles City News Service (CNS).
Judge Michael Carter declared a mistrial on the nine counts for
which jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict. The
D.A.'s office said it had yet to reach a decision on whether to
refile those counts.
Heaps, who has denied wrongdoing, was tried on a total of 21
counts stemming from accusations of sexual abuse against seven
women from 2009 to 2018.
The Los Angeles County Superior Court jury convicted him of
three counts of sexual battery by fraud and two counts of sexual
penetration of an unconscious person. He was found not guilty on
three counts of sexual battery by fraud, three counts of sexual
penetration of an unconscious person and one count of sexual
exploitation of a patient.
The trial came to a close months after UCLA reached back-to-back
agreements earlier this year to pay a total of $600 million to
settle two sex abuse civil lawsuits brought on behalf of more
than 500 former patients of Heaps.
A third civil case, a class-action suit in federal court, was
settled by the university for $73 million last year.
Those three settlements together fall short of the record $852
million that the University of Southern California, a private
institution, agreed to pay in a case involving more than 700
women who said they were sexually abused by an ex-USC
gynecologist, Dr. George Tyndall.
A separate $215 million settlement of a federal class-action
case stemming from Tyndall and a $50 million cluster of
individual state court settlements brought the entire USC payout
over the Tyndall scandal to $1.1 billion.
(By Steve Gorman; editing by Richard Pullin)
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