After a 25-year fight for accountability, a former foster youth has been awarded $5.5 million to settle his case against the county that placed him with his adoptive father — a man who was once the chief pediatrician for foster kids in Silicon Valley.
Dozens of children in foster care and multiple boys who lived in Dr. Patrick Clyne’s home when he was a licensed foster parent have accused him of sexual abuse, and he has been the subject of criminal investigations dating back to 2001. To date, he denies wrongdoing and has not been charged with any crime related to the allegations.
The settlement agreement reached in November between Santa Clara County and Kyle R. is the first successful lawsuit filed against Clyne by one of his victims — but may not be the last. Two more lawsuits have recently been filed against Clyne, 64, in local courts, and other claimants are also preparing filings.
Kyle has said preparing his case took a tremendous toll on him.
“It is a very hard thing to stand up for yourself in my situation,” he said in a recent Instagram post. “But through perseverance and searching for some form of justice, I can sleep a little easier knowing I have made an impact against the evil that is out there.”
Identified as Kyle R. in court documents, the plaintiff’s case against Santa Clara County was filed in Superior Court in 2020. That was decades after the Northern California resident made repeated reports to authorities about the alleged abuse he suffered in Clyne’s home — telling police, a probation officer, his mother and a criminal grand jury. He is now in his late 30s.
Robert Zimmerman, a Sacramento attorney representing Clyne in the case, did not respond to a request for comment on the settlement, the broad terms of which were confirmed by Kyle’s lawyer, Wyatt Vespermann.
Santa Clara County representatives also did not respond. But court documents show they are planning to pursue a separate civil action against Clyne, their former employee who was chief pediatrician for children in a local shelter and the county’s foster care system. They intend to establish that he “was the legal cause of any injuries and damages sustained by” Kyle R.
“It is a very hard thing to stand up for yourself in my situation. But through perseverance and searching for some form of justice, I can sleep a little easier knowing I have made an impact against the evil that is out there.”
— Kyle R., plaintiff
In a 2019 interview, Clyne said the 2001 allegations made by the foster children placed in his home were lies. The child patients who reported him, he said, must have misinterpreted his examinations because they mistrusted adults due to histories of abuse.
“My past has been investigated a lot, and there hasn’t been a time that a D.A. felt there was enough evidence to sustain a charge,” Clyne said.
More legal trouble ahead
Kyle’s multimillion-dollar award is not the end of efforts to hold Clyne accountable.
In December, two additional former Santa Clara County foster youth filed sexual abuse lawsuits against him. Their lawyers work for the Beverly Hills law firm Slater Slater Schulman LLP, which is representing more than 3,500 plaintiffs in a $4 billion settlement with Los Angeles County. That case centers on allegations of decades of sexual abuse and assault inside local juvenile detention facilities and foster care shelters.
Court records show Clyne was served with the new complaints, filed on behalf of former foster youth, identified as John Roe I.B. and John Roe L.G. The abuse is alleged to have occurred during routine health exams at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and Valley Health Center between 1998 and 2008.
They claim Clyne groomed the children, fondled their genitals under their clothes and without gloves and masturbated in front of them, according to allegations laid out in court documents.
The lawsuits name Clyne, Santa Clara County and numerous county employees as defendants.
“The Plaintiffs have alleged in court documents that the County of Santa Clara not only failed to protect them from a predator they knew was dangerous, but actively concealed reports of abuse,” attorney Simona Danesh said in an emailed statement.
Attorney Vespermann said he is also preparing a new round of lawsuits against Clyne and Santa Clara County on behalf of several other alleged victims.
A long journey for accountability
Kyle was placed in Clyne’s South Bay home in 1995 after being removed from his mother. A fourth grader at the time, he was one of several boys who lived with Clyne — a rare foster care doctor who also took in children from the system, as a single, wheelchair-bound foster parent. Clyne was partially paralyzed years earlier in a rock-climbing accident, according to news reports.
The sexual abuse Kyle said went on in his foster father’s home resulted in “post-traumatic stress disorder, significant shame and guilt, low self-esteem, lack of self-worth, lack of trust, anxiety, depression, lack of intimacy in close relationships, nightmares, and hyper-vigilance,” court documents state.
“There were so many times when the system failed Kyle, and this is now the first time that the system has recognized that his harm was real. It’s a great settlement, but I think the validation for Kyle is where the real win was in this case.”
— Wyatt Vespermann, attorney
Last year’s settlement is the first formal acknowledgement he’s received, his attorney said. A state law that took effect in 2020 helped his case proceed. The California Child Victims Act expanded the statute of limitations for childhood sex abuse crimes, allowing victims to file suit as adults until age 40 in most cases.
“There were so many times when the system failed Kyle, and this is now the first time that the system has recognized that his harm was real,” Vespermann said. “It’s a great settlement, but I think the validation for Kyle is where the real win was in this case.”
Clyne has faced multiple sexual abuse accusations for the past 25 years. He has been fired from his job, had his foster care license pulled, and last year was stripped of his medical license by the Medical Board of California, following a rare accusation by the state Attorney General’s Office.
As early as 2001, Santa Clara County social workers, parents, therapists, and staff at two residential group homes alleged that children in his care had been abused, court documents show.
The next year, three boys placed in Clyne’s home as foster children, including Kyle, gave personal accounts of abuse during the grand jury hearings that did not return an indictment; Clyne continued to serve as chief pediatrician at the Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and a local children’s shelter.
Abuse allegations surfaced yet again beginning in 2009, when at least 10 children ages 8 through 11 told law enforcement officers that Clyne sexually abused them during routine medical examinations, records show.
In 2011, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office notified defense attorneys there was “substantial evidence” that the longtime expert witness in child abuse cases had committed “multiple crimes of moral turpitude, specifically sexual assaults.” Santa Clara County fired Clyne the same year, and in 2014, the California Department of Social Services prohibited Clyne from ever serving as a foster parent again, and barred him from working with children or adults in state-licensed facilities.
All the while, Clyne retained his medical license and opened up a private practice serving a largely immigrant community in a rural part of Santa Cruz County. Reports of sex abuse followed him there as well. A parent’s complaint about inappropriate touching during a medical exam resulted in a joint investigation by the Medical Board of California and the Watsonville Police Department.
In an interview, Clyne denied the most recent accusations leveled against him in Watsonville. “I’ve never done anything in a medical examination that brought me sexual gratification or should be interpreted as a sexual assault,” he said.
In 2021, California Attorney General Rob Bonta charged Clyne with “unprofessional acts” and “gross negligence” during medical examinations of six patients. As a result, last year Clyne surrendered his medical license.
