A 16-year-old boy who was detained in a San Diego County juvenile hall more than a decade ago was sexually assaulted by two different probation officers on several occasions, a new lawsuit filed last week alleges.

Then, after his attorney filed a legal demand letter with the county last year that detailed the assaults, a county employee posted the entire letter online without redacting his name.

It remained on the county’s website for months, said Tracey Cowan, an attorney from Clarkson Law Firm whos representing the boy in the lawsuit.

“Honestly, I have seen some things that have made me so cynical. I have never seen anything like this,” Cowan said in an interview. “It’s such an insult on top of his preexisting injury.”

County spokesperson Michael Workman said the county doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

“However, the County respects the privacy rights of individuals and follows the legal requirements to protect those privacy rights, balanced by the public’s legally established right to certain information, including claims,” Workman wrote in an email.

The lawsuit filed last week in San Diego County Superior Court is one of many filed across the county and across the state in recent years that allege sexual abuse against minors while they were incarcerated in juvenile detention facilities, at the hands of officers whom they were told to obey.

Advocates say that the juvenile detention system has been ripe for such abuse of vulnerable youths because of the power that detention officers were given over them as they were confined. A report last year by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics found there were at least 500 substantiated reports of staff-on-youth sexual abuse and 1,200 substantiated reports of youth-on-youth sexual abuse from 2013 to 2018 in juvenile detention facilities nationwide.

The plaintiff, who is unnamed in the lawsuit to protect his privacy, says he was sexually abused in 2012 when he was only 16 while serving two court-ordered, months-long stints at Camp Barrett, a county-run juvenile detention facility in rural Alpine. The county shut it down in 2018 as the facility fell into disrepair and its population declined.

According to his lawsuit, during his first stint at the facility — ordered to last six months — a female probation officer groomed him by giving him extra attention, causing him to develop affection and trust for her and making him easier to exploit. The officer, estimated to be in her early thirties, lived on-site at Camp Barrett during the work week.

Once the officer got him to trust her, she got him alone in her private on-site bedroom by ordering him to clean her living quarters by himself, the lawsuit claims.

There, she sexually assaulted him, kissing him, groping him, giving him oral sex and making him perform sex acts, the suit alleges. This happened four separate times, the lawsuit says.

Later that same year, the plaintiff was ordered back to Camp Barrett for four more months when he was still 16. Then he was sexually assaulted again — this time by a different probation officer, the suit says.

It happened during a youth detainee field trip at the Point Loma Marina. According to the lawsuit, a male officer ordered the plaintiff to come with him, alone, into a restroom. There, the lawsuit says, the officer ordered the boy to give him oral sex and threatened to postpone his release date if he didn’t comply.

His abusers used their positions of power over Plaintiff to force him to comply with their demands, the lawsuit says.

The sexual abuse the boy endured represents systemic failure on the county’s part to protect the youths in its care, the lawsuit says. Camp Barrett supervisors and employees and other county employees should have recognized it was inappropriate for the two officers to be alone with the plaintiff and prevented such isolation. The suit said that youths at Camp Barrett were highly vulnerable to such sexual abuse because of their confinement and because probation officers had complete access to and control over them.

“The fact that it happened two different times with two different peace officers … it just shows that the entire system there was very corrupt,” Cowan said. “This is not just a rogue person acting out like a bad apple, but … it was bad enough that two different people were like, ‘I’m going to do this, and nobody’s going to say a word.’”

The county should have done a better job vetting its officers and failed to enforce standards and procedures to keep the youths in its care safe, the suit says. It said the department should have done a better job of monitoring where detainees are, limiting officers unsupervised access to them and training employees on how to report, investigate and prevent sexual assault.

The individual officers the plaintiff says assaulted him are not named as defendants; the plaintiff cannot remember their names because of the trauma he endured. But Cowan said she plans to add them once she obtains personnel records through court discovery.

The plaintiff didn’t immediately report the abuse to anybody due to the trauma and fear of retaliation, but reached a point last year where he wanted to speak up lest something similar happen to another child, said Sara Beller, another of his attorneys.

“It can take decades for them to recover from something like this and make it feel like it wasnt their fault,” she said of sexual abuse survivors.

Cowan said she filed a claim with the county for damages on the plaintiffs behalf in August 2023, then a legal demand letter days later.

In the letter, Cowan said she explained that her client was contemplating suing but was open to discussing a potential settlement. Those talks didn’t go anywhere, Cowan said.

Then, as she was drafting a lawsuit in June of this year, Cowan said she discovered the demand letter online, posted by the county, as the third search result after Googling “Camp Barrett sexual assault San Diego.” The county regularly posts copies of claims received on its Board of Supervisors website.

The letter appeared to have been timestamped by the county in late September 2023, so Cowan believes it had been online for several months. She called the publication of the letter unduly punitive and retaliatory.

Knowing the private, sensitive details of his traumas were publicly available for that long was “crushing” to her client, Cowan said.

“It’s something that really hit him hard, and it feeds into a lot of these fears that kept him from reporting sooner,” she said.

According to the lawsuit she filed on his behalf, after Cowan told the county about the posting, the county took six days to remove it.

“The reaction when we contacted the county was just so — it was very, very upsetting, she said. They did not take responsibility. They did not acknowledge the seriousness.