Two days before jury selection, Philadelphia foster care agency First Home Care agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by a woman who was sexually abused and trafficked by a man she met in her agency-approved foster home.
The woman, identified as D.P. to protect her identity, was awarded $9.3 million. The victim was also part of an earlier $24 million settlement with Days Inn where the trafficking occurred, along with eight other victims.
In court, D.P.’s attorneys said that the time it took to litigate the case was lengthy, which created numerous issues for the case.
Court documents state that D.P. was allegedly “groomed” into “sex trafficking” when she was only 13 years old while living as a foster child in an approved home.
D.P. also claimed that First Home Care placed her in an “unsuitable” foster home, where she became prey for the man who became her trafficker and sex abuser in 2009.
Once settled into her foster care home, the son of the woman living there, Craig Johnson, allegedly began grooming the young teenager and then trafficking her. In 2013, Mr. Johnson was sentenced to 24 years in prison for two counts of sex trafficking of minors. At the time of the first trial, the Department of Justice said in a statement that “in June 2012, Johnson recruited young females, ages 15 and 16, respectively, to work as prostitutes. He also created Internet advertisements in which he advertised various females as available for purchase for purposes of prostitution. These advertisements featured pictures of the prostitutes, either scantily clad or partially nude, the price for an encounter, and a phone number to call to arrange a meeting with a prostitute. Johnson pleaded guilty to the charges on June 13, 2013.”
After the conviction in 2013, U.S. District Court Judge C. Darnell Jones, II, sentenced Mr. Johnson to 10 years of supervised release and ordered him to pay $10,400, per victim, in restitution.
In the current case, new court documents last week state that after grooming the victim, most of the sex trafficking occurred at the Days Inn Hotel, located in Northeast Philadelphia. The lawsuit was filed in April 2022 in the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas.
Court documents claim that the foster agency should not have placed D.P. in the foster care home where she met Mr. Johnson because it was overcrowded with numerous children already. The Philadelphia Department of Human Services noted that the First Home Care agency had a contract with the city for foster care for ten years, between 2008 and 2018.
Furthermore, the court documents state, D.P. was coerced into moving out of the foster home at the age of 13 by Mr. Johnson, who then sexually abused her and trafficked her into a sex trafficking ring with others. The legal documents say that Mr. Johnson charged men a price of between $60 - $100 to rape and sexually assault the young girls in the sex trafficking ring.
As part of the legal filings in the lawsuit, attorneys argued that D.P. never was safe and that she did not have “adequate” care in the overpopulated foster care home.
First Home Care initially denied that D.P. was sexually abused during her time living in the foster home, which amounted to six weeks. First Home Care also stated that Mr. Johnson did not live in the house when D.P. was there. However, when authorities from the Bensalem Township Police interviewed D.P. in 2012, she told them she was but one of numerous minors, all girls, who had sex with men under Mr. Johnson’s direct bidding.
The new settlement of $9.3 million was announced in mid-October.
