• Melvin Dunlap, a Missouri native, said he was pressured to sign documents opting into L.A. County’s $4-billion sex abuse settlement.
• Downtown LA Law Group denied wrongdoing and said in a statement: “No one in the firm to our knowledge has coerced its clients or anyone else to sign anything.”
• Dunlap’s account deepens questions around how the firm acquired sex abuse plaintiffs — and whether some may be unknowing participants.

Melvin Dunlap says he doesn’t know how he became a plaintiff in the nation’s largest sex abuse settlement.

He grew up in Missouri, thousands of miles away from L.A. County’s juvenile halls — the subject of a deluge of lawsuits from people who say they were sexually assaulted while detained as children.

Dunlap says he has never been to juvie, and he’s never been abused.

And yet he’s part of L.A. County’s $4-billion sex abuse settlement, identified in court filings as JOHN DOE M.D. His lawsuit claims he was “physically assaulted, sexually harassed and abused” by staff at a Los Angeles detention center in Boyle Heights when he was 15.

“I can put my hand on a Bible and say ‘I ain’t ever been abused sexually,’” said Dunlap, who provided text messages and emails showing he sought to report the matter to the State Bar for investigation last July.

Dunlap’s lawsuit was filed Oct. 15, 2024, by Downtown LA Law Group. The firm, also known as DTLA, is under investigation by the district attorney, State Bar, and the county after nine clients told The Times last...

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