Robert Scrivner did something most people never have to do. He stood at a press conference and told the world his own father abused him, his siblings, and then walked free thanks to a loophole in California law.
Speaking out for the first time, Scrivner branded California's mental health diversion law a "flawed system" after his father, Zack Scrivner, a former elected official in Kern County, dodged getting locked up on child abuse charges by entering a mental health diversion program.
My own father, who is an elected official in Kern County, assaulted my siblings and myself and was granted mental health diversion.
That's not a policy abstraction. That's a son, standing in public, describing what happened to him as a child and watching the system shrug.
Zack Scrivner was charged last February with child abuse and possession of assault weapons. He was accused of climbing into bed with a pre-teen child in April 2024 and touching her inappropriately. Those are facts serious enough to warrant serious consequences.
Instead, Scrivner avoided harsher charges of child sexual assault because he was under the influence of drugs at the time, and entered a mental health diversion program, the New York Post reported. Under California law, mental health diversion allows eligible defendants with diagnosed mental health disorders to receive treatment instead of jail time.
Read that sequence again. A lawmaker is accused of sexually assaulting a child. Because he was high when he did it, the charges were softened. Because the charges were softened, he qualified for diversion. Because he qualified for diversion, he avoided prison. The drugs didn't make it worse. They made it easier.
Christina, Scrivner's estranged wife, spoke out during the press conference in favor of closing the loophole. Her words carried the weight of a parent who did everything right and watched the system fail anyway.
Faced with inexplicable trauma, my courageous children bravely and honorably shared the truth of their abuse.
We tell our children to speak up, speak up for yourselves, tell the truth, be honest. My children were and they did. Their answer to their plea, their cry for help, was a stark reality of a broken system under mental health diversion.
That is the core contradiction. Every school, every counselor, every public awareness campaign tells children the same thing: speak up and adults will protect you. These children spoke up. California law told them it had somewhere more important to put their abuser than behind bars.
State Senator Shannon Grove announced Senate Bill 1373 on Tuesday to begin closing the gap. The bill would set limits on certain crimes eligible for mental health diversion.
My bill will ensure that those who commit violent crimes, such as attempted murder of a child, assault resulting in death and domestic violence, are no longer eligible for a mental health diversion program.
The fact that this bill is even necessary tells you everything. California's 2018 diversion law was passed under the familiar banner of progressive criminal justice reform. Critics of the 2018 program law said it's being used as a get-out-of-jail free card by serious offenders. They were right.
Assemblymember Dr. Jasmeet Bains, who specializes in family and addiction medicine, put it plainly in a statement to the LA Times:
It was designed to help people get treatment and rehabilitation in appropriate cases, not to provide an escape hatch to sexually assault children.
Bains called it the "Epstein loophole." The name fits. When a law designed to help low-level offenders get treatment becomes a shield for accused child abusers, the law has been captured by the very people it should never protect.
This is not an isolated malfunction. It is the predictable result of a criminal justice philosophy that treats leniency as enlightenment and accountability as cruelty. California has spent years building a system that makes excuses for offenders at every stage:
The people who designed this framework will tell you it was never intended to protect child abusers. Maybe not. But when you build a system with enough loopholes, you don't get to act surprised when the worst people walk through them. Intent doesn't matter when a pre-teen's abuser is back on the street.
Mental health diversion has a legitimate, narrow purpose. There are defendants whose offenses stem directly from untreated illness, whose crimes are nonviolent, and who pose no ongoing threat to children. Reasonable people can support that concept while demanding that child sexual abuse never qualifies. Those two positions are not in tension. The only people who find them contradictory are the ones who built the loophole in the first place.
Robert Scrivner is not a politician. He's not an activist. He's a young man who stood in front of cameras and told the truth about what his father did, knowing the system had already decided it wasn't enough to warrant prison. That took more courage than anything Sacramento has produced in years.
Grove's bill deserves swift passage. But legislation alone won't fix a state where the reflex is always to soften consequences and the victims are always asked to understand. These children spoke up. The least California can do is listen.
