Robert Scrivner stood before cameras this week and did something no child should ever have to do: publicly accuse his own father of abuse, then explain how the state of California helped that father walk free.
Speaking for the first time at a press conference held by State Senator Shannon Grove, Robert branded California's mental health diversion law a "flawed system." His father, former Kern County Supervisor Zack Scrivner, was charged last February with child abuse and possession of assault weapons. He avoided harsher charges of child sexual assault because he was under the influence of drugs at the time and instead entered a mental health diversion program.
Robert Scrivner did not mince words:
"My own father, who is an elected official in Kern County, assaulted my siblings and myself and was granted mental health diversion."
That single sentence carries more indictment of California's criminal justice priorities than a thousand policy papers ever could.
Under California law, mental health diversion allows eligible defendants with diagnosed mental health disorders to receive treatment instead of jail time, the New York Post reported. The program dates back to 2018, and critics have warned for years that it functions as a get-out-of-jail-free card for serious offenders.
The Scrivner case illustrates exactly how. Zack Scrivner was accused of climbing into bed with a pre-teen child in April 2024 and touching her inappropriately. Because he was allegedly under the influence of drugs during the incident, the charges were reduced. Instead of facing the full weight of what he allegedly did to children, he entered a diversion program.
Think about the logic at work here. A man is accused of sexually assaulting a child. Because he was high at the time, the system treats the crime as less serious. Being intoxicated during an alleged assault on a minor becomes a mitigating factor rather than an aggravating one. The drugs don't compound the horror; they dilute the accountability.
This is what California built.
Christina Scrivner, Zack's estranged wife, also spoke at the press conference in favor of the proposed legislation. Her words captured the particular cruelty of a system that asks victims to come forward, then fails them when they do:
"We tell our children to speak up, speak up for yourselves, tell the truth, be honest. My children were and they did."
And then she described what followed:
"Their answer to their plea, their cry for help, was a stark reality of a broken system under mental health diversion."
Christina called her children "courageous" and "honorable" for sharing the truth of their abuse. She described the trauma as "inexplicable." What she did not call it was surprising. For anyone who has watched California's progressive criminal justice experiments play out over the past decade, none of this is surprising. The pattern is familiar. Lenient frameworks designed with sympathetic hypotheticals in mind collide with grotesque real-world cases, and the system shrugs.
Grove used the press conference to announce Senate Bill 1373, which would set limits on which crimes qualify for mental health diversion. She was direct about its purpose:
"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 bill represents a straightforward correction. Violent crimes against children, attempted murder, and domestic violence should never have been eligible for diversion in the first place. That they were tells you everything about the philosophy that produced the 2018 law: the offender's therapeutic journey matters more than the victim's safety.
Assemblymember Dr. Jasmeet Bains, who specializes in family and addiction medicine, added her voice to the effort. Her framing was notably blunt for a California Democrat:
"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," a term that has attached itself to this provision because of how neatly it captures the dynamic: powerful people exploiting therapeutic language to escape consequences for predatory behavior.
California has spent the better part of a decade reimagining criminal justice around the idea that incarceration is the problem rather than the response to a problem. Proposition 47 downgraded theft. Proposition 57 eased early release for "nonviolent" offenders through classifications that strained the meaning of the word. Zero-bail policies turned arrest into a revolving door. Mental health diversion was supposed to be the humane, evidence-based alternative to a system the left insisted was irredeemably punitive.
But humane for whom? Not for Robert Scrivner. Not for his siblings. Not for the pre-teen child Zack Scrivner allegedly climbed into bed with.
Every one of these reforms shares the same structural defect. They center the accused. They treat the system's response to crime as the injustice worth fixing, rather than the crime itself. And when the inevitable horror story emerges, the architects of these policies express shock that anyone would use a loophole as a loophole.
The fact that it took a former county supervisor's own son going public to generate enough pressure for a legislative fix tells you how entrenched these frameworks are. How many cases without a press conference never get corrected at all?
Senate Bill 1373 faces the gauntlet of California's legislature, where criminal justice reform has historically meant making enforcement softer, not harder. Whether Grove can build enough coalition support to carve out these exclusions remains an open question. Bains's involvement as a physician and assemblymember lends bipartisan credibility, but Sacramento has killed commonsense public safety measures before.
The Scrivner family did what the system told them to do. The children spoke up. The mother believed them. They told the truth. And California's answer was to send the man accused of abusing them to a treatment program instead of a cell.
Robert Scrivner had to stand at a podium and say his father's name out loud to change that. No child should carry that weight. But in California, the state made sure someone had to.
