The former owner and operator of more than a dozen Southland drug-treatment and rehabilitation centers was sentenced Tuesday to nearly 53 years in state prison for sexually assaulting or exploiting seven patients and offering controlled substances.
Christopher Bathum – who owned and operated Community Recovery of Los Angeles and other entities in Southern California and Colorado – was also ordered to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
Bathum was convicted in February 2018 of 31 counts, including forcible rape, sexual penetration by a foreign object, forcible oral copulation, sexual exploitation and offering controlled substances, including methamphetamine and heroin.
Jurors acquitted Bathum, now 58, of a dozen other charges and deadlocked on three remaining counts.
“Each one is a drug addict,” Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller said of Bathum’s victims at the outset of the trial.
Some of the women suffered from shame and hopelessness, and Bathum exploited the fact that they had “shared some of their most intimate secrets with him,” Mueller told the jury.
The defendant – who lived with his wife and children in Agoura – gave his patients drugs as they were trying to break a cycle of addiction, used alongside them and taught them how to beat drug tests, the prosecutor said.
Bathum also offered the women special privileges, such as internships, company cars and access to iPhones, positioning himself as a father figure to the young women in their 20s and 30s but acting like a predator, Mueller said.
“They were easy targets. They were perfect victims,” the prosecutor told jurors.
Bathum pleaded no contest in January in a separate case to 14 felony counts in connection with a $175 million insurance fraud scheme in which he was charged with Kirsten Wallace. He was sentenced in that case to 20 years in state prison, which will run at the same time as the sentence in the sexual-assault case.
Wallace, who co-owned Community Recovery of Los Angeles with Bathum, pleaded guilty in 2018 to all 46 felony counts against her and was sentenced to 11 years in state prison.
Source: Orange County Register
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