Seven former Salinas High School students have sued the Salinas Union High School District, the now-defunct drug and alcohol counseling center Sunrise House and former Sunrise House counselor Gilbert Olivares, alleging Olivares groomed them as victims and recorded them with a hidden camera having sexual encounters in his office with other students.
In 2014, Olivares pleaded no contest to 56 charges involving sex crimes against students and was sentenced to 16 years in prison; police, acting on a tip from the sister of one boy, found Olivares had hidden a video camera in his office and recorded sexual encounters between students. In all, when Salinas Police searched his iPhone, they found 13 videos of 11 students engaging in sexual activity.
He was released from prison in 2020.
In the suit, filed June 1 in Monterey County Superior Court, the plaintiffs (six men and one woman) allege Olivares engaged in a pattern of behavior that included befriending them, offering to let them hang out in his office even when class was in session, giving them hall passes and protecting a few of them from the administration when they came to school under the influence of alcohol.
Instead of offering them the counseling services he was hired to do, from his office in a secluded area near the school's bell tower, he would talk to them about their genitals, ask them about their sex lives, touch them inappropriately and let them know if they wanted alone time in his office with their boyfriend or girlfriend, they could take it.
Olivares, the lawsuit states, had absolutely no credentials to function as a drug or alcohol counselor and was left unsupervised by the agency that employed him.
"Olivares was given…unlimited, unsupervised access to minor students…he did not possess any special skill, qualification, licenses, background, training or education to be a counselor, especially to high school students," the lawsuit states. "He was given unlimited access to pull students out of their classes and meet with them in his basement office whenever he wanted."
The students, now all adults, filed the lawsuit as John and Jane Does because the acts committed against them occurred when they were minors.
Olivares was also sued last December by a former student, now 23, who made the same claims about the former counselor. When Olivares was released from prison, he was required to register as a sex offender; that registry lists him as a transient. No attorney is listed for him in the previous suit, and it's been set for trial in October 2022.
It's unclear what, if anything, the plaintiffs might be able to recover from Olivares or Sunrise House, which operated under a joint powers agreement between SUHSD, the Hartnell Community College District, Santa Rita Union School District and the city of Salinas. Sunrise House dissolved in 2018 due to financial insolvency related to previous lawsuits from other Olivares victims; because the organization no longer exists, the parties involved in the JPA would be responsible for any financial judgment that might be ordered in this latest suit.