The Fourth Appellate District reversed a judgment and remanded. The court held that the trial court erred in applying the substantial evidence standard of review, rather than the independent judgment standard, to a county’s publicly reported determination a parent had possibly abused his child.
Ranganath Saraswati was involved in a contentious custody dispute over his five-year-old daughter after dissolution of his marriage to the child’s mother. In 2006, several days before a hearing to consider sanctions against the mother for violation of a custody order, the child made claims of sexual abuse by Saraswati to a San Diego County investigating social worker. The child told the social worker that Saraswati inserted his electric toothbrush in her vagina and anus and then brushed his teeth with it. The mother stated that the child had told her that Saraswati had plucked the child’s eyelashes when she did not tell him information about the mother and that Saraswati had twisted the child’s arm.
