Woman Who Falsely Accused Brian Banks of Rape Ordered to Pay $2.6M

Woman Who Falsely Accused Brian Banks of Rape Ordered to Pay $2.6M

Woman who falsely claimed Brian Banks raped her will now have to pay the school district where she claimed the rape occurred.

 

A woman whose false claim of rape sent former prep football star Brian Banks to prison was ordered to pay a $2.6 million judgment in connection with the case.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge on Friday ordered Wanetta Gibson to pay a $1.5 million, plus an additional $1.1 million in fees, including for making a false claim and court-related costs, the Long Beach Press Telegram reported.

Gibson was a former high-school acquaintance of Banks in 2002 when she accused him of raping her at Long Beach Polytechnic High School, according to the California Innocence Project, an organization that helped exonerate Banks.

Gibson sued the Long Beach Unified School District claiming the school was not safe and won a $1.5 million settlement.

Former Litton Loan servicing employee: At Goldman Sachs servicer, ‘total disaster’

Former Litton Loan servicing employee: At Goldman Sachs servicer, ‘total disaster’

by Paul Kiel
ProPublica, April 11, 2012, 7:53 a.m

Chris Wyatt, a former employee of Litton Loan Servicing, then a Goldman Sachs subsidiary, tells what it was like at the company during the first, crucial years of the government’s loan modification program.

Wyatt led Litton’s “Executive Response Team,” which was charged with handling customer complaints. Litton employees, overwhelmed and undertrained, frequently made basic errors when calculating a homeowner’s income, he says. HAMP guidelines often weren’t followed, because Litton was “way understaffed” and couldn’t keep up, he recalls. But the worst part was the way Litton dealt with homeowners’ documents, he says.

When homeowners faxed their documents, they didn’t go to Litton, Wyatt says. They went to India, where a low-cost company scanned and filed the documents — but often misfiled or lost them. Wyatt says Litton routinely denied modifications because homeowners had not sent their documents when, in fact, they had.

In a process internally referred to as a “denial sweep,” Litton’s computers would automatically generate denial letters for every homeowner who, according to Litton’s records, hadn’t sent their documents. But untold numbers of those documents had been lost on another continent. Wyatt complained about the practice in multiple meetings with senior management, he says, but managers were chiefly worried about reducing the overwhelming backlog.

In general, Wyatt recalls, Litton was much more careful about granting modifications than denying them. Yes, HAMP gave financial incentives for each modification Litton and other servicers made, but modifications also meant closer scrutiny from the program’s auditors.

As of the end of 2010, fewer than 12 percent of the borrowers who’d applied for a HAMP modification with Litton were granted one. The vast majority of those denials, Wyatt says, were not legitimate. Goldman Sachs’ emphasis on maximizing profits rather than preventing foreclosures is typical of the servicing industry, he says, particularly the larger banks.

Lenders seek court actions against homeowners years after foreclosure

Jose Santos Benavides, 42, lives with daughter Gloria, 6, and the rest of his family in a Rockville apartment. The family left a four-bedroom house in Rockville in 2008 when Benavides could no longer afford to make mortgage payments. More than three years later, Benavides was told that he still owed $115,000 on the house he no longer owns.

For Jose Santos Benavides, the ordeal of losing his home was over.

The Salvadoran immigrant had worked for years as a self-employed landscaper to make a $15,000 down payment on a four-bedroom house in Rockville. He had achieved a portion of the American dream, earning nearly six figures.

Then the economy soured, and lean paychecks turned into late mortgage payments. On Aug. 20, 2008, one year after he bought his dream home for $469,000, the bank’s threat to take his house became real via a letter in the mail. Just four days before the bank seized the property, he moved out, along with his wife and their two young children.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

In November, more than three years after the foreclosure, he was stunned to learn he still owed $115,000 — with the interest alone growing at a rate high enough to lease a luxury car.

“I’m scared, you know,” Benavides said. “I can’t pay.”

The 42-year-old is among the many homeowners being taken to court by their lenders long after their houses were taken in foreclosure. Lenders are filing new motions in old foreclosure lawsuits and hiring debt collectors to pursue leftover debt, plus court fees, attorneys’ fees and tens of thousands in interest that had been accruing for years.

It’s an aftershock of the foreclosure crisis, and most homeowners don’t know it’s coming.

Read on.

The Securities Arbitration Law Firm of Klayman & Toskes Files $4,000,000 Claim Against Wells Fargo

The Securities Arbitration Law Firm of Klayman & Toskes Files $4,000,000 Claim Against Wells Fargo

The Securities Arbitration Law Firm of Klayman & Toskes Files $4,000,000 Claim Against Wells Fargo Advisors on Behalf of a UPS Employee As It Continues To Investigate Claims on Behalf of Current and Former UPS Employees

NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)– The Securities Arbitration Law Firm of Klayman & Toskes (“K&T”), www.nasd-law.com, announced today that it filed a securities arbitration claim against Wells Fargo Advisors on behalf of a UPS (NYS: UPS) employee for losses sustained as a result of maintaining a concentrated, leveraged position in UPS stock. The claim seeks damages of $4,000,000. The suit was filed with the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s (“FINRA”) Office of Dispute Resolution.