CALIFORNIA — The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office reported that Christopher Bathum, 59, the owner of an alcohol and drug treatment center in Los Angeles, was sentenced on July 14.
Mr. Bathum was sentenced to 52 years and eight months in state prison for the sexual assault of seven women over a period of two years. He was also ordered to be registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life. In February of 2018, a jury of his peers found Christopher Bathum guilty of 31 counts including sexual penetration by a foreign object, forcible rape, sexual exploitation and forcible oral copulation.
Reinhold Mueller, Deputy District Attorney of the Sex Crimes Division, prosecuted the case.
Bathum was the founder and operator of Community Recovery of Los Angeles in the Southern California and Colorado locations.
The victims who were sexually assaulted range in age from twenty to early thirties. Most of the sexual assaults occurred at the locations where Bathum worked.
Christopher Bathum was also sentenced to 20 years in prison for operating a $175 million fraudulent healthcare billing scam. Bathum pleaded no contest to five counts of insurance fraud, one count each of identity theft and money laundering, and seven counts of grand theft in January.
Shaun Gipson, Deputy District Attorney of the Healthcare Fraud Division, prosecuted the case.
The co-defendant in the case Kirsten Wallace, 47, acquired access to multiple health care insurance policies that belonged to their patients and used their personal information to gain access to client healthcare policies. The clients were not aware that healthcare policies had been issued in their names.
Christopher Bathum and Kirsten Wallace also billed their former patients after their treatment. During June 2012 and December 2015, Bathum and Wallace fraudulently billed an estimated $175 million for treatments their clients never received; $44 million was paid out by five different insurance companies.
Wallace was sentenced in 2018 to 11 years in state prison after she pleaded no contest in court to 46 felony counts, which were related to the same healthcare billing scam.
Both cases BA451664 and BA451669 were investigated by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Bureau of Investigation, and the California Department of Insurance.
