Jennifer Turpin has come out to staunchly defend a former county employee who came under scrutiny in a November “20/20” segment about alleged difficulties that Turpin and her adult siblings had getting assistance after the family’s 13 children were freed in 2018 from years of abuse and neglect by their Perris parents.
“This is literally to clean my conscience and to let you guys know what happened, through my eyes,” Turpin said in a nearly eight-minute video posted on TikTok on Sunday, May 22.
In the “20/20” interview, ABC News identified Vanessa Espinoza as the deputy Public Guardian official assigned to the conservatorship of what at the time consisted of seven adult children.
Jennifer and Jordan Turpin told the ABC-TV show of having insufficient housing, food and life-skills training. Joshua Turpin said he was denied money for a bicycle from a trust fund that held hundreds of thousands of donated dollars being administered by the Public Guardian.
And on that show, Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin told reporter Diane Sawyer that the Turpin adults were living in a “crime-ridden neighborhood” and in “squalor.”
Recently unsealed conservatorship documents show that Espinoza rejected the apartments the Turpins wanted to rent as either too expensive or too far away, and instead steered them toward housing that the Turpins considered substandard.
But in the video, Jennifer Turpin said it was unfair to put so much of the blame on Espinoza.
“Most of the stuff that happened wasn’t even her fault,” said Turpin, the eldest child at 33. “Any of the bad stuff that I could go on and on and on about, it was because of her bosses.”
It was Espinoza’s idea, Turpin said, to use $30,000 in her trust fund to pay off loans that funded Turpin’s medical-assistant schooling.
“Even in the beginning, she always would treat us to Starbucks, so many things,” Jennifer Turpin said. “She would go out of her way and do something for us. But she got in trouble.
“She was afraid of losing her job, so she stopped,” Turpin said. “Then she would secretly give us something. She would go out of her way to make sure we got our trust funds we needed. …
“(But) each one of us probably has a different story.”
On “20/20” Joshua Turpin said Espinoza told him to “Google it” after he sought life-skills advice.
Espinoza has declined to answer reporters’ questions about the conservatorship.
Her departure from the Public Guardian’s office in 2021 was her choice, she said in a social media post shortly after the “202/20” special aired, and had nothing to do with the Turpin case or any other client.
She now sells real estate.
“Anything and everything said about me in the ’20/20′ interview is false,” Espinoza wrote.
In summarizing the conservatorship, Turpin said, “There was bad, there was good that came out of it.
“We have a place to live. We got into therapy,” she said. “There was a lot of stuff they didn’t teach us. We ended up having to figure it all out.
“But all in all, I think it made me smarter in trying to figure out things, and I did real well figuring it out.”
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