First criminal trial in abuse scandal at juvenile detention center in New Hampshire begins

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — A New Hampshire prosecutor told jurors Monday that a former youth corrections employee “took exactly what he wanted, where he wanted it and when he wanted it” when he repeatedly raped a teenage girl. His lawyer said the accuser fabricated the allegations for money.

The case against Victor Malavet is the first criminal case to emerge from a five-year investigation into allegations of abuse at the Sununu Youth Services Center, although unlike the other Charges are being brought against eight men. Malavet, 62, worked at another government facility. Charges against a tenth man were dropped in May after he was declared incompetent to stand trial. An eleventh man who had been charged died last month.

While the others worked at the Manchester facility, formerly known as the Youth Development Center, Malavet worked at the Youth Detention Services Unit in Concord, where children were held while awaiting the court's decision on their cases. He is accused of 12 counts of aggravated sexual assault, all against a girl who was incarcerated there in 2001 when she was 15 and 16 years old.

Prosecutors say Malavet began paying special attention to the girl soon after her arrival, treating her better than other residents and granting her special privileges. He is accused of assaulting her in a candy cabinet, a storage room and a television room.

“This defendant took exactly what he wanted,” said Assistant Attorney General Audriana Mekula in her opening statement. “He raped a child, a child who was locked up in a detention facility and isolated from her family and the outside world. He used his authority as a youth counselor at YDSU and his control over her daily grades and restrictions, as well as her special privileges, to take what he wanted.”

Malavet's lawyer Maya Dominguez argued that the girl, now 39, fabricated the charges to get money from the state. She is one of more than 1,100 former residents who sue the state and claims that it was an abuse that spanned six decades.

The prosecutor “has a million-dollar motive to lie,” Dominguez said. “Money can change almost anything. It can change memories, it can change motives, it can even change a person's morals. But the one thing that even millions and millions of dollars can't change? That's the truth.”

Dominguez said the allegations were originally fabricated by another girl who wanted to cause trouble for the plaintiff. The alleged victim told investigators at the time that she and Malavet never even hugged, but “she kept that seed in her pocket for almost two decades,” Dominguez said.

Mekula, who showed a photo of the teens, said the girl did not tell investigators at the time because she was afraid. She was also afraid every time she was raped, “because if she did not give him what he wanted, he had the power to control her life at YDSU,” she said.

According to court documents, Malavet's accuser was transferred from Manchester to the Concord unit after she attacked a staff member with a metal pipe and fled. Defense attorneys tried to introduce evidence of that incident at his trial, saying he paid attention to her because she was treated poorly by other staff and residents because of it. He also wanted to use it to undermine her claim that she was coerced, according to a judge who denied his motion.

The judge granted Malavet's request to admit evidence of her later convictions, despite prosecutors' objections. After the girl was tried as an adult, she spent ten years in prison for attacking the Manchester employee.

In a 2021 interview, the woman said she was too afraid to report the abuse she suffered.

“I didn't want it to get worse,” she told the Associated Press.

In the only civil case that goes to court So far, a jury has awarded David Meehan $38 million for the abuse he allegedly suffered at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s. The verdict remains controversial.

Together, the two cases illustrate the unusual dynamic that arises when the Attorney General’s Office simultaneously the criminal prosecution of defendants in the commission of criminal offences and defend the state. While prosecutors will likely rely on the testimony of the former youth center residents in the criminal trials, the lawyers defending the state against Meehan’s claims spent much of the trial portraying him as violent childrebellious teenager and delusional adult.

The AP generally does not name people who say they have been victims of sexual abuse unless they speak publicly with their story, as Meehan has done.

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This story has been edited to correct that the prosecutor who delivered the opening statements was Assistant Attorney General Audriana Mekula, not Senior Assistant Attorney General Meghan Hagaman.