a year

AP Photo / Holly Ramer

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The first criminal trial arising from a five-year investigation into allegations of abuse at New Hampshire’s youth detention center started Monday, though the case involves a different state-run facility.

Victor Malavet, 62, of Gilford, is one of nine former state workers charged in connection with the attorney general’s broad criminal probe of the Sununu Youth Services Center. Charges against a 10th man were dropped in May after he was deemed incompetent to stand trial, and another 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 court disposition of their cases. He’s charged with 12 counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault, all against a 16-year-old girl held there in 2001.

Prosecutors say Malavet started paying special attention to the girl soon after she arrived, treating her better than other residents and giving her special privileges.

“This defendant took exactly what he wanted from Natasha,” Senior Assistant Attorney General Meghan Hagaman said in her opening statement. “He raped a child, a child locked away in a detention facility, 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 and her special privileges to take what he wanted.”

Malavet’s attorney, Maya Dominguez, argued that the girl, now 39, made up the allegations in an attempt to get money from the state. She is among more than 1,100 former residents who are suing the state alleging abuse that spanned six decades.

“Natasha has a million-dollar motive to lie,” Dominguez said. “Money can change almost anything. It can change memory, it can change motive, it can even change someone’s morality. But the one thing that not even millions and millions of dollars can change? That’s the truth.”

According to court documents, Malavet's accuser was transferred to the Concord unit from Manchester after she assaulted a staffer with a metal pipe and escaped. Defense lawyers sought to present evidence about 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 that to undermine her claim of being coerced, according to a judge's ruling denying his request.

The judge did grant Malavet's request to allow evidence about her subsequent criminal convictions, however, over the objection of prosecutors. After being tried as an adult, the girl spent 10 years in prison for assaulting the Manchester staffer.

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

“I didn’t want it to get worse,” she told The Associated Press. “There was a lot of fear around reporting anything. I saw how other kids were being treated.”

She also said she hoped to return to school to complete a finance degree.

“I think that strength can be derived from even the darkest moments, and I feel like anybody who has experienced what I have, they don’t need to be crippled by it,” she said. “They can certainly still have hope.”

In the only civil case to go to trial so far, a jury awarded David Meehan $38 million for abuse he says he suffered at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s, though the verdict remains in dispute.

Together, the two trials highlight the unusual dynamic of having the state attorney general’s office simultaneously prosecute those accused of committing offenses and defend the state. While prosecutors likely will be relying on the testimony of the former youth center residents in the criminal trials, attorneys defending the state against Meehan's claims spent much of that trial portraying him as a violent child, troublemaking teenager and delusional adult.

The AP generally does not name people who say they are the victim of sexual abuse unless they come forward with their story publicly, as Meehan has done.