While the MAGA-verse is all atwitter about the Epstein sex trafficking files, its New Hampshire wing is further victimizing hundreds of people who suffered horrendous sexual and physical abuse while in state custody as children. Republicans in the Legislature, Gov. Kelly Ayotte and Attorney General John Formella are all implicated. This is unconscionable, at least to anyone who has a conscience.
To begin in the middle, in 2022 the Legislature established the Youth Development Center Settlement Fund to limit the state’s exposure to costly lawsuits arising from 50 years of abuse by state employees of children in their custody. The state Supreme Court appointed former chief justice John Broderick as the independent claims administrator.
Since then, according to reporting by the InDepthNH news site, 386 victim claims have been settled for more than $221 million, including interest on settlements dispersed over several years. The settlements average about $545,000 per victim.
Ayotte and Formella raised questions about Broderick’s decisions about payments to victims and their lawyers, and, although a state audit found no problems, they pushed through legislation during this year’s session that ended the independence of the fund administrator. This was accomplished by giving the governor the power to appoint the fund administrator and vesting in the attorney general veto power over any proposed settlement.
When Broderick announced that he was leaving as a result of these changes, Ayotte issued a statement about his “resignation.” He was having none of it. “I didn’t resign,” Broderick said. “They took my job away. I can’t resign from a job I don’t have.”
Why exactly the Legislature wanted to give Formella power over settlement decisions is unclear, given that he has settled two cases outside the settlement fund for a total of $14.5 million and lost a court case in which the jury awarded the victim $38 million (which the Attorney General’s Office is now trying to get knocked down to $475,000).
But in any case, making the fund administrator a political appointee and giving Formella power over settlement decisions created a blatant conflict of interest, as Broderick did not hesitate to point out. “In what world does the defendant get to go in before the trial and say, ‘I would like to pick the judge. I can replace the judge. We can overrule the jury.’ We would laugh at that. It would be funny except we are not talking about children who were sent to bed without TV. They were sexually and physically abused, and this went on 50 years,” he said.
This new regime compounds an already existing conflict posed by the Attorney General’s Office defending the state against civil suits arising from the YDC abuse while at the same time prosecuting those alleged to be responsible for it.
Moreover, it represents a tawdry bait-and-switch for more than 1,500 victims whose claims totaling $1.8 billion are still pending with the settlement fund. David Vicinanzo, a lawyer who represents hundreds of victims with pending claims, said that, “I think the vast majority of our clients view this as a betrayal of the promises that were made to them.” It is impossible to view it otherwise. Victims have now gone to court trying to block the changes to the settlement fund.
Indeed, what Ayotte and her allies have done amounts to abuse of governmental authority, of the public trust and of victims who already have suffered grievous harm inflicted by the state of New Hampshire. It seems very clear that the state, like so many other of society’s institutions, not only has failed to take full responsibility for child sexual abuse, but is actively trying to evade it.