CONCORD, NH (AP) — The first criminal trial in a five-year investigation into abuse allegations at New Hampshire’s youth prison begins Monday, but the case involves a different state facility.
Victor Malavet, 62, of Gilford is one of nine former state employees charged in connection with the attorney general’s sweeping criminal investigation of the Sununu Youth Services Center. Charges against a 10th man were dropped in May after he was declared 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 the court’s decision on their cases. He is accused of 12 counts of aggravated sexual assault, all against a 16-year-old girl who was detained there in 2001.
Prosecutors say Malavet paid special attention to the girl soon after her arrival, treating her better than other residents and granting her special privileges.
“She was selected as the resident to go into a candy storage room to pick out candy for the other residents,” Assistant Attorney General Timothy Sullivan said at a court hearing shortly after Malavet’s arrest in 2021. Once in the storage room-like room, she was allegedly forced to have sex.
Malavet was transferred to Manchester after other employees reported that “something was going on between the two,” Sullivan said.
Malavet’s lawyer, Maya Dominguez, said Friday that her client maintains his innocence and looks forward to contesting the charges.
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 an interview in 2021, the woman, now 39, said she was too afraid 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 of reporting anything. I saw how other children were treated.”
She also said she hopes to return to school to pursue a degree in finance.
“I believe that even in the darkest moments, you can find strength, and I don’t think anyone who has experienced what I have experienced should be paralyzed by it,” she said. “They can certainly still have hope.”
The woman is one of more than 1,100 former residents suing the state for abuse spanning six decades. In the only case to go to trial so far, a jury awarded David Meehan $38 million for abuse he allegedly suffered at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s, but the verdict is still disputed.
Taken together, the two trials underscore the unusual dynamic that occurs when the attorney general’s office simultaneously prosecutes alleged perpetrators and defends the state. While prosecutors will likely rely on the testimony of the youth center’s former residents in the criminal trials, lawyers defending the state against Meehan’s charges spent much of the trial portraying him as a violent child, a rebellious teenager and a delusional adult.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who claim to have been victims of sexual abuse unless they speak publicly with their story, as Meehan has done.
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