CONCORD, NH — The first criminal trial begins Monday in a five-year investigation into allegations of abuse at a New Hampshire juvenile detention center, though the case involves a different state-run facility.
Victor Malavet, 62, from Gilford, is one of nine former government employees charged in connection with the attorney general’s broad criminal investigation into the Sununu Youth Services Center. Charges against a 10th man were dropped in May after he was found 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 decisions on their cases. He has been charged with 12 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, all against a 16-year-old girl who was held there in 2001.
Prosecutors say Malavet began paying special attention to the girl soon after her arrival, treating her better than the other residents and giving her special privileges.
“She was selected to be the resident who would go into a candy storage room and pick out candy for the other residents,” Assistant Attorney General Timothy Sullivan said during a court hearing shortly after Malavet’s arrest in 2021. Once in the closet-like room, she was allegedly forced to have sex.
Malavet was transferred to Manchester after other employees reported “something was going on between the two,” Sullivan said.
Malavet’s attorney, Maya Dominguez, said Friday that her client maintains his innocence and looks forward to fighting the charges.
According to court documents, Malavet’s accuser was transferred to the Concord Unit from Manchester after she attacked a staff member with a metal pipe and escaped. Defense attorneys tried to introduce evidence about that incident at his trial, saying he paid attention to her because she was being mistreated by other staff and residents. He also wanted to use that to undermine her claim that she was coerced, according to a judge’s ruling denying his request.
The judge did grant Malavet’s request to allow evidence about her later convictions, however, over prosecutors’ objections. After being tried as an adult, the girl spent 10 years in prison for attacking the Manchester coworker.
In a 2021 interview, the now 39-year-old woman said she was too afraid to report the abuse she had experienced.
“I didn’t want it to get worse,” she told The Associated Press. “There was a lot of fear about reporting anything. I saw how other kids were being treated.”
She also said she hopes to go back to school to pursue a degree in finance.
“I think you can find strength in even the darkest moments, and I think anyone who has been through what I have been through doesn’t have to be paralyzed by it,” she said. “They can definitely still have hope.”
The woman is one of more than 1,100 former residents who to sue the state allege that there has been abuse that has lasted for six decades. In the any case that comes before the court So far, a jury has awarded David Meehan $38 million for the 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 the state attorney general’s office simultaneously the prosecution of alleged offenders and defend the state. While prosecutors will likely rely on the testimony of former juvenile center residents in the criminal trials, attorneys defending the state against Meehan’s claims have spent much of that trial portraying him as a violent childdifficult teenager and delusions of an adult.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they are victims of sexual abuse unless they go public with their story, as Meehan has done.
