By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
MANCHESTER — Jurors must decide if former Sununu Youth Services Center house leader Bradley Asbury held down a 14-year-old boy during a 1998 rape, or if the victim, Michael Gilpatrick, is a fantasist looking for money.
The jury in the Hillsborough Superior Court — North in Manchester deliberated for about five hours Friday before going home for the weekend. Their work will start again Monday as they determine Asbury’s guilt or innocence.
Asbury is accused of holding Gilpatrick down while two other staffers at what was then called YDC, Jeffrey Buskey and Stephen Murphy, raped the boy. Asbury denies being party to Gilpatrick’s rape, and his lawyer, David Rothstein denies that it happened at all.
Rothstein told jurors during his closing argument that Gilpatrick is an opportunist who glommed onto the YDC scandal in order to get rich.
“All it does is it gives you some insight into the imaginary world in which Mike Gilpatrick lives, a world where he creates his own reality, maybe even believes the reality that he has created,” Rothstein said.
Gilpatrick testified he kept silent about the abuse he suffered for decades. He never reported the abuse while inside the system, and he never told anyone else until 2020, when he told his wife, Kelly Gilpatrick. By then, other survivors had begun to come forward and take action.
Assistant Attorney General Adam Woods reminded the jury in his final remarks that Gilpatrick had no one he could report the rape to inside the YDC system. Gilpatrick was assigned to East Cottage where Asbury was the house leader who controlled staff and residents alike.
“How could Mike be expected to report an assault enabled by Brad Asbury, knowing that this very man would be informed about that report?” Woods said.
A civil jury found the state liable for the abuse of another YDC resident David Meehan earlier this year after hearing evidence of YDC administrators covering up abuse complaints and staff and children being punished for speaking out.
Gilpatrick is suing the state for the physical and sexual abuse he allegedly suffered as a child, along with about 1,000 other adult YDC survivors. Rothstein tried to make an issue out of Gilpatrick’s lawsuit and the fact he’s already been paid.
Gilpatrick has taken more than $140,000 from a finance company that specializes in loans to civil litigants. Under the terms of the agreement, Gilpatrick will repay the loan from any damages he receives from his lawsuit. He is not obliged to repay the money if his lawsuit is unsuccessful, but Gilpatrick testified he plans to repay that cash even if he loses the case.
“You’re trying to establish this is about money and it’s got nothing to do with money,” Gilpatrick said during his testimony on Wednesday. “I would give that all up in a second to see (Asbury) go away.”
Money is a large factor in the YDC scandal, but not necessarily for the survivors.
The YDC scandal, and the fact children were horrifically abused for decades while in state care, is a reality that the state acknowledges, to a degree. New Hampshire has paid $102 million to 200 survivors from a settlement fund created in the wake of the scandal becoming public. There are approximately 450 more settlement cases pending with the fund, and hundreds more expected to be filed in the coming months.
The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office has a special task force to investigate and prosecute alleged YDC abusers, created in 2019. But that task force stopped indicting suspects in 2021 after finding 11 men to charge out of hundreds of named abusers.
And, while the state pays some victims, lawyers with the same New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office are trying to discredit other survivors in the civil lawsuits. The first civil trial resulted in a record-setting $38 million damages award for survivor David Meehan that the state is now trying to force down to $475,000. During his trial, Meehan was accused of making up the abuse in order to score a payday.
