Above, Lyn Schollett, executive director of the NH Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, is pictured at Wednesday’s hearing on House Bill 1675. Katharine Webster photo
By KATHARINE WEBSTER, InDepthNH.org
Accusations of harassment, doxing and retaliation – as well as harrowing personal stories about domestic and sexual violence – dominated a lengthy hearing Wednesday on a bill that would form a legislative commission to investigate the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence.
House Bill 1675, sponsored by Rep. Ellen Read, D-Newmarket, would give the commission subpoena powers to investigate allegations of conflicts of interest and illegal lobbying, sometimes in violation of the coalition’s mission. The bill would also require the coalition to be audited annually by the state Office of the Legislative Budget Assistant.
During the investigation, the bill would strip the coalition of state funding for anything other than services that directly benefit victims. It would also remove the coalition from the state Task Force on Sexual Misconduct and other state committees.
Read, who identified herself as a survivor of both domestic violence and a more recent sexual assault, accused the coalition of advocating against common-sense bills to help victims if they could hurt the coalition’s finances, including some sponsored by her.
Testifying before an overflow crowd, Read said the bill is about oversight and accountability for a private nonprofit that has a monopoly on victim services in the state, receives 98 percent of its funding from the state and federal governments and performs “core government functions” under contract with the state attorney general’s office.
Those services include managing the state sex offender registry, training prosecutors and police in trauma-informed practices for dealing with victims, training Sexual Assault Nurse Examiners (SANE) and setting the standards for evidence collection, Read said.
The coalition has successfully opposed legislative attempts to redirect funding for those services to the state Office of Victim/Witness Assistance, which would be subject to legislative and public oversight, Read said.
“We have outsourced about $10 million to $12 million of public funds (annually) … to a private organization that is doing those core government functions, but without any of the accountability, without any of the (state Right-to-Know Law) access, without any of the overarching regulation structure that would normally keep a government agency in check,” Read said.
The bill was fiercely opposed by the coalition and its supporters, who accused Read and the bipartisan group of legislators who co-sponsored it of trying to silence the coalition, cripple it financially and destroy its reputation.
Lyn Schollett, the coalition’s executive director, called the bill part of a coordinated campaign of “harassing and stalking activity toward the coalition for a period of six-and-a-half years.”
“This bill is not an isolated event,” she said. “It is the culmination of a purposeful and targeted campaign intended both to silence us and to disrupt our work with victims.”
The coalition undergoes annual, independent audits and complies with extensive oversight by both the state and federal governments, to which it must submit reams of data and information, Schollett said.
“Many of the complaints that you are reading in the bill … come verbatim from complaints that have been filed before,” she said. “They’ve been filed with law enforcement agencies – local law enforcement agencies, state law enforcement agencies, the FBI, the Department of Justice in New Hampshire, the U.S. Attorney’s Office.”
But none of those complaints have gone anywhere, Schollett said.
“There’s one reason for that: It’s because these allegations are false.”
Rep. Alicia Gregg, D-Concord, who identified herself as a survivor of domestic violence, said that while transparency and oversight are important, “That’s not what this bill is about.”
“I have a hard time thinking that this is a good-faith bill when it takes away funding before an investigation is done,” Gregg said.
“The coalition would be prohibited from receiving state funding for the 24/7 crisis line, training for law enforcement and prosecutors on trauma-informed response, legal advocacy, court accompaniment for victims, coordination between the 12 member crisis centers in New Hampshire, for prevention education programs for schools and communities, technical assistance that helps local programs maximize their federal grants, and our statewide Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) program and anti-human trafficking efforts. All of these would be wiped out for two years,” Gregg said.
Rep. Jonah Wheeler, D-Peterborough and a cosponsor, said he did not believe the proposed law stripped out that funding, but that the bill’s sponsors would agree to an amendment removing language saying funding would be limited to providing “material” services to victims such as “shelter, food, or medicine.”
Read and other legislators and witnesses questioned financial settlements that the coalition received after aiding alleged sexual assault victims and connecting them with “preferred” law firms in high-profile civil lawsuits against St. Paul’s School, Phillips Exeter Academy and Dartmouth College – and the state Youth Development Center (YDC).
That last represents a conflict of interest because, at the same time the coalition works under contract to the attorney general’s office, the attorney general is defending the state in those civil lawsuits, they said.
Rep. Marjorie Smith, D-Durham, and Concord City Councilor Stacey Brown also questioned payments to individual coalition staff members to lobby for a New Hampshire version of “Marsy’s Law” in 2018. “Marsy’s Law,” which gives victims more rights in criminal proceedings and versions of which have been adopted by about a dozen states, failed as a proposed constitutional amendment in New Hampshire that year.
Others claimed the coalition was biased against male victims of sexual violence and questioned alleged discrepancies between the coalition’s reporting of its spending on lobbying and what its outside lobbyists reported receiving.
And several legislators accused the coalition of opposing bills intended to help victims instead of working with the sponsors to improve them. Those included the latest version of a bill sponsored by Read that would require doctors and police to inform victims in writing of their rights, including to forensic medical testing in cases of rape and sexual assault.
Schollett said the coalition works “inclusively” with police, prosecutors and medical experts on policies and legislation, but that many of the bills legislators have put forward with good intentions were deeply flawed or would have unintended consequences.
“For more than 50 years we have worked across the aisle; we have wonderful allies in both parties, and we want to continue engaging in that kind of bipartisan work,” said Schollett, the last person to testify at the three-and-a-half hour hearing. “Unfortunately, in the case of that bill, that attempt at collaboration devolved into very personal disagreement and hostility.”
Schollett noted that well over 1,000 people had registered their opposition to the bill online, including victims, community members, professionals and donors, “all of whom are prepared to speak not only to the integrity of our organization, but the impact of our services.”
In fiscal 2025, the coalition’s member organizations provided services to 9,144 victims of domestic violence, 2,241 victims of sexual assault, 1,058 stalking victims, 135 human trafficking victims, and 57 victims of teen dating violence, she said. Of the total, more than 1,000 were children and teens younger than 18 and 1,182 were men.
Schollett and others said that the bill, by tarnishing the coalition’s reputation, could make victims afraid to seek help.
“What this bill ultimately does is it undermines trust in those organizations that victims need to come to for help, and it will chill the advocacy that we are able to provide to vulnerable people,” she said.