The New Hampshire attorney general agreed to a $10 million to a man who alleged that he was gang-raped in a stairwell at the state’s youth detention center in the 1990s. Michael Gilpatrick’s lawsuit against the state would have been the second of more than 1,300 to go to trial. The payout is four times the maximum amount available to those who submit claims via the state settlement fund for abuse victims, though less than half the amount a jury awarded last May in first lawsuit of its kind that went to trial. The $38 million verdict remains in dispute as the state seeks to slash it to $475,000, reports the Associated Press.
Gilpatrick, now 41, was 14 when he was sent to the Youth Development Center for three years in 1997. His lawsuit accused 10 staffers of sexual or physical abuse, including repeated rapes and being choked to the point of unconsciousness. “There was nobody you could go ... You literally stuck in your own thoughts, in your own fear every single day,” he said in 2021. “That place turned us into what we were ... . coming out of that place, I was a monster.” In one incident, Gilpatrick said, two staffers held him down in a stairwell while another raped him and a fourth man forced him to perform a sex act. Those allegations resulted in criminal charges against four former staffers whom Gilpatrick called a “hit squad." Brad Asbury, 70, was sentenced to 20 to 40 years in prison after being convicted in November of being an accomplice to aggravated sexual assault. “The four of them used to roll together, and they would go to different cottages and beat kids,” Gilpatrick testified. “They would literally come over and just go door to door and beat every single one of us, down the line.”
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