39 people sue agencies over alleged sex abuse at Baltimore County youth facility

BALTIMORE — Thirty-nine people have sued three Maryland agencies for placing them in, and failing to regulate, a residential facility for troubled children in Halethorpe where they say they were sexually abused.

Two lawsuits were filed Tuesday in Baltimore Circuit Court alleging the state’s Department of Juvenile Services and Department of Human Services sent children to a privately run residential treatment program in Baltimore County, and that those agencies, along with the Department of Health, failed to monitor the program while children were sexually abused there.

Sisters of the Good Shepherd Province of Mid-North America, a Catholic order, owned and operated the program known as Good Shepherd Services from 1970 until it closed in 2017.

The plaintiffs, mostly women identified only by their initials in the lawsuits, range in age from 23 to 55. The complaints describe allegations that occurred as recently as the year the facility closed and as far as four decades back. It says children were abused by guards, counselors and teachers as well as nuns and priests.

“The Good Shepherd Services treatment center was a site of unimaginable trauma for Maryland’s most vulnerable children,” read one the complaints, filed for 13 plaintiffs by attorneys from the firms Levy Konigsberg, of New York, and Brown Kiely, of Bethesda. “Though Good Shepherd was run by a private religious organization, the State of Maryland regularly sent children in need of mental health care to the facility, forcing these children into confinement in a cruel and inhumane environment where they suffered horrific sexual abuse.”

Staff often bribed and groomed children before abusing them in their bedrooms, confinement cells, classrooms and offices, according to the lawsuits. Some abusers drugged their victims. Some told the children they took advantage of, most of them vulnerable and disenfranchised, that nobody would believe them if they reported the abuse.

“The state hired them to take care of us and help us and they ultimately ended up being the people that hurt us the most,” said one survivor, a 27-year-old woman from Washington who asked to be identified by her initials, E.M.

E.M. is part of a lawsuit filed by the firm Slater Slater Schulman on behalf of 26 women who say they were sexually abused at Good Shepherd. The Baltimore Sun does not name victims of sexual abuse without their consent.

A child of the state foster care system, E.M. said the Department of Human Services sent her to Good Shepherd around 2012, when she was 15. Once there, she said, faced staff who withheld food and access to hygiene to incentivize attacks between children, then placed “bets on us fighting each other like we were pit bulls.”

There also was abuse.

A man in his mid-20s brought E.M. food from McDonald's and a cellphone to use, according to the lawsuit. Then, he sexually assaulted her at least three or four times.

“Every day there, I lived in fear. It was like being in Riker’s Island,” said E.M, referring to the notorious New York City jail. “It was no place for a kid, no place for children who needed professional help.”

The co-ed residential treatment center in Baltimore County served as a destination for children in state foster care and incarcerated by the Department of Juvenile Services. The state health department regulates residential treatment centers.

Spokespeople for the agencies said in a joint statement the state hadn’t been served with the lawsuits yet.

“However, the Departments of Health, Human Services and Juvenile Services work to ensure the safety and well-being of all children and youth placed in state care,” the agencies said. “We take allegations of sexual abuse of children in our care seriously.”

Sisters of the Good Shepherd Province of Mid-North America did not respond to a request for comment.

Both lawsuits cited The Baltimore Sun’s previous reporting about the troubled treatment facility.

In 2016, The Sun reported that several state agencies had stopped sending children to Good Shepherd after regulators cited it for a lack of supervision following the sexual assault of one patient and reports of others showing signs of overdose using stolen medicines. Good Shepherd shuttered the facility in Halethorpe the next year.

The lawsuits filed Tuesday add to widespread allegations of rampant abuse in facilities run or used by the state’s juvenile services agency. In the last year, complaints have focused on the former Thomas J.S. Waxter Children’s Center, a detention facility for girls in Laurel, and the Charles H. Hickey Jr. School, a detention facility for boys near Loch Raven in Baltimore County, among others.

The complaints filed Tuesday are the latest filed under Maryland’s nascent Child Victims Act, which attorney Adam Slater credited with empowering victims and their lawyers to hold institutions accountable for abuse, when the survivors are ready.

Enacted last spring, the act took effect Oct. 1. It lifted a previous time limit for survivors to sue perpetrators and the institutions that enabled their abuse. A flurry of lawsuits followed, targeting the likes of churches, schools and state agencies for abuse allegedly committed by priests, teachers and others who held positions of authority over children.

The new law also faced a prompt, if expected, legal challenge. Responding to a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging priests and other church employees sexually abused children, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington challenged the Child Victims Act as unconstitutional.

A Prince George’s County judge last week ruled the law was constitutional, but the Washington diocese, taking advantage of a provision legislators included in the act, is pursuing a mid-lawsuit appeal. That appeal will go to the intermediate Appellate Court of Maryland, but scholars expect the state Supreme Court to ultimately decide the novel legal question.

When the high court takes up the appeal, experts say, lawsuits like the ones Tuesday will pause until the Supreme Court justices vote on the law.

“We’re confident the Maryland Child Victims Act will be fully upheld by the Supreme Court of Maryland,” Slater said.

The complaints filed Tuesday charge negligence, negligent hiring, and cruel and unusual punishment.

According to one of the lawsuits, a girl who was in state custody at Good Shepherd Services for about three years in the mid-2000s, when she was approximately 13 to 16 years old, was sexually assaulted in her room by female staff members about three times a week and every other weekend.

She “was then forced to go see a priest for confession every two weeks,” that complaint says.

When she told the priest about the abuse, he told her she needed to “enjoy the love that you get when you’re here,” and proceeded to rape her, according to the lawsuit. The priest allegedly continued to rape her every two weeks throughout her time incarcerated at Good Shepherd.

Two members of Good Shepherd’s “behavioral intervention” team abused a girl from 2006 to 2008, when she was approximately 14 to 16 years old, the other complaint said. The men allegedly threatened her with violence, loss of privileges, such as phone calls, and placement in solitary confinement if she did not comply with their abuse. The men also bribed her with food.

According to that lawsuit, a different employee sexually assaulted a girl eight to 10 times by entering her cell under the pretext of conducting “wellness checks.” In another case, the complaint said, an abuser regularly injected a girl with sedatives before raping her.

The complaint filed on behalf of 26 women described victims going to great lengths to avoid continued torment. Some ran away. Others threatened violence. In one case, a girl cut her arms with razors and swallowed batteries “in an attempt to escape the sexual abuse.” There was at least one suicide.

“Some of us didn’t even make it out of there alive,” said E.M., recalling that a fellow resident saved her from a suicide attempt. “The pain was just so much that a couple of girls couldn’t take it anymore.”

The lawsuits allege state agencies knew, or should have known, children were being sexually abused at Good Shepherd.

“Due to Defendants’ negligence in allowing this culture of sexual abuse to flourish and in failing to protect the children in their custody, including Plaintiffs, Plaintiffs suffered physical, emotional, and psychological trauma, leading to significant anguish and distress that they will be forced to live with for the rest of their lives,” one complaint said.

E.M. said she continues to do therapy a decade later.

“I find it extremely hard to make and maintain romantic relationships and to make and maintain friendships,” she said. “I suffer from PTSD, nightmares and maladaptive daydreaming about what happened. I could be talking to you one minute and then the next it’s like I’m back there. It’s been really hard.”

Calling the lawsuits a step in the right direction toward holding perpetrators accountable, E.M. said she still prays every day that she and other survivors “find some source of peace.”

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