Sex abuse lawsuit targets three Maryland agencies for Baltimore County youth residential treatment program with Good Shepherd Services

Twenty-six women have sued three Maryland agencies for placing them in a residential facility for troubled children where they say they were sexually abused.

Filed Tuesday in Baltimore Circuit Court, the complaint alleges that the state’s Department of Juvenile Services, Department of Human Services and Department of Health sent children with behavioral health issues to Good Shepherd Services’ residential treatment facility in Halethorpe despite allegations of abuse there.

The facility was owned and operated by Sisters of the Good Shepherd Province of Mid-North America, a Catholic order.

The plaintiffs, who are identified only by initials in the lawsuit, range in age from 23 to 55. While the complaint did not always specify the years in which the abuse happened, it listed the approximate ages of the victims when they were abused, suggesting the abuse happened as recently as 2017 and as far as four decades back.

Staff members, including priests and nuns, abused girls in their bedrooms, in offices and away from the facility, according to the lawsuit. Some employees allegedly bought girls gifts before abusing them. Others drugged their victims. Some told the girls they abused, 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.

The Baltimore Sun does not name victims of sexual abuse without their consent.

The Department of Human Services sent E.M., who was in the custody of state foster care, to Good Shepherd around 2012, when she was about 15. She said she 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 McDonalds 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 jail in New York City. “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 departments of juvenile services, human services and health did not respond immediately to requests for comment Tuesday.

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

Attorney Adam Slater, whose firm is representing the plaintiffs, said the complaint was only the “tip of the iceberg” of abuse perpetrated in residential treatment programs for children in Maryland, but provided context of the scope of how pervasive the abuse was “and how long this has been going on.”

“We have clients all the way from the ’60s that were sexually abused, all the way to 2017,” Slater said in an interview.

His firm wrote in the complaint that the state agencies “utterly failed to train, supervise, or discipline employees and/or agents with regard to the prevention of the sexual abuse of children under their care.”

“This repeated failure, despite notice of widespread sexual abuse, constitutes a pattern and practice of allowing such sexual abuse to occur, in violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the Maryland State Constitution,” the complaint continued.

It is the latest lawsuit filed under Maryland’s Child Victims Act, which lifted a previous time limit for survivors to sue perpetrators and the institutions that enabled their abuse.

Enacted last spring, the law took effect Oct. 1. A flurry of complaints 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 law also faced a prompt, if expected, legal challenge. Responding to a 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 one the 26 women filed 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. “We think the lower court got it right and we expect the Supreme Court to follow suit.”

The complaint filed by Slater’s firm charges charges negligence and negligent hiring among other counts,

According to the lawsuit, one girl, who was in state custody at Good Shepherd Services for about three years in the mid-2000s, from 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,” the 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.

The complaint says four different staff members abused another girl.

In a different case, four residents sexually abused a victim, according to the lawsuit. When she reported abuse to staff, “nothing was done,” with some employees even watching her abuse.

The complaint says victims had to go 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.”

State agencies, the complaint says, “knew, or should have known, that these staff members were sexually abusing children at Good Shepherd Services … these residents and staff members were not being adequately supervised, monitored, or surveilled by Defendants. Upon information and belief, Defendants’ failure to supervise, discipline, remove, and/or otherwise investigate these staff members directly enabled the above-described sexual abuse.”

As a result of their abuse, the women’s quality of life and earning capacity suffered, according to the lawsuit. They also have had to pay for medical and psychological care.

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.”

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

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