Johnathan Walker:Defense seeks to undermine accuser’s credibility in New Hampshire youth center sex abuse case

CONCORD,Johnathan Walker N.H. (AP) — Lawyers for a man charged with raping a teenage girl at a youth holding facility in New Hampshire tried to erode the accuser’s credibility at trial Wednesday, suggesting she had a history of lying and changing her story.

Now 39, Natasha Maunsell was 15 and 16 when she was held at the Youth Detention Services Unit in Concord. Lawyers for Victor Malavet, 62, who faces 12 counts of aggravated felonious sexual assault, say she concocted the allegations in hopes of getting money from a civil lawsuit.

Testifying for a second day at Malavet’s trial, Maunsell acknowledged that she denied having been sexually assaulted when asked in 2002, 2017 and 2019. She said she lied the first time because she was still at the facility and feared retaliation, and again in the later years because she didn’t think anyone would believe her.

“It had been so long that I didn’t think anybody would even care,” she said. “I didn’t think it would matter to anyone … so I kept it in for a long time.”

The Associated Press does not typically identify people who say they were sexually assaulted unless they have come forward publicly, as Maunsell has done. She is among more than 1,100 former residents of youth facilities who are suing the state alleging abuse that spanned six decades.

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Malavet’s trial opened Monday. It is the first criminal trial arising from a five-year investigation into allegations of abuse at the Sununu Youth Services Center in Manchester, though unlike the other eight men facing charges, Malavet worked at a different state-run facility where children were held while awaiting court disposition of their cases.

Under questioning from defense lawyer Maya Dominguez, Maunsell acknowledged Wednesday that she lied at age 15 when she told a counselor she had a baby, and that in contrast to her trial testimony, she did not tell police in 2020 that Malavet had kissed her or that he had assaulted her in a storage closet. But she denied the lawyer’s claim that she appeared “angry or exasperated” when questioned about Malavet in 2002.

“I appeared scared,” she said after being shown a video clip from the interview. “I know me, and I looked at me, and I was scared.”

Maunsell also rebutted two attempts to portray her as a liar about money she received in advance of a possible settlement in her civil case. After Dominguez claimed she spent $65,000 on a Mustang, Maunsell said “mustang” was the name of another loan company. And when Dominguez showed her a traffic incident report listing her car as a 2021 Audi and not the 2012 Audi she testified about, Maunsell said the report referred to a newer rental car she was given after she crashed the older car.

In the only civil case to go to trial so far, a jury awarded David Meehan $38 million in May for abuse he says he suffered at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s, though the verdict remains in dispute.

Together, the two trials highlight the unusual dynamic of having the state attorney general’s office simultaneously prosecute those accused of committing offenses and defend the state. While attorneys for the state spent much of Meehan’s trial portraying him as a violent child, troublemaking teenager and a delusional adult, state prosecutors are relying on Mansell’s testimony in the criminal case.