The NHCADSV has issued a statement on the Cornell 7 story. How ironic. Please remember that the NHCADSV’s own attorney, David Vicinanzo, successfully petitioned Merrimack County DA/Superior Court to block publication of the Grand Jury Criminal Investigation into St. Paul’s School. Vicinanzo, per RTK emails from the AG’s office, represented multiple parties with conflicting interests, per Associate AG Jane Young. He represented: respondents/defendants as well as one victim/complainant, and he represented the NHCADSV, who got a contract out of it all.
Lacy Crawford came forward to the AG’s office with a report about her alleged sexual assault at the school in the 1990s. Concord Police Detective Julie Curtin called her back, and her information was given to private attorneys as well. Julie Curtin told her she had the go-ahead to get Lacy Crawford’s files from St. Paul’s, which she then obtained but wouldn’t share them with Lacy Crawford, who spent years trying to get them back from Concord Police Chief Bradley Osgood.
According to Lacy’s account in her memoir “Notes on a Silencing”, her report of her sexual assault was not included in the final report in the Grand Jury because of the failure of the police and civil attorneys to follow professional codes of conduct. In fact, there is a letter from Jane Young to Concord Police Chief Bradley Osgood about these failures dated September 21, 2017, and addressing the conflicts of interest between their offices.
Concord PD, Police Standards and Training, and the AG’s office have failed for 6 years to give me records on Julie Curtin. This week I finally got Julie Curtin’s Form B records. Guess what: She was “demoted” on May 19, 2015, effective June 7, 2015 – right before she was called as a principal witness and principal investigator in NH v Owen Labrie (August 2015), and NOBODY was told. Reasons for demotion are either an alternative to firing or because the person failed their probationary period at a higher-level position (Sargent in her case). Yet the NHCADSV gave her an award in 2016 for “justice for the victim”.
The NHCADSV was also fast to support Rapuano & Does v. Dartmouth College, which led to a $14 million settlement that included a provision for WISE to work more closely with the college and a CY PRES award for the NHCADSV. What was the result of that? Nothing. In 2020 1000 students signed a petition demanding due process for Maha Hasan Alshawi, who went on hunger strike because the college allegedly ignored her rape claims.
Another student I met went to the Title IX office to complain because a student intruder climbed into her and her roommate’s dorm to try to sexually assault them. WISE and the Title IX office were useless. She ended up suing the college. Another student committed suicide per news reports after an alleged sexual assault at Dartmouth. What was the point of Rapuano & Does v. Dartmouth, outside of the $4.9 million in attorney fees and the money to NHCADSV? The 9 complainants got $75 K each.
The NHCADSV also praised Phillips Exeter Academy for “leaving no stone unturned.” But this was untrue. Precisely during the period being investigated, a teacher was having an ongoing unlawful sexual relationship with a student, which eventually came out years later, and he is now in prison serving a 12-year prison sentence. The NHCADSV were curiously quiet about it.
Meanwhile, thanks to their MOU with Phillips Exeter Academy, the following messes happened: Mr. Weber was framed for sexual assault that his “victim” (Nancy Jo Sales) said never happened (see Vanity Fair article “Mr. Weber’s Confession”); John Doe was framed for an alleged sexual assault on Jane Roe but when his parents petitioned to get the “investigator’s” reports, they found that the school’s attorneys, Nixon Peabody (also the attorneys for the NHCADSV) hired the investigator and that there was a combined effort to find a certain outcome against John Doe. He was awarded $17-27K in damages in November 2017 under Judge Joseph LaPlante; DCYF admitted to deleting files of sexual misconduct at the school. Governor Hassan’s husband, Tom Hassan, was the principal. Governor Hassan appointed AG Foster, who declined to prosecute perpetrators of sexual assault at Phillips Exeter Academy. The NHCADSV said nothing about that and nothing about DCYF deleting files. It is contracted with DCYF to prevent sexual abuse, yet it continues at YDC and other youth facilities in NH. So what is it actually doing?
If the State of New Hampshire wants to actually address sexual assault and prevent it, then stop having “experts” from the NHCADSV and its crisis centers who are inconsistently trained, with poor management and little knowledge of actual laws. See the Keene Sentinel article on the closing and receivership of Monadnock Crisis Center, for example, or the NHCADSV’s SANE nurse statement during the hearing of HB1633, in which she admitted that she was not aware that over-the-counter rape kits had been banned in NH.
Guess what – it was the NHCADSV who lobbied to get them banned, and Governor Sununu signed the bill in 2020. Six years ago. Or look at the NHCADSV’s statements on why HB1633 shouldn’t have passed – their statements DIRECTLY contradict national best practices, which the NHCADSV sent to the AG’s office verbatim several years ago and which I have through Right to Know.
UNH has a whole department to address sexual assault: the Prevention Innovation Research Center. It’s tied to the NHCADSV and has received millions upon millions for “bystander” training from the federal government. It receives money to create propaganda programs as well. But students at UNH have protested at the university’s failure to address sexual assault.
Maybe the NHCADSV should think about its own role in the cover-ups of campus sexual assault before it starts criticizing others in other states.
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