The second of what could ultimately swell to hundreds of civil trials stemming from claims of child abuse in state-run or contracted youth facilities is set to begin on Monday in Merrimack Superior Court.
The plaintiff in the case, Kristy Gesse, will argue that the state was liable for the months of sexual abuse she endured as a teenager while living in a Deerfield group home in the early 1990s.
The trial, which is scheduled to last three weeks, will likely serve as a test for whether juries are inclined to assign blame to the state for abuse that occurred in the private facilities where children were sent.
Unlike the bulk of more than 1,600 people who have filed lawsuits against the state over the past five years for abuse experienced in state facilities as children, Gesse was never held in a youth detention facility or abused by a state employee.
Instead, her abuser was Peter Tsetsilas, according to court records, the co-owner of Saddleback Mountain Retreat on Deerfield’s Saddleback Mountain Road. Tsetsilas groomed Gesse and then ultimately sexually assaulted her over one hundred times between October 1992 and February 1993, according to the complaint filed in the case. The abuse ended when Concord police conducted a welfare check at a motel in the city to which Tsetsilas had brought her.
Lawyers for Gesse will argue that the state knew or should have known that Tsetsilas posed a danger to children due to his previous history. Almost a decade before Gesse was placed in Tsetsilas’s care, another child living in the group home reported to state police and a child welfare employee that she had been abused by him too, according to police reports.
Gesse’s lawyers also plan to introduce evidence about widespread abuse at a separate group home in Canaan in the early 1980s.
The state, meanwhile, is expected to argue that blame for Gesse’s abuse rests with Tsetsilas, his wife, and Gesse’s mother and stepfather, according to court records.
Neither Peter Tsetsilas nor his wife is still alive.
The Concord Monitor does not identify victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to come forward publicly, as Gesse has done.
During the trial, both Gesse and the woman who reported Tsetsilas to state police a decade earlier may testify, according to a witness list.
The case is the first in New Hampshire’s sprawling youth abuse scandal to go to trial in civil court since a jury found the state liable in 2024 for the abuse experienced by David Meehan in the state’s Youth Development Center. (Other criminal cases have proceeded since then.)
The jury awarded Meehan $38 million in damages, but the award led to a still-unresolved dispute because of a clerical error on the verdict form. That dispute, which the state’s Supreme Court must rule on, has stalled hundreds of other cases that involved abuse in the state’s youth detention facilities.
However, the approximately 150 cases like Gesse’s that solely involve claims of abuse in state-contracted facilities can proceed. Gesse’s trial is occurring first because it was selected by lawyers representing her and the state.
Gesse is part of a group of plaintiffs who are ineligible to receive compensation through the state-established settlement fund because they either were not held in a state-run youth detention facility, did not experience abuse there, or both.
“The system created two different legal paths,” Meehan wrote in a statement released by his lawyers. “That was never our choice.
“The YDC Settlement Fund was only for the ones abused in the state-run places,” he added. “A lot of survivors who got hurt in contracted homes got left out. For them, the courtroom is the main path left.”
Both Meehan and Gesse are represented by the law firms Nixon Peabody and Rilee & Associates.
