A jury in Middlesex County, New Jersey, returned a $25 million verdict in a suit against the state Department of Children and Families over allegations that the plaintiff endured years of sexual abuse in foster homes as a child.
Lawyers for both sides reached a high-low agreement with parameters of $4 million and $12 million just before closing arguments.
The suit was brought under a 2019 statute that extends the statute of limitations for survivors of sexual abuse to file suit against their abusers.
Although that statute has generated a large volume of suits, the present case is one of a small number that has gone to trial, said Matthew Bonanno of Rebenack Aronow Mascolo in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who along with Vincent Nappo of Pfau Cochran Vertetis Amala in Seattle, Washington, represented plaintiff Niema Jones.
Jones, now 39, said four men sexually assaulted her at various times when she was in the custody of DCF in the 1990s.
A key dispute in the case was Jones’ claim that DCF failed to give her proper care after her first sexual assault, when she was 6, Bonanno said.
Jones’ records showed that psychotherapy was recommended after the first sexual assault but it was never provided, Bonanno said.
“One of our main theories of liability was they deprived her of the protective aspects of psychotherapy where she would have an opportunity to talk within a safe space,” Bonanno said.
Counsel for the state claimed that the failure to provide Jones with therapy was not a proximate cause of her sexual abuse, according to Bonanno. The state’s lawyer claimed that psychotherapy can have varying outcomes and there was no guarantee that meeting with a therapist would benefit Jones, Bonanno said.
But lawyers for Jones argued that psychotherapy could help her understand she didn’t do anything wrong to cause the abuse and that she could establish boundaries with other people.
“By depriving her of that, it resulted in continuing sexual abuse,” Bonanno said.
After Jones disclosed the first sexual abuse incident, her caseworker and her foster mother both told her not to discuss what happened and to put it out of her mind, Bonanno said. And some of her abusers told her bad things would happen to her if she reported the abuse to anyone else, he said.
“Those are the exact types of things that a trained trauma therapist would erase and say, listen, you need to speak up,” Bonanno said.
Jones was taken away from her parents because they were drug abusers, Bonanno said. Jones’ first sexual assault took place when her foster mother was hospitalized due to a car crash, Bonanno said. Jones and four other children were moved from the foster home to the home of a friend of the foster mother, which was not an approved foster home, Bonanno said. In that home, Jones was assaulted by a man living in the house, Bonanno said.
Later, Jones was placed in another foster home where she had to share a bed with the foster parent’s 21-year-old son, who molested her, Bonanno said. Jones then moved to another foster home, where her foster father molested her once, Bonanno said. That family also had a biological son, nine years her senior, who molested Jones two to three times a week for more than two years, Bonanno said.
At age 9, Jones was returned to the custody of her biological parents, where she stayed for five years, although they lived in an abandoned house, Bonanno said. As a teenager, she moved in with a pastor who ran a youth program and his family, he said.
Jones had done poorly in school, but after the pastor’s family took her in, “her whole life turned around” and she finished high school in three years, Bonanno said. Jones soon earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees, worked for a time at the DCF, and now works as a school counselor, he said. She filed the suit in 2019.
Bonanno described Jones as a highly credible witness who has “been consistent in all of this and has as clear a memory as I’ve ever seen in a client for the past 25 years.”
Before trial, the state offered Jones $150,000 to settle, and two weeks into trial, the state’s offer increased to $1.5 million, Bonanno said.
After a two-week trial before Judge Patrick Bradshaw, the jury found the state grossly negligent, and that its gross negligence was the proximate cause of Jones’ abuse.
The jury found that the DCF and the Division of Child Protection and Permanency were 99% at fault in proximately causing Jones’ abuse and the four men who committed the assaults were, collectively, 1% at fault.
The jury declined to apportion fault to the foster mother whose son assaulted Jones for two years.
The jury awarded $15 million for Jones’ past pain and suffering and $10 million for her future pain and suffering.
Jones is satisfied with the $12 million award she will receive pursuant to the high-low agreement, which also calls for a waiver of all appeals, Bonanno said.
In the courtroom, after hearing that the jury apportioned 99% of fault to the state, Bonanno said, “My client and I looked at each other, and we said that’s justice, before the number even came down. And the number came down, and it was obviously life-changing. So her dream is to open a nonprofit for girls who have been sexually abused like she was. Now, this gives her the opportunity to do that.”
Charles Vaccaro and John North of Greenbaum Rowe Smith & Davis in Iselin, New Jersey, representing the state, confirmed the verdict and high-low agreement but declined to comment. The Office of the Attorney General and the DCF did not respond to requests for comment.
