Hyde School Lawsuit: Allegations, AI Filing Sanctions, and Status

The Hyde School lawsuit is a federal class action filed in July 2025 by former student Jessica Fuller against the private boarding school in Bath, Maine, and five members of its founding Gauld family, alleging forced labor, physical and emotional abuse, and trafficking carried out under the school’s “character development” program. The case, Fuller v. Hyde School, is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maine before Judge Stacey D. Neumann, and as of June 2026 it remains at the motion-to-dismiss stage.¹

What the Complaint Alleges

The complaint, filed on July 11, 2025, and amended on July 31, describes a decades-long pattern of compelled unpaid labor, physical abuse, and psychological coercion at the school.¹

At the center of the allegations is a program students knew as “Work Crew” or “2-4.” According to the complaint, students were pulled from bed at 5:36 a.m. and put to work on campus maintenance, landscaping at staff and Gauld family homes, cleaning bathrooms and areas containing asbestos, building structures, and clearing trails at off-site properties including the Lennox Outdoor Leadership Center and Seguin Island. The plaintiff’s attorney said students performed these tasks “for the majority of the day at the expense of their academic education.”²³

The complaint also alleges physical abuse. Students were slammed into walls, choked, and forced into pre-dawn exercise sessions until they passed out or vomited, according to the filing. One example cited in the complaint involves a student with a broken hip being forced to run; another describes a student made to do sit-ups in dog feces.³⁴

Emotional abuse allegedly took the form of “attack therapy,” which the complaint describes as verbal humiliation in group settings, along with a peer surveillance system called “Brother’s Keeper.” Students were required to publicly disclose personal trauma, had contact with their families restricted, and were denied medical care, the filing says.³

The “2-4” disciplinary system itself allegedly involved prolonged isolation, food restrictions (sometimes limited to peanut butter and jelly), and suspension of academic instruction. The complaint alleges that threats of further isolation, food deprivation, or physical punishment were used to keep students working.³

Who Is Being Sued

The lawsuit names Hyde School, a 501(c)(3) organization chartered in Maine, along with five members of the Gauld family:³

Laura Gauld, president and head of school.
Malcolm Gauld, executive director and son of founder Joseph Gauld; previously president from 1998 to 2018 and headmaster from 1987 to 1998.
Georgia “Gigi” Gauld MacMillan, executive director of family education and former head of campus for both the Maine and Connecticut locations.
Donald MacMillan, former head of school and current staff teacher.
Laurie Gauld Hurd, director of community engagement.

The complaint characterizes the family as running the school as a “coordinated enterprise” that maximized revenue while concealing punitive practices behind marketing that promised a safe character-development environment.³

The Legal Theory

The suit asserts violations of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, specifically 18 U.S.C. § 1589, which prohibits forced labor. It also invokes Title 17 of Maine’s Revised Statutes.¹

The complaint originally included state tort claims for negligence and negligent infliction of emotional distress, but the plaintiff voluntarily withdrew those after the defendants filed their motion to dismiss in October 2025.¹ Using a federal trafficking statute against a boarding school is an unusual approach, but plaintiffs’ attorneys in cases against residential adolescent programs have increasingly turned to the TVPA, arguing that compelled student labor meets the statute’s definition of forced labor.⁵

The case is brought by Justice Law Collaborative and co-counsel Island Justice Law on behalf of Fuller and a proposed class of former students.⁴ Attorneys have said they aim to represent more than 100 former students, but class certification cannot be sought until the motion to dismiss is resolved.⁶

Hyde School’s Response

A school representative has denied the allegations, calling them “grossly mischaracterized or patently false.”²

On October 7, 2025, attorneys for the school filed a motion to dismiss on several grounds. They argued that Fuller, who attended from July 2014 to February 2015, lacks standing; that the alleged labor does not meet the legal threshold for coercion under the trafficking statute; that certain named defendants were not employed at the school during Fuller’s time there; and that the statute of limitations for the now-withdrawn negligence claims had expired.⁶

Sanctions Over AI-Generated Filings

The case attracted national attention in May 2026 when Judge Neumann sanctioned the plaintiff’s lead attorney, Kelly Guagenty of Justice Law Collaborative, for submitting filings containing fabricated and inaccurate legal citations generated by ChatGPT and Claude.⁷

The issue surfaced in late 2025, when Hyde School’s attorneys pointed out that cases cited in Guagenty’s opposition to the motion to dismiss had “nothing to do with forced labor claims,” and that the filings misquoted Maine’s human trafficking law.⁸ Guagenty, a Massachusetts-based attorney admitted specially for this case, acknowledged the errors and attributed them to an “admittedly poorly overseen” drafting process in which AI-generated material was not independently verified.⁹

On May 5, 2026, after an order to show cause, Judge Neumann issued a non-monetary sanctions order. She wrote that while AI “can be an aid,” its use does not abdicate an attorney’s “nondelegable duties of diligence, candor, and reasonable inquiry.”⁷⁹¹

Where the Case Stands

As of early June 2026, Fuller v. Hyde School is still awaiting a ruling on the motion to dismiss. The defendants’ reply to the plaintiff’s amended opposition was due June 3, 2026. Class certification has not yet been sought, no trial date is set, and there is no public indication of settlement talks.¹⁶

A separate Connecticut state court case, Jane Doe v. Hyde School at South Woodstock Inc., resulted in a judgment on February 2, 2026, though the details of its allegations and outcome have not been publicly reported.¹⁰

Alumni Accounts

Since the lawsuit was filed, alumni from both the Maine and Connecticut campuses have spoken publicly. Britt DiGiacomo, who attended the Woodstock, Connecticut, campus for three and a half years, has described the environment as “militaristic,” with 5:30 a.m. workouts and a punishment called “24s” — 24 hours of isolation, cleaning, and forced self-reflection for rule violations.¹¹

DiGiacomo said the “Brother’s Keeper” system “created a hierarchy of informants and interrogators” that “rewarded betrayal, punished privacy, and manufactured fear.”¹² She recounted events called “school busts,” in which all activities halted and students were herded into a theater, sometimes for hours without food or water, and pressured to go on stage to confess personal information and identify other students who had broken rules.¹¹ In a February 2026 opinion piece, she wrote: “What Hyde called ‘character’ was just control.”¹³

The Broader Litigation Landscape

The Hyde School case is part of a growing wave of lawsuits targeting residential programs for adolescents, an industry that remains largely unregulated at the federal level.⁵

The most notable recent precedent came in June 2025, when a federal judge approved a $2.3 million class action settlement against Trinity Teen Solutions, a Wyoming program where more than 250 former residents alleged they had been forced to perform agricultural labor including laying irrigation pipes, repairing fences, and castrating animals. Trinity and its owners admitted no wrongdoing.¹⁴ That case took four years to resolve. In June 2024, a jury awarded $2.55 million to a parent who sued Arizona’s Spring Ridge Academy for fraud after staff allegedly coerced and abused students.⁵

Attorneys in these cases point to persistent obstacles: poor recordkeeping by facilities, short statutes of limitations, and the fact that many disciplinary tactics, however extreme, are not explicitly illegal.⁵

1
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Fuller v. Hyde School
2
WMTW. Former Student Sues Maine Boarding School Alleging Forced Child Labor
3
Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse. Fuller v. Hyde School Complaint
4
Justice Law Collaborative. Justice Law Collaborative and Island Justice Law File Class Action Lawsuit Against Hyde School Maine
5
Reuters. Troubled Teen Industry: Scrutiny Builds, Litigation Follows
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Portland Press Herald. Hyde School Asks Judge to Dismiss Lawsuit Alleging Forced Labor and Abuse
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Portland Press Herald. Attorney in Hyde School Lawsuit Sanctioned for AI Misuse but Case Will Continue
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Portland Press Herald. Hyde School Lawsuit’s Future Unclear Following Attorney Errors in Legal Docs
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GovInfo. Order Imposing Sanctions, Fuller v. Hyde School
10
CaseMine. Doe, Jane v. Hyde School at South Woodstock Inc
11
Britt DiGiacomo. Hyde School Lawsuit: It’s About Time
12
CT Insider. Hyde School Woodstock CT
13
Portland Press Herald. Still Waiting on Accountability From Hyde School
14
NBC News. Wyoming Troubled Teen Program Settles Lawsuit