Jamesburg Abuse Lawsuits: Claims, Named Facilities, and Payouts

More than 350 men have sued the State of New Jersey over sexual abuse they say they endured as children at the New Jersey Training School in Monroe Township, the juvenile facility widely known as Jamesburg. The Jamesburg abuse lawsuits were consolidated in May 2025 into a single multicounty proceeding in Middlesex County, and state budget documents project the eventual cost to New Jersey at no less than $340 million.¹

What the Plaintiffs Say Happened

The complaints describe a pattern of sexual abuse at Jamesburg running from the 1970s into the 2010s. Officers, counselors, and other staff are accused of assaulting boys in their custody through acts ranging from groping and forced masturbation to oral copulation and rape, using bribes, threats, and physical force to carry out and then conceal what they did.²

Randolph McLeod, one of the survivors, told reporters the abuse was “too graphic to even describe” and said officers threatened to harm his mother in the parking lot if he spoke up. Plaintiffs’ attorney Jerome Block testified that some children sent to secure facilities for addiction treatment were “bribed with drugs to engage in sexual activity.” Stacy Hughes, another attorney for victims, called the facilities “hunting grounds for predators and dumping grounds for children who the state believes should be forgotten and silenced.” Survivor Tormel Pittman described the state’s failure to act over the decades as “benign neglect,” noting the facilities disproportionately housed Black and Latino youth treated as “voiceless.”³

Which Facilities Are Named

The first major filing came in January 2024, when the firm Levy Konigsberg sued on behalf of 50 men who alleged abuse at Jamesburg.² By mid-2025 the same firm represented more than 400 survivors of abuse at facilities across the state.⁴

Jamesburg is the largest single target, but the litigation reaches other state-run sites as well:

Juvenile Medium Security Facility in Bordentown, with allegations against guards, counselors, nurses, and teachers.
Female Secure Care and Intake Facility in Bordentown.
Lloyd McCorkle Training School at Skillman, covering the 1980s before that facility closed in 1992.
Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center, now closed, where prior abuse settlements have already cost the state tens of millions of dollars.

County-run juvenile detention centers in Middlesex, Morris, and Union counties, along with Atlantic County’s Harborfields facility, have also been sued.⁴ Separately, in March 2025, Levy Konigsberg filed on behalf of 23 survivors against Daytop Village, a private adolescent substance abuse program that operated until 2020. That complaint alleges staff provided drugs and alcohol to residents to facilitate abuse and that the state was responsible for court-ordering youth into the program and then failing to monitor conditions.⁵

The 2019 Law That Made the Filings Possible

Almost all of these claims would have been time-barred under the rules that existed a decade ago. Governor Phil Murphy signed legislation on May 13, 2019, that extended New Jersey’s civil statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse to age 55, or seven years from when a survivor recognized the connection between the abuse and the harm suffered, whichever came later.⁶ The old deadline had been just two years after turning 18.

The same law opened a two-year look-back window from December 1, 2019, through November 30, 2021, letting survivors of any age revive claims that had previously expired. It also carved exceptions into the New Jersey Tort Claims Act and the Charitable Immunity Act so that survivors could bring negligent hiring, supervision, and retention claims against public entities and nonprofits.⁷ Those two changes are what put the State of New Jersey squarely on the hook.

How the Cases Are Organized in Court

On May 28, 2025, New Jersey Supreme Court Chief Justice Stuart Rabner ordered all pending and future lawsuits involving sexual abuse at state-operated juvenile detention facilities consolidated into a single multicounty litigation, designated MCL No. 641, before Superior Court Judge Bruce J. Kaplan in Middlesex County. Existing complaints filed elsewhere were transferred in, and new complaints must be filed there.⁸

The consolidated MCL covers roughly 250 cases against the Youth Justice Commission (formerly the Juvenile Justice Commission). Another 100 or so cases naming other state agencies are moving separately, and county and private-entity claims travel on their own tracks.¹

In October 2025, Judge Kaplan issued a case management order setting up a bellwether process focused initially and exclusively on Jamesburg. The court plans to select 40 cases for an initial bellwether group and narrow them to 12 for full discovery and possible trial. Plaintiffs must submit detailed fact sheets describing the alleged abuse, and the state must produce personnel files and incident records for identified abusers. Discovery for non-bellwether cases is stayed. Paper discovery is to close by December 2026, fact depositions by mid-2027, and expert reports by late 2027, with trial dates set after that.⁹

In a September 2025 filing, attorneys for the State of New Jersey denied the majority of the victims’ claims and demanded a jury trial.¹

What the State May Pay

No settlements or verdicts have been entered in the consolidated Jamesburg litigation as of mid-2026. State budget documents project the eventual exposure at a minimum of $340 million, extrapolating from earlier payouts in similar abuse cases. As of March 2026, the median settlement in comparable claims was $975,000.¹

The state has already been paying. In 2024, New Jersey paid $177.9 million to settle 332 lawsuits of all types, with more than $23 million going to resolve over a dozen sexual abuse complaints alone. Two women received settlements of $12 million and $6.8 million for abuse in foster care placements, and a victim of convicted Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center employee Thomas Grisard received $750,000.¹⁰

Warnings the State Had Years Earlier

Concerns about Jamesburg predate the current wave of filings by decades. A 1987 report in the New Jersey Free Press documented high rates of sexual abuse complaints at the Training School, and the head of the state’s Juvenile Detention Monitoring Unit warned that overcrowding was likely contributing.¹¹

A 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, the first national survey to collect data directly from juvenile offenders, flagged Jamesburg as one of 13 “high rate” facilities in the country for sexual victimization. It found that 23.3% of youth at the Training School reported some form of sexual victimization, against a national estimate of about 12% for juvenile facilities generally, with staff-on-youth abuse far more common than youth-on-youth abuse.¹²

A handful of staff have been prosecuted over the years. Karen Selmon, a supervisor at Jamesburg, pleaded guilty to criminal sexual conduct for assaulting a 19-year-old inmate in 2015 and was sentenced to a year and a half in prison. A related civil suit alleged that superintendent Lionel Henderson knowingly ignored a culture of improper sexual behavior at the facility.¹³¹¹ At Skillman, former corrections officer Thomas Patterson was convicted in 1988 of criminal sexual contact and endangering the welfare of a child and received a six-month prison sentence.¹⁴ At Daytop Village, former art teacher Donna Peirce-Faley pleaded guilty to criminal sexual contact in 2016, and former social worker Richard Mieliwocki pleaded guilty in 2007 to child abuse charges involving four teenage residents.¹⁵

Is Jamesburg Closing

The state determined in 2017 that Jamesburg should close, but it remains open. Replacement facilities are under construction in Ewing and Winslow, and a third northern site is nearly finalized; the state legislature appropriated $60 million for the design and construction of that third facility.¹⁶¹⁷ The first replacement is not expected to open before 2027.

Attorney General Matt Platkin has said the plan is to close both Jamesburg and the Female Secure Care and Intake Facility by 2028, contingent on the new sites being finished.¹⁸ A youth justice working group convened by the Attorney General’s office released a report in January 2026 recommending that the Jamesburg and Hayes sites be repurposed for restorative or therapeutic programming rather than continued correctional use.¹⁶

1
New Jersey Monitor. Sex Abuse Children State Custody Lawsuits
2
WHYY. New Jersey Youth Detention Abuse Training Center Monroe
3
New Jersey Monitor. Victims of Sex Abuse in New Jersey’s Juvenile Lockups Demand Justice
4
Levy Konigsberg LLP. Over 300 Men and Women Have Filed New Jersey Juvenile Facility Sex Abuse Lawsuits
5
NJ.com. The Dark Secret Behind This Once-Celebrated NJ Rehab Center for Vulnerable Teens
6
New Jersey Coalition Against Sexual Assault. Civil Statute of Limitations
7
State of New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. Civil Sexual Assault Statute of Limitations One-Pager
8
New Jersey Courts. Notice and Order: Multicounty Litigation Designation
9
New Jersey Courts. Case Management Order #3
10
New Jersey Monitor. Lawsuits Cost New Jersey $178M in 2024 as Abuse Claims Rise
11
Levy Konigsberg LLP. New Jersey Training School Sexual Abuse Lawsuits
12
Bureau of Justice Statistics. Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities Reported by Youth, 2008-09
13
NJ.com. Teen Sexually Assaulted in NJ Juvenile Detention Center
14
MyCentralJersey.com. NJ Training School Montgomery Lawsuit
15
Helping Survivors. Daytop Village Lawsuit
16
News From the States. Brighter Future Plotted for Sites of Two Youth Jails Slated for Closure
17
New Jersey Legislature. S3511 Bill Text
18
State of New Jersey Office of the Attorney General. New Jersey Training School