Lawsuits Claiming Abuse At NJ Child Treatment Centers Reach 150

NEW JERSEY — New lawsuits were filed this week against two closed state-run child treatment centers, bringing the number of claims alleging sexual abuse at New Jersey's youth facilities to 150.

One of the lawsuits filed by Levy Konigsberg on behalf of 13 men and women claims the state failed to protect children from rampant sexual abuse at Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center, a state-run children's psychiatric hospital in Monmouth County.

A second lawsuit was also filed against the New Jersey Training School in Montgomery, according to an Associated Press report.

The lawsuits are the latest in a string of accusations against the state. Attorneys for Levy Konigsberg said the total number of lawsuits alleging sexual abuse in state-run youth facilities has now reached 150.

The lawsuits follow decades of investigations that revealed widespread abuse, overcrowding and cruelty at Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center, attorneys said, until the facility was forced to close in 2005.

According to attorneys, many different staff at Arthur Brisbane and other state-run youth facilities were involved in sexual abuse, including counselors, correctional officers, teachers, nurses and others.

"The Arthur Brisbane Child Treatment Center was a site of trauma and neglect for generations of New Jersey's most vulnerable children," Levy Konigsberg attorneys said Wednesday in a news release. "The children harmed by the culture of abuse that the State allowed to flourish carry their wounds to this day."

The lawsuits were brought under New Jersey's Child Sexual Abuse Act, a 2019 law that expanded the statute of limitations for filing civil lawsuits in cases of child sexual abuse. Most of the survivors filing lawsuits were abused many years ago, some as far back as the 1980s, attorneys said.

A spokesperson for the New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who is responsible for defending the state when it's named in lawsuits, declined to comment on the lawsuit when contacted by Patch.

The first lawsuit was brought against the state in January 2024 when a group of 50 men accused the New Jersey Training School of letting a "culture of abuse" endure for decades.

The allegations laid out in the lawsuit stretched from the 1970s to the 2010s and included dozens of harrowing details, according to an Associated Press report, including that guards, counselors and other staff sexually abused the boys at the facility and in woods around it and threatened them with further confinement if they divulged the abuse.

Other survivors claimed the facility was known for its "dangerous conditions, with widespread reports of overcrowding, underfunding and horrific child abuse."

• RELATED: 'Horrific Child Abuse,' Rape Alleged At Training School In Montgomery: Lawsuit