Claim Ted Gatsas Covered Up High School Rape Was Fact
Judge ‘s Decision was a Devastating Attack on Executive Councilor’s Integrity: OPINION
MANCHESTER, NH — Judge Jillian L. Abramson’s decision dismissing Theodore Gatsas’ defamation lawsuit against two citizens who petitioned the Queen City’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen (BMA) for an investigation of Gatsas’ failure to inform them of a high school rape was a devastating judgement on the former mayor’s character.
The decision all but called Gatsas (the plaintiff) a liar.
Seemingly, like most decent people except for Gatsas’ diehard partisans (such as Richard H. Girard, whose now-cancelled radio show the mayor reportedly left in mysterious circumstances on the day of the rape), the judge found Ted Gatsas to suffer from something far beyond a “truthiness” problem, namely, that in all probability, he likely knew fully well that a teenaged girl had been raped at West High School and he had covered it up.
The petition to the Board called for the convening of a Conduct Board to investigate the handling of the rape, to determine whether Gatsas’s behavior violated the City Charter. The petition was rejected overwhelmingly by the BMA, most of the members of which did not know that Ted Gatsas already sued the petitioners.
The Integrity of Ted Gatsas
Days after filing the lawsuit, when he finally went public with the fact that he had sued the petitioners after the BMA vote, then-Mayor Ted Gatsas claimed he did so as the conduct board request was an attack on the integrity of his character. Gatsas told WMUR-TV that the petition was “slanderous. It defamed me and was intentionally meant to impugn my integrity.’’
Ted Gatsas revealed the existence of the lawsuit only after the BMA considered and rejected the petition. Under the Charter, arguably, he should have told the Board about the lawsuit. Sources say that the pressure that Gatsas brought on individual board members was tremendous.
The conduct board petition made “strange bedfellows” out of Gatsas and his then-nemesis, Alderman-at-Large Joe Kelly Levasseur. There are credible reports that Levasseur manipulated Gatsas into filing the lawsuit, in order to curry favor with the mayor.
Levasseur eventually was rewarded with a seat on the municipal planning Board, where he triggered a lawsuit for failing to recuse himself from a case in which he already had made up his mind.
The Character of Ted Gatsa
Judge Abramson’s ruling did more to impugn Gatsas’ reptutation that the petition ever did, in the opinion of this writer, who was party to the lawsuit. It is my belief, and that of many people including lawyers who have talked to me about the decision, that the judge’s decision was a withering attack on Ted Gatsas’ lack of integrity.
The ruling held that the opening sentence of the petition, “News reports about the September 30, 2015 West High School rape containing statements from city officials including Mayor Theodore Gatsas strongly indicate that the mayor engineered a cover-up of the rape during a mayoral race in which crime was a top issue,” was a statement of fact, not opinion.
One didn’t have to read very far between the lines to understand the judge more likely than not felt that Ted Gatsas was a liar.
The lawsuit, rather than defending Gatsas’ integrity, wound up trashing it. For a time.
Parental Outrage
The revelation of a high school rape nearly a year and a half after it happened made national headlines. A Boston TV station’s report of the outrage of Manchester parents after discovering the rape had been hushed up for almost two years included a statement by parent Brian Logue, who said, “It reeks of some kind of coverup.”
The media coverage quoted Manchester School District Superintendent Bolgen Vargas, who was not in Manchester at the time, claiming that information about the rape wasn’t released by the prior school administration in order to protect the rape victim, a 14 year-old girl.
Vargas’s comment obscured the reality of the situation. Ted Gatsas, who as mayor served as chair of the Board of the School Committee (BOSC), was part of the school administration that did not release the information. He failed to inform the members of the BOSC as to what had really happened, and completely failed to notify the BMA about the incident.
Vargas also said, “When you have an investigation going on by the police department, you have to be careful that you don’t jeopardize that process.”
The statement was disingenuous, as the process of apprehending the rapist lasted less than 24 hours. Then-Manchester Police Chief Nick Willard, who told the press he had reported the rape to Gatsas on the day it occurred, said “The assault happened during the day, he was in our custody that night, and was never a threat to another student at the time.”
Willard also said there was no coverup.
Under the Vargas-in-Manchester standard of not revealing information so as not to compromise an investigation, that necessity expired a day after the West High rape occurred.
Sources say that the Manchester Police Department did conduct a thorough investigation, and that Willard or someone else in the MPD had arranged with David Ryan, the assistant school superintendent, to issue a public statement. It never was released.
Ironically, less than a week before the September 30, 2015 West High rape, Bolgen Vargas hand the parents of the Rochester School District, where he was superintendent, informed of the arrest of a substitute teacher who had raped a 15 year-old high school girl.
In contrast to what transpired in Manchester, Vargas as the superintendent of the Rochester schools met with the press, and a letter informing parents of the incident was sent out a day after the arrest. Vargas was quoted by Rochester media as saying, “We take every action to make sure our students are safe,” which included informing parents.
His statements in Manchester, defending the procedure by which the West High rape was handled by the School District, were directly rebutted by his own behavior in Rochester.
The parents of Rochester were informed so that they could talk to their children, and discover any other students who had been raped but who had not come forward, so that they could report the crime. This did not happen in Manchester.
In fact, there were procedures to handle just such an incident in Manchester, but they were ignored. Similarly, when almost two years to the day of the West High rape, in the middle of the 2017 mayoral election when the handling of the 2015 high school rape was a major issue, the procedures that Vargas and the City implemented in the wake of parent outrage were ignored when Webster School principal Sarah Lynch was stabbed.
That incident, and a subsequent attack on Lynch by another student in 2018, were not reported to the public. They were only revealed when she filed a lawsuit against the City.
Theodore Gatsas, Executive Councilor
Ted Gatsas now serves on the New Hampshire Executive Council from District Four, having won the 2018 election to replace Chris Pappas, who went on to the U.S. House of Representatives, by less than 1,600 votes out of the nearly 100,000 votes that were cast. Gatsas was opposed by political tyro Gray Chynoweth, a successful businessman, who was in his first, and so far only, political race.
It was felt by most political observers that Chynoweth would have won the seat if he had brought up the West High rape coverup during the campaign. Many did not understand why he avoided the issue.
Chynoweth, who now serves on the board of directors of Primary Bank with prominent Republican businessmen who are among Ted Gatsas’ biggest campaign contributors, declined to run for the seat in 2020. He was one of a handful of prominent Democrats who publicly backed former Manchester Alderman Jerome Duval in the 2020 primary.
Duval, who had been out of elective politics for quite some time, lost the primary to former New Hampshire AFL-CIO President Mark MacKenzie.
The full text of the decision dismissing Gatsas’ lawsuit can be found here.
