2 weeks Ago By Josh Rogers
New Hampshire lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are condemning a top State House Republican’s comments about people who suffered years of abuse at New Hampshire's youth detention facility. Rep. Ken Weyler, who leads the House Finance Committee, said last week that the state should not have set aside so much money to pay out the abuse claims.
He also mocked the victims as unworthy of support and implied they were responsible for the abuse they suffered as children. "We can’t break the budget with this ridiculousness for people who haven't obeyed the rules, and acting like, ‘Oh, you are rewarded.’ Rewarded for what? A misspent life,” Weyler said.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me that someone who got abused, abused others and abused themselves should be rewarded and that’s the way it looks: Someone on the streets says, ‘YDC, I’ll just say they abused me and I’ll become a millionaire.’ This is the example we’re setting.” More than 1,000 people have alleged that they were abused at New Hampshire’s Youth Development Center over the span of several decades, in one of the biggest youth detention scandals in U.
S. history. The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office is prosecuting some of the alleged assailants — including former state employees — and lawmakers have set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to compensate victims.
Money for those settlements will factor into the Legislature’s coming budget negotiations in which Weyler — as the House’s top budget writer — will play a key role. Read more from NHPR's Document team: Almost 1,300 people say New Hampshire failed to act to protect them from child abuse at youth facilities. Here’s what the allegations reveal.
Weyler did not respond to a request for comment. He told IndepthNH his main concern with the settlements are the size of the payouts. “What are you going to do when you get a pile of money? You’re probably going to spend it on drugs and alcohol,” Weyler told the news outlet.
Meanwhile, lawmakers from both parties are pushing back on his statements. On X, Republican Rep. Kelley Potenza called Weyler’s remarks “abhorrent and disgusting.
” “What an absolute disgrace for him to be a NH state representative,” she wrote. House Democrats are calling on House Speaker Sherman Packard to force Weyler to recuse himself from work related to the YDC settlements. Packard did not respond to a request for comment.
Weyler is no stranger to controversy over offensive or conspiratorial comments. In 2021, the state health commissioner publicly accused Weyler of spreading disinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine. Later that year, Weyler lost his post as House finance chair for circulating a document full of conspiracy theories about vaccines and the Catholic Church.
Packard later reappointed Weyler to the job. Last year, Weyler had to deliver a public apology for heckling a fellow lawmaker on the House floor..
