A new lawsuit claims a law enforcement officer raped a teenage boy in custody at a Maryland State Police barrack in Essex nearly two decades ago.

Filed on Monday, the complaint accuses the unnamed “police officer” of assaulting the detainee in either 2008 or 2009. The alleged sodomy took place only once, the lawsuit states, but had lifelong effects on the boy, now a 32-year-old Baltimore resident. The accuser was identified by initials, a common pseudonym in child sex abuse claims.

Maryland State Police generally describe its personnel as “Troopers,” not officers. But Joan Vollero, a spokesperson for the Timonium law firm Slater Slater Schulman that filed the suit, said Thursday that the complaint refers to a Maryland State Trooper.

The lawsuit states that the teenager was 16 or 17 when he was arrested by state officials and assaulted at Barracks R Golden Ring. The sex was “accomplished using forcible compulsion, undue influence, duress, coercion, intimidation, threats of physical harm and/or retaliation,” according to the complaint, and the trauma “delayed Plaintiff’s ability to report or even recognize the full extent of the harm.”

The 13-page complaint accuses the Maryland Department of State Police and Barracks R Golden Ring of negligence and failing to enact and enforce sexual abuse policies. It also names the Baltimore County Government as a defendant, asserting it’s partly responsible for the “oversight, operation, control, management and staffing” of the Essex facility.

The Maryland State Police force is operated and maintained by its own department and funded through the budget considered each year by the General Assembly.

Vollero declined to comment further on the case, including an inquiry about the role of the county government in the alleged incident.

Representatives of Maryland State Police and the Baltimore County Government declined to comment Thursday on the active litigation.

Monday’s lawsuit appears to be the first in Maryland against its state police force since the Child Victims Act took effect in 2023, axing the time limits on starting sex abuse claims.

Celebrated by Gov. Wes Moore as shrinking a “big gap” between justice and survivors, the bill created an avalanche of claims against state and private institutions, including the Archdiocese of Baltimore, whose decades of abuse and deception were uncovered as the law bounced between chambers.

The number of civil suits it has generated against the state is unknown, though legislators this year estimate that there have been between 3,000 and 6,000 such claims. The open cases are pressuring the state’s already strained budget and have sparked fear that its $3.3 billion deficit could be doubled.

In response, the Maryland General Assembly passed another law in March that significantly lowered the amount of damages a survivor can be awarded. Starting June 1, the possible compensation from cases involving state institutions will be reduced by more than half, from an $890,000 ceiling to $400,000.

The new caps have been criticized by attorneys and victims who say future cases may not be worth pursuing, financially or emotionally.

They have also sent a legal crunch into motion, with dozens of negligence lawsuits entering the Maryland Judiciary every week to beat the June deadline. Court records show the new claims are against a variety of defendants and institutions, both state and private, and most list initials, John or Jane Doe, or some other kind of pseudonym as the plaintiffs.

Some of the lawsuits are filed on behalf of several accusers at once. Between April 29 and May 1, for instance, Slater Slater Schulman filed lawsuits representing 174 former Boy Scouts against the six oversight councils that operate across the state. And on Tuesday, more than 180 accusers filed a single complaint against the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Baltimore and other Catholic entities, including Archbishop Spalding High School and several congregations.

But if Monday’s suit is the first involving Maryland State Police under the Child Victims Act, the kind of behavior it describes is hardly new.

Staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct has been reported and studied by advocacy organizations and the federal government for over two decades, with some groups finding staff incidents, or “victimizations,” are almost as common as those between inmates.

According to a 2023 study from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 2016 and 2018, authorities reported over 2,600 inmate-on-inmate incidents in adult correctional facilities and more than 2,200 substantiated incidents of staff-on-inmate sexual victimization.

Most of the time, inmate incidents involved “abusive sexual contact,” according to the study, while the majority of staff incidents were characterized as “sexual misconduct.” The Bureau’s definition of misconduct included consensual and nonconsensual behaviors, and the perpetrators were mostly white, female, full-time workers and/or correctional officers.

Monday’s lawsuit does not describe the alleged abuser beyond his being a male “police officer.”

Have a news tip? Contact Luke Parker at lparker @baltsun.com, 410-725-6214, on X as @lparkernews, or on Signal as @parkerluke.34.