NORTH HAVERHILL — Sanna McAuliffe was “sick of hearing things were different back then,” and it was time to act.
So after McAuliffe and her two sisters celebrated their grandmother’s 90th birthday last August, she set out to seek the justice she was denied 29 years ago, when McAuliffe’s stepfather sexually abused her at their home in Etna when she was 6 years old. She said authorities failed to hold her abuser to account even though he admitted to the crime.
On a rainy Wednesday morning at Grafton Superior Court in North Haverhill, McAuliffe and her family finally witnessed long-delayed justice rendered as Malcolm Fogg, 73, of Lyme, pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated felonious sexual assault against McAuliffe. He was sentenced by Judge Peter Bornstein to 12 months in the Grafton County House of Corrections.
McAuliffe, a 2004 graduate of Hanover High School now living in Massachusetts as a financial planner and mother of three young children, recounted in court and afterward in an interview with the Valley News how the justice system — despite fully knowing what had occurred — failed her and her sisters.
The Valley News does not typically identify survivors of sexual assault; in this instance, McAuliffe agreed to an interview and gave permission to use her name.
She said Fogg’s guilty plea and negotiated sentence was the culmination of nearly three decades of anxiety, fear and nightmares.
“It has taken over 29 years and an immense amount of trauma, sorrow and work to get to this sentencing hearing today,” McAuliffe said, standing at a podium and addressing the court. “Work that I believe — if this system had been doing its job properly … wouldn’t and shouldn’t have taken nearly this long.”
McAuliffe was alone in the house with Fogg, 42 at the time, when he unbuttoned her pants and touched her vaginal area, Grafton County Assistant Attorney Antonia Barry told the court.
“She told him to stop” but Fogg continued, Barry said.
McAuliffe recounted the assault in her victim impact statement to the court on Wednesday.
“I remember feeling very scared. Even as a child in first grade, I knew what (he) did to me and my body was wrong,” McAuliffe said. She added that shortly after the assault, “I had the courage to tell my mother that Malcolm had molested me.”
McAuliffe said her mother, who died in 2014 at age 54 from cancer, took her daughter to her pediatrician. The physician, as mandated by law, reported the sexual assault to authorities.
Barry and McAuliffe both told the court that when questioned by law enforcement investigators, Fogg admitted to abusing his stepdaughter.
Hanover police “knew (Fogg) abused me and by law were supposed to protect me, my sisters and any other children (he) would be around by documenting him as a registered sex offender,” McAuliffe told the court.
Instead, when decades later McAuliffe inquired about the investigation with the state’s Division for Children, Youth and Families, she learned the case had been closed and the records purged.
In August 2021, she requested Hanover police reopen the investigation “to prove that my allegations of Malcolm Fogg’s actions were, in fact, a crime,” McAuliffe said.
“The mishandling of this case left (Fogg) a free man, while my family and I have been tethered to this unfinished case literally for decades,” she said.
When Bornstein asked Barry why Fogg had not been prosecuted following the investigations, Barry replied that “based on police reports, there was a conversation between Detective (Nick) Giaccone” and (McAuliffe’s mother) and it was “decided” not to pursue criminal charges.
Giaccone, who later became chief of police, died in 2017.
Christina Nihan, Sanna McAuliffe’s older sister, who traveled from Florida to attend Fogg’s sentencing, said in an interview that their mother “told me that she didn’t want to prosecute because she didn’t want Sanna to go through the trauma of a trial.”
“There was a lot of fear and shame” in a community that did not have many support resources for families traumatized by sexual abuse, Nihan said.
“She asked Nick (Giaccone) not to prosecute. But now we know that with the New Hampshire Child Protection Act of 1979, that once it’s handed over to the state, it’s never the responsibility of the parent to choose whether or not to prosecute,” Nihan said.
After Wednesday hearing, McAuliffe said in an interview that her mother was “in shock” at learning what her then-husband had done but “was very protective of her children at the time and was afraid of us being taken away. She didn’t know or didn’t realize that there shouldn’t have been options. (Fogg) should just have been taken away and prosecuted at that time.”
Declining to pursue a case against Fogg — even if her mother did not want to press charges — was am egregious breach of law enforcement’s responsibility, McAuliffe said.
“I don’t think Chief Giaccone did the right thing,” McAuliffe said.
Their mother “finally came to her senses and divorced” Fogg, Nihan said.
After hearing McAuliffe share what she has experienced over the past 30 years, Bornstein said it “was one of the most powerful — I don’t want to call it ‘victim’ — personal impact statements I’ve ever heard.”
George Ostler, a veteran Norwich criminal defense attorney who represented McAuliffe, said that her story is probably not an outlier.
“Back in the ’90s, there was one county attorney and one part-time assistant. There were no victim advocates,” Ostler said. “The local police departments made decisions on what to send to the county attorney’s office. They had a lot of power to say, ‘Well, we’ll just keep this right here.’ It’s much different now. Any case like this has to be reviewed at the higher level,” he said.
The county attorney’s office is considerably larger and better-staffed today than it was 30 years ago, he noted.
Ostler said he couldn’t say for sure but, given the way the system functioned at the time, “it was probably Giaccone’s call” not to prosecute Fogg.
Nihan and McAuiliffe said they quickly grew tired of hearing excuses about how sexual abuse cases at the time were swept under the rug.
McAuillife said when she and her sisters visited New Hampshire last year to celebrate their grandmother’s 90th birthday, the conversation turned to how Fogg’s crime was still an open wound to the family and an open question as to whether he harmed others.
As a mother herself and aunt to two young nieces, “the thought of no one protecting them nauseates me,” McAuliffe said.
“I was sick of hearing ‘times were different back then’ and ‘people didn’t talk about this.’ ” she said. “Well, I did talk about it — at the age of 6 — and we continued to talk about it, and it was time to change the dialogue of questioning it and instead bring accountability to Malcolm and not anything else besides that.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.