Universal Health  Services, owner of Chicago’s Hartgrove Hospital, a psychiatric hospital dedicated to providing quality behavioral health services for a diverse population of children, adolescents, and adults, is facing yet another multi-million dollar lawsuit for failing to protect its young patients from sexual abuse.

     Former Hartgrove Hospital mental health counselor, Edmund Rivers – described as a serial perpetrator by one victim’s lawyer, Martin Gould – is charged with repeatedly assaulting resident children as young as seven years old from 1996 to 2004. Attorney Gould represents more than a thousand patients who say they were abused physically, sexually, and psychologically at youth residential treatment centers across Illinois. “The worst appears to be Hartgrove, with hundreds of sexual abuse plaintiffs,” Gould told MindSite News. “It was a playpen for pedophiles.

     Last year Virginia civil juries awarded child sexual abuse victims $895 million in damages for being assaulted sexually at two Universal health Services youth mental health facilities in the state. Another law firm sued UHS last August on behalf of a teenage girl who reported she had been sexually assaulted repeatedly by staff members, also at Hartgrove, during three separate stays at the facility.

     In yet another case last year, jurors imposed a s $360 million negligence fee against a UHS facility in Virginia because of one doctor’s alleged sexual assaults on teen patients. A jury has already awarded $120 million each to the first three patients in the first UHS trial, but trials for the other forty-three patients could involve even more massive judgments against UHS. 

     One year earlier, in March, 2024, an Illinois jury awarded $535 million to the mother of a thirteen-year-old girl raped by a sixteen-year-old patient at an adolescent psych unit of a UHS hospital in Champaign.

     A 2024 US Senate Finance Committee report , “Warehouses of Neglect,” about facilities for “troubled teens” found UHS and three other behavioral health chains were engaging in “taxpayer-funded child abuse.”

     Yet the sexual abuse of youth continues within the walls of UHS facilities. Why?

     Perhaps because UHS can so easily afford to settle these multi-million dollar sexual assault cases. The company’s net income last year was $1.1 billion , and its behavioral health facilities earned the highest of its profit margin.