Journal Inquirer
Matthew P. Knox
A new lawsuit filed against Glastonbury resident Bruce Bemer accuses the wealthy businessman of sexually abusing and trafficking a man over the course of four years.
The lawsuit, filed anonymously in Hartford Judicial District on Thursday, is one of numerous actions against Bemer that have been filed in recent years.
The lawsuit states that in 1992, and again between 1994 and 1996, Bemer “sexually attacked, assaulted, and/or raped the plaintiff on numerous occasions when the plaintiff was approximately 14 to 18 years old as a minor.”
In addition, the lawsuit says that Bemer “ordered, directed and/or caused the plaintiff to be trafficked and delivered to other sexual predators for the purpose of sexual abuse when he was a minor.”
A Danbury Superior Court jury in 2019 convicted Bemer of aiding or encouraging human trafficking and four other felony counts based on the jury’s conclusion that he had paid for sex with men he knew had been subjected to human trafficking by Robert King of Danbury. Bemer was sentenced to 10 years in prison but is free on a $750,000 bond while appealing the conviction.
The lawsuit further accuses Bemer and his associates of having a “penchant for searching for and seeking out minors to sexually abuse to attempt to quench their insatiable, depraved pedophilic desires and tendencies.”
The complaint contains examples of text messages sent between Bemer and Robert King, who was convicted of sex trafficking in 2019 for supplying young men to Bemer and others to have sex for money.
The text messages “display blatantly pedophilic sexual depravity” in which the men share photos of children and discuss sexually abusing them, the complaint says.
“The texts are merely a sampling of the evidence of the decades-long sex trafficking operation that was run by Bemer and King that, tragically, ensnared the plaintiff when he was a minor,” the lawsuit states.
Bemer’s actions have led the plaintiff to suffer drug and alcohol addiction, incarceration, humiliation, mental suffering, and suicidal thoughts, according to the lawsuit.