DOVER — A mentally-disabled woman, who was allegedly sexually assaulted by the 80-year-old man caring for her, has filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against him and Community Partners, the mental health agency he was working for.

The woman and her parents allege in the suit filed in Strafford County Superior Court that medical records showed the woman was particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse and Community Partners did not do enough to protect her, resulting in her alleged sexual exploitation at the hands of former caretaker Richard MacDonald.

MacDonald, of 29 Birch Hill Road in New Durham, is charged with aggravated felonious sexual assault. The incident allegedly happened at the Somersworth mobile home the woman lived at under the care of Community Partners, sometime between July 30 and Aug. 16, 2008, when the woman was 29 years old.

She is now 32 years old, though her attorney, John Driscoll, said she has the mental capacity of a 7-year-old.

The suit also alleges that Community Partners failed to investigate the woman's allegation of sexual assault, tried to convince her parents the story was fabricated, coerced the woman into recanting the allegation in writing and failed to offer her any sort of sexual abuse counseling.

“Community Partners knows full well that (she) was abused and exploited, yet willfully refused to acknowledge it, let alone treat her for the trauma of it,” the suit says.

Brian Collins, executive director of Community Partners, said in a statement that the organization “regrets that our long-term residential client feels that she has been sexually assaulted on our premises by an employee who is no longer with us.”

Collins declined to provide specific information about the incident, citing patient privacy.

“However, we can say generally that the alleged assailant was a 77-year-old man who had given no indication of any potential for this type of act during his 20 years of employment with Community Partners,” the statement said.

MacDonald was 77 years old when the alleged assault occurred.

Collins also said the organization conducted “an extensive internal investigation,” but declined to release the results, again citing patient privacy.

“We can tell you that we are confident that Community Partners met appropriate standards in hiring and supervising our personnel, as the safety of our clients is our foremost goal,” the statement said.

Community Partners is a Dover-based nonprofit that provides mental health services and services for the developmentally disabled throughout Strafford County.

The civil suit also alleges that MacDonald groomed the woman for sexual contact by showing her pornographic videos and took pictures of her naked.

MacDonald is free on personal recognizance bail and is scheduled for trial in October. His criminal attorney, Richard Samdperil, declined to comment on the suit.

MacDonald's case has been significantly delayed over a dispute about the alleged victim's medical records. Attorneys in the case initially agreed to allow Judge Kenneth Brown to review her medical records himself and then decide which ones would be admissible in court.

Brown instead ruled that Samdperil could review all the records, more than 2,000 pages of documents, and then decide himself what documents were relevant. The order triggered an appeal by prosecutors and the state Supreme Court ruled last month that Brown had to review the records himself.

“In this case, the trial court stated that it ‘assume(d) without having reviewed the records produced to date that portions of the records may well be relevant to the State and Defense since the victim's mental limitations, if any, are an element of the pending charge.' This was error,” the court wrote in its ruling.