Ex-prosecutor sentenced for sex with boys

  Eyewitness News

NEW CITY, N.Y. - (WABC) -- A former prosecutor was sentenced Wednesday to two years in prison for having sex with underage boys after her daughter alleged that her 15-year-old boyfriend was among the woman's victims, seduced into a sex act in the bathroom of the family home.

Beth Modica, 44, wept as her daughter Danielle said in court that she was banging on the bathroom door one day last year as her mother and her boyfriend were engaging in oral sex.

"We were competing for the same 15-year-old boy," Danielle Modica said. "I was betrayed by both of them."

Modica told her children to lie to their father - the Spring Valley police chief - about the marijuana and alcohol she gave to them and their friends. They were changed forever by their mother's "constant lying and the things she did around me and my brothers," she said.

Her brother, 17-year-old Joseph Modica, wrote - in a letter read by prosecutor Dominic Crispino - that he knew his mother was having sex with his friend in her bedroom although "she lied to my face" and claimed the boy was sick. Addressing his mother, he said, "I am truly embarrassed and disgusted with you."

Modica's 12-year-old son, Nicholas, also wrote to request prison time for his mother, saying, "I need to know when she gets out of jail it will be safe for me to be around her."

Leslie Brown, mother of one of the boys who had sex with Modica, told the judge that Modica was "a sly and manipulative sexual predator."

Modica, in an orange prison jumpsuit, her hands shackled to her waist, apologized through sobs to her family and her victims, saying she knows she has destroyed her family and devastated others. "I will be eternally remorseful," she said.

Her attorney, Gerard Damiani, asked for a shorter sentence or just probation, saying the outlaw behavior was an aberration and noting that Modica, a former prosecutor in Queens and Rockland, had already lost her law license and custody of the children. She is estranged from her husband. Damiani said she is benefiting from psychiatric treatment.

But the judge told Modica, who lived in Sloatsburg, she was "a disgusting monster."

"At some point in your life you decided to become a manipulator, a conniver and a sexual predator," she said. "You had unprotected sex with children. You gave them drugs and alcohol...Some of these acts took place in your home with your children present."

At one point the judge said, "Your daughter's boyfriend? That's disgusting."

Besides two years in state prison for Modica's guilty plea to statutory rape and criminal sex act, Bartlett imposed 10 years probation, sex offender registration and 10-year orders of protection for the two boys she had sex with.

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