New York City health officials have moved to permanently shut down a Manhattan branch of the child care giant Bright Horizons where prosecutors say employees committed disturbing acts of child abuse, documents show.
The move to close the branch, on Ninth Avenue near Columbus Circle, comes as three of its former employees are set to appear in court on Wednesday for child endangerment and other charges. Bright Horizons, which has 31,000 employees worldwide, is also under broader scrutiny in the city, where it faced nearly four dozen complaints from July 2024 to July 2025, according to documents The New York Times obtained through public records requests.
The complaints, filed with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, include allegations of injuries, inappropriate discipline, workers losing track of children and, in one instance, a severe allergic reaction caused by inattention to a child’s known cheese allergy.
In October, the Columbus Circle center reported to health officials that a staff member had put a bleach solution in children’s water bottles, which at least one child drank.
Bright Horizons’s business is largely built around regular or backup child care employees of more than 1,000 corporate customers, including The Times. In New York, the company also offers publicly funded pre-K and 3-K programs, potentially positioning it to profit from Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s push to expand free child care.
But the criminal case linked to the Columbus Circle center, and a pattern of complaints and forced temporary closings across the network, could have serious consequences for Bright Horizons’s local operations. The company has about three dozen locations in the city and more than 1,000 in the United States, Britain, the Netherlands, Australia and India.
After a series of complaints at the Columbus Circle location, culminating with the bleach incident, city officials took the rare step of moving to rescind its permits to operate, the documents show. (The incident was reported earlier by CBS News New York.)
“We take a stand against any provider who is not following the city’s high standards for health and safety, no matter what,” said William Fowler, a health department spokesman. “The abuse, mistreatment and lack of safety in Bright Horizons’s infant-toddler and preschool programs at their Columbus Circle location is horrifying and unacceptable.”
The center has been closed since late October. The effort to revoke its permits is pending before the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings.
Bright Horizons is contesting the move.
Last February, the company fired three workers — Evelyn Vargas, Shakia Henley and Latia Townes — who now have criminal cases pending in state court. According to an indictment, Ms. Vargas covered a toddler’s mouth with packing tape so that the girl could not breathe, then made fun of her; force-fed children ginger shots; and, along with Ms. Townes, hit children on the head with metal bottles and shoved them to the ground repeatedly.
Ms. Henley was accused of spraying children with bleach.
In July, Manhattan prosecutors charged all three with multiple counts of child endangerment, a misdemeanor, and Ms. Vargas with felony counts of assault, strangulation and attempted assault. They have all pleaded not guilty.
Christopher Booth, a lawyer for Ms. Vargas, did not respond to a request for comment. Eugene Nathanson, a lawyer for Ms. Henley, and Douglas Rankin, Ms. Townes’s lawyer, declined to comment.
Michelle DeLuties, a Bright Horizons spokeswoman, said in a statement: “We are devastated by the actions of these individuals whose behavior represents a profound betrayal of the trust placed in them by our organization, the children in our care, and their families.”
She continued: “We understand that our responsibility is the safety and well-being of every child, and our hearts are with all who have been affected. We will continue to take all steps necessary to reinforce and strengthen the safeguards families expect and deserve from us.”
The case began with two complaints that investigators found to be true, accusing workers at the Columbus Circle center of mistreating 1- and 2-year-olds in alarming ways: leaving them in soiled diapers; calling them names like “lazy slug” and “retard”; strapping them in chairs; stuffing their mouths with tissue; throwing cups at them; spraying soapy water in their eyes.
The health department referred its findings to Manhattan prosecutors, leading to the criminal charges.
“We have fully cooperated with authorities from the beginning when we first reported the matter and support a just legal outcome,” Ms. DeLuties said in the statement. She did not address specific questions about the allegations and other complaints.
The complaints naming the Columbus Circle center were among 47 that were filed from July 2024 to July 2025 and involved more than a dozen Bright Horizons centers in the city, the documents show. Eighteen, or about 40 percent, were substantiated, meaning determined to be true. Fourteen were unsubstantiated, and 15 were listed as “hold for observation” as of August, making the final determinations unclear.
None of the other substantiated complaints from that period appear to have resulted in criminal charges, but their final outcomes are also unclear.
Even if a complaint is substantiated, it may not lead to disciplinary action if the health department finds that no health codes were violated. The department has temporarily closed Bright Horizons programs other than Columbus Circle seven times since 2017, requiring corrective actions before allowing them to reopen.
A summary of a substantiated complaint from August 2024 describes a worker at a center on Manhattan’s Upper West Side who “aggressively” grabbed a girl and sat her down “forcefully” in a way that was “excessive.” The girl’s mother worked at the center, saw the incident and reported it, the summary says.
A second substantiated complaint from that month says two workers on the Upper East Side did not notice when a child “wandered away for an unknown period of time and was located near a locked gate by a bystander.”
Another substantiated complaint, from June 2025, says a child at an East 46th Street center fell from a park structure as two workers paid attention to other children, according to a summary that does not say whether the child was hurt.
The child care network also has problems beyond the complaints.
An October inspection at the Columbus Circle location found that two workers had not completed the required background checks, according to the health department’s petition to revoke the permits.
The petition also says staff members were “aware of the pervasive and ongoing rumors” of abuse said to have been happening since early 2024, but they did not notify state child welfare authorities about the abusive acts they had seen.
Lawyers for the health department and Bright Horizons were scheduled to meet before an OATH judge last week for a settlement conference about the Columbus Circle center, but it was adjourned to Feb. 24, said Marisa Senigo, an OATH spokeswoman. If there is no settlement, the matter would go to a public OATH trial.
Losing the operating permits could be a significant blow to Bright Horizons. “Brand value and our reputation can be severely damaged even by isolated incidents,” the company wrote in its 2024 annual report.
The abuse allegations at Columbus Circle have cost that center its contract with the New York City Department of Education, according to Dominique Ellison, an agency spokeswoman.
“We thoroughly investigate every allegation or incident reported at any of our provider sites,” Ms. Ellison said, adding that the department had contracts with 20 Bright Horizons locations for pre-K or 3-K and was focused on “ensuring that all children continue to receive safe, uninterrupted care.”
Bright Horizons had $2.7 billion in revenue in 2024, up 11 percent from the year before, according to a news release. In addition to child care, its services include elder care, college counseling and pet care.
In 2022, the company was fined 800,000 pounds, or just over $1 million, after the British authorities found that its failure to adequately train workers at an Edinburgh nursery had contributed to the death of an 11-month-old boy, who choked on a piece of mango.
Recently, a man who worked at a Bright Horizons nursery in north London for seven years and who had, according to the BBC, passed the company’s vetting checks, admitted to sexual attacks on children in his care, including some who were napping.
Ed Shanahan is a rewrite reporter and editor covering breaking news and general assignments on the Metro desk.
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