Gothamist: New data released by New York City’s Department of Correction shows the Adams administration began investigating reports of sexual misconduct in city jails more promptly after hundreds of current and former detainees filed lawsuits in 2023 alleging they were raped and sexually abused by staff at the women’s jail on Rikers Island. But the department has yet to regain compliance with local and federal guidelines for how investigations are conducted, a status it previously achieved in the years before Mayor Eric Adams took office.
Those guidelines require correction officials to investigate complaints from detainees of sexual assault and abuse within 90 days to ensure evidence is preserved and to build trust in the system, legal experts and victim advocates said. Experts also said delays affect staff, who are taken off their posts while complaints are investigated.
City data from the end of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure in 2020 and 2021 shows all of the 729 rape and sexual-abuse allegations the correction department received were investigated within the mandated period.
But the number of stalled investigations spiked in the first two years after Adams was elected, with 23% of 236 cases exceeding the 90-day limit in 2022 and 45% of 177 cases exceeding the limit in 2023.
In 2023, more than 700 women filed lawsuits under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, alleging they’d been raped or sexually abused by correctional staff members while they were held at the Rose M. Singer women’s jail at Rikers. The law opened a one-year window for victims of sexual violence. The claims span a period of five decades and are collectively seeking $14.7 billion in damages from the city.
A Gothamist investigation found 24 women who all said they were either raped, groped or otherwise sexually abused by the same guard, most of whom only knew by the nickname “Champagne.” Another guard, Anthony Martin Jr., who was charged with raping a woman at his home in Queens last year, was also identified by at least two women held at Rikers as the man who sexually abused them.
Adams was asked repeatedly about the allegations at the time. He promised a “thorough investigation” of the claims. None ever materialized.
But the latest data shows the correction department began completing more investigations into detainees’ sexual assault and abuse complaints after the lawsuits were filed.
Only 6% of complaints have exceeded the 90-day limit since the flood of litigation .
Sarena Townsend, a former NYC prosecutor and the former deputy commissioner of internal affairs and discipline at Rikers Island, said the overall decline in the number of complaints since 2022, despite a growing jail population in recent years, suggests that the department could be logging fewer legitimate allegations and that fewer detainees are willing to come forward.
“The very low numbers do not comport with the numbers I was seeing back in 2018 through 2021,” Townsend said.
After clearing a backlog of 8,000 rape and sexual-abuse investigations under de Blasio, Townsend was fired early in the Adams administration. She said Louis Molina, who was appointed by Adams to lead the Department of Correction, demanded that she “get rid of” 2,000 cases in 100 days. Townsend said she believed that was an unreasonable expectation and suspected Molina expected her to dismiss those cases. Molina did not respond to questions about why he terminated Townsend and her claim that he wanted her to get rid of complaints.
