Jeny remembers trying to hide under the rough, jail-issued sheets when the Rikers Island guards would come for her in the middle of the night.
She said they called out the names and ID numbers of women in the room, where she slept on a makeshift pillow of bundled clothing. Then, she said, the correction officers ordered the women to rise from their beds before leading them down a series of long hallways in silence.
“We just had to be kind of like soldiers, walking to where they were leading us,” she said. “Once we passed through a door, everything was pitch black.”
Jeny said the officers took the women to a dark room with benches, which was illuminated only by the occasional glow of a flashlight. They ordered the women to kneel and be quiet before forcing them to perform oral sex, she said. Jeny added that one officer would not let her stop, even as cracks formed on her lips and even as she told him he was hurting her.
“I just cooperated with what I needed to do,” Jeny said. “When something is happening and you don’t have any control of the situation, the more you fight back, the worse it can become for you.”
Jeny sued the City of New York more than eight years after her release, alleging that it failed to protect her while she was in its custody.
Her case is one of 719 civil lawsuits analyzed by Gothamist that were recently filed against the City of New York and the NYC Department of Correction under the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that opened a one-year window for sexual assault survivors to file claims outside of the statute of limitations. That window closed in November.
Although the law was propelled by the #MeToo movement and not written specifically to address abuse behind bars, nearly 60% of the 1,256 lawsuits filed in New York City’s supreme courts during the temporary filing period describe assaults against people held on Rikers Island.
Gothamist’s detailed analysis of the civil lawsuits shows for the first time the breathtaking scope of alleged abuse at the women’s jail at Rikers. The allegations span decades and place New York City’s jail system in the company of other powerful institutions that have recently been plagued by massive sexual abuse scandals, including Columbia University, USA Gymnastics and the Catholic Church.
Accounts spanning from 1976 to as recently as last year describe a system where jail employees groped detainees, forcibly kissed them, ordered them to perform oral sex and engaged in violent rape. The lawsuits allege that jail officials knew — or should have known — about the ongoing attacks and allowed jail employees to continue to prey on incarcerated people.
The plaintiffs seek more than $14.7 billion in damages, which could pose a staggering financial burden for the city. That number is more than triple the $4 billion New York City had spent as of February on the migrant crisis, which Mayor Eric Adams has said will “destroy New York City.”
Several city officials declined to be interviewed for this story. Annais Morales, the Department of Correction’s press secretary, said in a written statement that the department is working with the city’s Law Department to navigate all the pending cases.
The Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, the union that represents a majority of city jail guards, did not respond to specific questions about allegations of sexual abuse by its members. Its President Benny Boscio noted in a written statement that dozens of officers have themselves been sexually assaulted in recent years and lamented that state lawmakers have not increased the penalties for such crimes.
Most of the lawsuits related to Rikers were filed by two attorneys, Anna Kull of Levy Konigsberg LLP and Adam Slater of Slater Slater Schulman LLP. Each filed hundreds of cases on behalf of people who were incarcerated on Rikers Island. Their firms also sued the New York state prison system under the Adult Survivors Act.
“I call them the forgotten women of the #MeToo movement,” Slater said.
The lawsuits claim that the more the city overlooked the abuse, the more it emboldened correction officers to sexually assault detainees. They also add that the city sometimes hired candidates with significant red flags. Two Department of Investigation reports in 2015 and 2018 found that guards were hired even if they had concerning responses on psychological exams or prior arrests for crimes like domestic violence.
“This is a continuous problem,” Kull said. “The Adult Survivors Act is only highlighting just how long-standing the problem has been.”
The sexual assault lawsuits add to mounting pressure the city faces to improve conditions on Rikers Island. The city is legally required to close Rikers Island by 2027, but the plan to replace the complex with borough-based jails has made little progress under Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. Meanwhile, a federal judge is weighing whether to strip New York City officials of control of the jail complex amid high rates of violence and dysfunction.
‘It definitely looked organized’
The Rose M. Singer Center, more commonly known as “Rosie’s,” is a large, 800-bed jail on the northeast edge of Rikers Island with a pale pink facade and a cracked concrete recreation yard at its center. It’s the only jail facility on the island that houses women, who have always represented a small percentage of the city’s jail population.
A 2011-2012 survey conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice found that detainees at Rosie’s reported one of the highest rates of sexual abuse at jails nationwide. Nearly 6% of people incarcerated in the women’s jail on Rikers reported sexual victimization by jail staffers, compared to a national average of 1.8%.
Jeny, a Bronx native, was sent to Rosie’s in 2015 on a felony conviction of driving while impaired. She said she was working as a call center customer-service representative at the time and had a 5-year-old son with Asperger’s syndrome. She missed his sixth birthday while serving her sentence.
Jeny did not want to use her full name because she fears retaliation from the correction officers over her accusations. Other women said in their lawsuits that officers threatened to hurt them and their families if they came forward about the abuse.
Soon after Jeny arrived at the facility, other women in her jail dorm warned her about sexual abuse by guards. “They were like, ‘Oh, you’re one of the pretty ones, they’re going to pick you,’” Jeny said.
Her incarceration records show she served 33 days at Rosie’s. In that time, the abusive late-night visits happened at least four times, she said, adding that she saw officers slap women or grab them by their hair if they didn’t comply with their sexual demands.
“They used to laugh at us and stuff, because it was like a fun game to them,” she said.
After several hours, the officers would walk past the dormitory guard as they returned the women to their beds, she recalled. The women were expected to go back to sleep and then start the next day hours later, Jeny said. After just one month of detention, she’d surmised that sexual abuse at the hands of guards was a systemic problem at the facility and that “everyone knew what was happening.”
Rikers Island
Doug Schneider/Getty Images
“It definitely looked organized,” Jeny said. “It was something that you can tell was already happening for a while.”
Jeny’s lawsuit alleges the city did not properly supervise officers and allowed the abuse to happen. It also accuses guards of performing invasive cavity searches on her and other female detainees.
She doesn’t know the names of the officers who she says abused her, but her lawsuit describes two of them: a heavy-set, gray-haired white man in his 50s and a bald, bearded Hispanic man.
The department’s sexual harassment policy bans male correction officers from conducting strip searches and cavity searches on female detainees except in “exigent circumstances,” which the policy describes as temporary and unforeseen situations “that require immediate action to combat a threat to security or institutional order.”
But Jeny said male officers regularly performed strip searches and cavity searches on women. She said correction officers would enter their dorm “like a hurricane” on a nearly weekly basis and claim they needed to search for drugs. She and other women would be ordered to enter the bathroom, strip naked and squat with their hands against the wall, she said, while an officer went down the line and penetrated each woman with a gloved hand.
“It just felt like you weren’t human,” Jeny said. “When you were in there, you had to do what they told you, or else.”
Patterns of abuse
The account of alleged abuse in Jeny’s lawsuit closely resembles those of hundreds of other women who say they were sexually abused at Rikers.
Gothamist’s analysis of the 719 lawsuits reveals several patterns. Like Jeny, at least 15 people said they were sexually assaulted during body searches and at least 30 said officers abused them at night while the jail was quiet and most people were sleeping.
At least 318 lawsuits described officers flirting with detainees or offering them phone access and contraband like cigarettes, soap, perfume and drugs to coerce them into sexual acts. At least nine women said they were sexually assaulted while working as suicide prevention aides, a job given to some detainees to watch other incarcerated people for potentially suicidal behavior. Some said they were abused on other work assignments, including while cooking in the kitchen or taking out the trash. Detainees in at least 14 lawsuits said they were abused in the laundry room, while about 70 described being watched or assaulted in the shower.
Showers, toilets, cells and areas used for medical exams are some of the few spaces in the jail complex that aren’t viewable through a security camera. They were carved out as camera-free zones via a 2015 court order after then-Mayor Bill de Blasio promised “100% coverage of all sensitive locations on Rikers Island” as a way to reduce violence. Gothamist found that the lawsuits repeatedly describe these semi-private areas as spaces where alleged sexual abuse occurred.
At least nine women said they were sexually assaulted or raped while pregnant on Rikers Island, including one who said a doctor groped her breasts and prodded her so intensely during a gynecological exam that her cervix ruptured.
At least seven women alleged officers impregnated them, with at least three claiming they got abortions while incarcerated. At least two women said they gave birth to officers’ babies.
Nearly all of the Rikers lawsuits were filed by women who were incarcerated at Rosie’s at some point over the last 50 years. Of the 719 lawsuits, Gothamist identified 13 filed by formerly incarcerated men. Sexual abuse of detainees by female officers was detailed in at least 60 lawsuits, most of which were brought by women.
More than half of those who filed lawsuits said they submitted to sexual abuse because staffers threatened to send detainees to solitary confinement, block visits with their children, extend their jail time or use violence against them or their family members if they reported the abuse or didn’t comply with their demands. Some said officers warned that they knew where they lived. One woman said an officer threatened to hurt her grandmother.
According to the lawsuits, jail staffers repeatedly told detainees that there would be no use in telling anyone about the abuse because no one would believe them.
Morales, the Department of Correction spokesperson, said the DOC has a “zero-tolerance policy toward all forms of sexual abuse and sexual harassment” and that it has taken steps to ensure staff, vendors, volunteers and contractors are trained to prevent, detect and report sexual abuse.
In more than 240 cases, incarcerated people didn’t know the names of their alleged abusers, making it difficult to determine who the Department of Correction employees are and how many are alleged to have repeatedly assaulted detainees, or how often. Other women could only recall a correction officer’s last name or their nickname. Nicknames are commonplace on Rikers Island, criminal justice experts said, and it’s possible that detainees would only know an officer by their alias.
Many last names or nicknames of jail employees appear in more than one lawsuit, with some coming up dozens of times in allegations by separate women. Twenty-three women detained on Rikers at various points between 1990 and 2005 said in their lawsuits that they were raped or sexually assaulted by a man known by the alias “Officer Champagne.” Some lawsuits only list a common last name, like “Brown,” which appeared in 59 suits.
“The fact that there are names of individuals there multiple times from different people who probably don’t know each other is extremely concerning,” said Sarena Townsend, a deputy commissioner at the Department of Correction who oversaw investigations into alleged officer misconduct on Rikers from 2018 to January 2022.
A handful of times a year while she was at the department, Townsend said, correction officers resigned or retired to avoid consequences if they were under internal investigation and discipline within the department looked likely. This meant they could leave without a record in their disciplinary file, she said. Under state law, retired government workers can still receive a pension even if they face allegations of misconduct, as long as they have not been convicted of certain crimes. City payroll records show that some of the officers identified in the lawsuits were still working for the correction department at least as recently as 2023.
Boscio, the Correction Officers Benevolent Association’s president, defended his members and said they should not be “tried and convicted in the court of public opinion.”
“Simply because the Adult Survivors Act makes it possible to file civil litigation based on new allegations of incidents that allegedly go back years, if not decades, that doesn’t mean those allegations have any merit and ultimately a court will make that decision,” Boscio said in his written statement.
Both state law and department policy forbid sexual contact between correction employees and detainees. New York law also states that people in custody at a correctional facility are incapable of consenting to sex with an employee.
Federal prosecutors would not comment on whether criminal charges were likely to be investigated in light of the flood of civil suits. Earlier this month, the FBI raided a federal women’s prison in California where a U.S. Senate subcommittee found “repeated sexual abuse of female prisoners” following a 2022 investigation by the Associated Press. Eight employees of the facility have been criminally charged and a special master has been appointed to oversee the facility.
I felt like me saying something maybe could end up backfiring.
Kull, who represents Jeny and hundreds of other women alleging sexual assault in jails and prisons across New York, said upstate prosecutors contacted her about possible criminal investigations into correction officers accused of abusing people in county jails. But she said she hasn’t heard from the Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark’s office, which has jurisdiction over crimes committed at Rikers.
In 2016, Clark established an office inside a small, white trailer on the island for a Rikers Island Prosecution Bureau. Her office also has a Public Integrity Bureau to investigate and prosecute cases of misconduct by police and correction officers in the Bronx.
Clark’s office declined four requests by Gothamist for an interview. Her office spokesperson, Patrice O’Shaughnessy would only respond to questions via email.
In response to questions about the decades of alleged abuse and repeated claims against individual officers, O’Shaughnessy wrote that prosecutors would “look into any allegations” brought to their attention by victims or their lawyers. She said the office would follow the approach it used with sexual abuse lawsuits filed against the Archdiocese of New York by either investigating allegations referred to them or connecting plaintiffs with the office’s Crime Victims Assistance Bureau if the criminal statute of limitations has passed.
She did not respond to questions about whether the office has plans to conduct a broader investigation into allegations from people who say they were sexually abused while detained on Rikers.
The New York Attorney General’s office said it does not have primary jurisdiction over criminal cases but could open an investigation if it received a referral from the DA’s office.
‘This is wrong’
Barbara Hamilton worked for eight years to expose what she describes as an “ingrained culture” of abuse on the island.
She was a self-described “young and idealistic” law school graduate when she began working at Rikers in 2008 as a legal coordinator for the Department of Correction, helping detainees access the law library. One day early in her tenure there, she said, she noticed an officer walking arm-in-arm with a female detainee.
“It was the strangest thing,” she said.
Hamilton began working at the Legal Aid Society two years later, helping Rikers detainees who were challenging department decisions, such as placing people in solitary confinement. As she met more detainees, she said she heard more stories of sexual abuse.
“Sexual assault was pretty commonplace at Rikers Island based on my experience talking to women,” Hamilton said. “Some came to trust me and kind of talk over time.”
She recalled seeing women wearing trinkets or makeup, which the jail typically bars detainees from having. Some told her they exchanged sexual acts for the items and other small privileges, like being placed on a work detail that allowed them to get out of the jail facility for a few hours.
“They would give correctional officers oral sex in exchange for this coveted work position,” Hamilton said. “It’s just so heart-wrenching to even think about the price that it costs.”
She eventually found two women willing to sue. Both alleged they’d been raped by a correction officer named Benny Santiago, who denied the accusations. As Hamilton began to investigate the cases, she said she interviewed more than 20 women in upstate prisons who also said they’d been raped by officers while they were held on Rikers awaiting trial or sentencing. Many of their claims were similar to those her two clients made.
The sign at the entrance to Rikers Island in Queens.
José A. Alvarado Jr.
In May 2015, Hamilton filed a lawsuit against Santiago and the City of New York, claiming the Rose M. Singer Center’s “pervasive culture of rape and other sexual abuse” allowed Santiago to repeatedly rape both the plaintiffs, one in 2008 and another in 2013. In addition to seeking damages, the lawsuit asked the court to force the city “to remedy the pattern of sexual abuse” at Rosie’s. That included demands for monitoring correction officers suspected of sexual misconduct, installing cameras in isolated parts of the jail and strengthening the system for investigating complaints.
In May 2017, the lawsuit settled for $1.2 million before the court decided whether to order the city to implement new policies to prevent sexual assault at Rosie’s. At the time, the city’s Law Department told The New York Times that the settlement was in the city’s best interest and that it was committed to protecting detainees from sexual abuse.
Santiago remained employed as an officer, but did not have further contact with detainees, the correction department said. He retired in September 2018 with his pension, according to records from the New York City Employees’ Retirement System. He received more than $52,000 in pension payments last year and nearly $9,000 so far this year.
“I don’t see it as a total failure, but, again, being idealistic, you want to fix it and want a court to say this is wrong,” Hamilton said.
She didn’t get a ruling. But as the lawsuit was making its way through the court in 2016, the city’s Board of Correction, under petition by then-Public Advocate Letitia James, enacted new policies that require Rikers leadership to follow federal guidelines for investigating and reporting sexual assault in the jails under the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act. The Department of Correction must now produce a twice-yearly report on sexual assault and harassment on Rikers.
But Townsend, the former deputy commissioner, said the department’s ability to investigate sexual assault allegations is still woefully inadequate. In the fiscal year ending June 2023, the department reported 79 allegations of staff-on-detainee sexual assault or harassment, up from 51 the year before, plus 167 allegations of sexual victimization between detainees. Only three allegations were substantiated in that time period, two from Rosie’s. Neither City Hall nor the correction department responded to questions about whether those substantiated claims involved officers.
The correction department told Gothamist it is improving the way it manages sexual misconduct cases by implementing a new case management system to better track patterns of alleged sexual misconduct. The department has been making similar promises since at least 2019, when it cited plans to upgrade its system at a Board of Correction hearing on sexual assault on Rikers. A department spokesperson told Gothamist the rollout was delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Nobody would believe me’
The fear Jeny felt at Rikers has stayed with her in the near decade since she was released, she said. She didn’t want to be touched after her month on Rikers, she recalled, not even by her husband. Their marriage suffered, she said, and the couple temporarily separated. She said she felt too ashamed to share the details of the abuse and instead tried to put her time at Rikers behind her.
“I felt like me saying something maybe could end up backfiring or maybe nobody would believe me,” Jeny said. “And I didn’t want to open up a can of worms and bring up these experiences again. I wanted the most to shove them into my subconscious and forget that they ever happened.”
Then an ad about the Adult Survivors Act started appearing in her social media feed. She thought it might be a scam but decided to call the attorney’s number anyway. She doubted anything had changed at Rikers and wanted to prevent more abuse.
“These are sexual predators,” Jeny said. “They take advantage of people and they get a kick out of it.”
As Jeny’s and hundreds of other lawsuits make their way through the courts, taxpayers will be forced to carry the burden of the legal fallout. The total cost to the city could be “astronomical,” said Kull, Jeny’s attorney, who is seeking $25 million for each of her clients.
“The city is facing more exposure than I think they bargained for,” Kull said.