Women held at Rikers say they were sexually assaulted during routine medical exams

Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.

Jennifer Levine thought she knew what to expect when she arrived at Rikers Island in 2002.

She was homeless at the time and had been cycling in and out of jail. Levine anticipated the crowded holding cell filled with other women. She knew officers would order her into the showers, order her to strip, and search her body for contraband like drugs or weapons. She knew she would have to put the clothes she was wearing into a clear plastic bag and change into a stiff Department of Correction jumpsuit.

But this time, when Levine went to the clinic for an intake physical, she said, the routine deviated.

She recalled laying on an exam table with stirrups and hearing the snap of rubber as a doctor removed his blue medical glove and told her he was going to perform a vaginal exam — a step in the process that Levine knew to be out of the ordinary.

“I just didn’t understand,” she said. “Why would I need a gynecological exam?”

She said the doctor, whose name she still does not know, shoved his bare hand so deep it felt like nearly his whole forearm was inside her pelvis.

Levine said she tried to wriggle upright on the examination table but the doctor held her down. Her then-100 pound body stiffened and she tilted her head to the side, tears welling in her eyes, while the doctor prodded deeper inside her, she said. She doesn’t recall a nurse or anyone else being present for the exam.

“I just remember just watching other girls going to be examined by him, and I just wondered to myself, like, ‘Is he doing the same thing to them? Or was it just me?’ Almost blaming myself,” Levine said. “Is that why he did it? Because he knew nobody would believe me?”

More than 700 women recently filed lawsuits against New York City under the Adult Survivors Act alleging they were sexually abused while detained at Rikers. In total, they are seeking more than $14.7 billion in damages. The claims previously reported by Gothamist span nearly five decades and primarily identify jail guards as the perpetrators.

But guards were not the only jail employees accused of abuse. In at least 32 cases, including Levine’s, the accused perpetrators are medical professionals hired to treat detainees.

Medical staff groped women’s breasts, forcefully penetrated their vaginas with their hands or medical devices, forced them to perform oral sex, and sexually assaulted them in other ways, according to the lawsuits analyzed by Gothamist. Most of the women said they were assaulted during what were supposed to be routine exams.

The claims highlight ongoing concerns about the city’s safety measures for protecting detainees during medical procedures and speak to the difficulty of bringing criminal charges against health care providers and other staff at Rikers.

Jail clinics lack surveillance cameras for privacy reasons, making them difficult to monitor. And Correctional Health Services, the city agency that has provided medical services at Rikers since 2016, has also faced allegations that it lacks adequate staffing to provide required chaperones during breast and vaginal exams.

The total number of individual health care providers facing allegations in the lawsuits is unknown because many of the plaintiffs said they did not know the names of the people who abused them. Attorneys expect to learn their identities when they receive medical records during the litigation process, which could drag on for months or years.

The allegations against medical providers range from 1986 to 2018. The lawsuits were filed under a state law that opened a one-year window for survivors of sexual assault to bring civil claims beyond the statue of limitations.

The lawsuits accuse the Department of Correction and other city officials of not doing enough to end the abuse. In the past, the few criminal cases against Rikers medical staff that have become public didn’t get far. In one case, Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark told the Board of Correction she planned to bring a physician assistant charged with rape and sexual abuse to trial, then quietly dropped the charges. In another, prosecutors charged a Rikers doctor named Franck Leveille with sexual assault, but he absconded more than a decade ago. There is still a warrant out for his arrest.

At least 18 of the lawsuits filed under the Adult Survivors Act accuse Rikers medical staff of sexually abusing detainees between 2001 and 2015, when the city contracted a for-profit company known as Corizon Health to provide health care on the island. The city ended its contract with Corizon in 2015 after discovering major lapses in the company’s hiring practices and treatment of detainees with mental illness.

Only one of the 32 allegations analyzed by Gothamist accuses medical staff of wrongdoing in the period since Correctional Health Services took over in 2016. Spokesperson Jeanette Merrill said in an emailed statement that the agency is “committed to zero tolerance of any form of sexual abuse or harassment” and provides multiple ways for detainees to report misconduct.

The city’s Department of Correction refused to make anyone available for an interview for this article. Spokesperson Frank Dwyer declined to comment on the allegations against medical staff but said every employee, volunteer and contractor in city jails is trained on federal requirements to prevent sexual assault behind bars. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which oversaw the Corizon contract, also declined to comment.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams called for a “thorough investigation” into the accusations reported by Gothamist last month. His spokesperson Kayla Mamelak wrote in an emailed statement that most of the Rikers sexual abuse claims pre-date the Adams administration but said City Hall would continue to work with the law department to navigate pending cases.

“Sexual abuse and harassment is abhorrent and unacceptable, and we take these allegations very seriously,” she said.

The Bronx DA’s office said earlier this month that, in response to Gothamist’s reporting, it is contacting attorneys who filed lawsuits alleging sexual assault at Rikers and assessing whether their clients want to pursue criminal charges. It also established an email tip line for survivors to contact the DA. The office said those tips will be reviewed by prosecutors from the sex crimes unit, the Rikers Island Prosecution Bureau and the Public Integrity Bureau, which brings cases against jail employees accused of crimes.

The hundreds of lawsuits describe an entrenched culture of sexual abuse within the city’s jails, where most people are being held while they await trial and have not been convicted of a crime. But the accusations against medical professionals at correctional facilities point to an even more insidious form of alleged abuse. Like recent high-profile cases against former USA Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar and former Columbia University OB-GYN Robert Hadden, the allegations accuse Rikers health care providers of exploiting patients’ trust and using medical procedures for their own sexual gratification.

Lawsuits allege a lack of safeguards

A medical clinic staffed with doctors, nurses and other health care providers is one of the first places people visit when they arrive at Rikers. All detainees undergo a health screening and a physical to assess their medical and mental health needs before receiving their housing placement.

Women may opt into tests for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, according to Correctional Health Services. The agency said clinicians may also offer breast and vaginal exams if needed, but they are not currently a routine part of the intake process at Rikers and detainees have the right to refuse the procedures. The city’s prior correctional health care contractor was supposed to offer female detainees pap smears during their initial screening if they had not received one in the previous year, contracts obtained by Gothamist show.

More than two-thirds of the women who filed lawsuits claiming medical staff abused them, including Levine, alleged that they were assaulted during a gynecological exam at Rikers. More than a dozen women said providers fondled their breasts or vaginas during their intake screenings and sometimes performed gynecological exams on them even after they did not consent. At least 19 women said health care providers groped their breasts, and sometimes did so while commenting about their appearance.

Many women who filed lawsuits declined interview requests made through their attorneys. Gothamist has decided not to publicly use the names of women who could not be reached or requested anonymity. Some said they feared retaliation for speaking out or did not wish to be identified in the media in connection with the sensitive allegations.

At least two lawsuits alleged that doctors forced detainees to perform oral sex on them. Overall, more than 260 of the Rikers lawsuits filed under the Adult Survivors Act allege forced oral sex.

Medical treatment areas at Rikers are a rare blind spot in what is arguably one of the most surveilled corners of New York City. Due to privacy concerns, these areas, as well as shower and toilet areas, are exempt from a 2015 court order that required the city to install cameras in every part of the island’s detention facilities that didn’t already have them. The ruling was in response to high rates of violence at Rikers but did not focus on sexual assault.

At least two lawsuits accused female medical providers of sexual abuse. In her lawsuit, Veronica, who asked Gothamist not to share her last name because she fears retaliation for making her allegations public, said that while she was pregnant on Rikers in the mid-1990s, a female doctor inserted her entire hand into her vagina and dug so intensely with a medical tool that she punctured her mucous membrane and caused her cervix to rupture. Another doctor told her that her amniotic fluid had leaked, according to her lawyers. After Veronica was released from jail, the baby was born before her due date and spent time in the neonatal intensive care unit, Veronica’s lawyers said.

Correctional Health’s policy requires chaperones to be present during “intimate” examinations of the breasts, genitalia or rectum. The city first implemented the policy in 2010, a spokesperson said. But the city is currently facing a class-action lawsuit filed in 2018 alleging that jail staff sometimes ignore the intimate exam policy and detainees’ specific requests for a female chaperone due to staffing shortages.

Merrill, the Correctional Health Services spokesperson, reiterated that chaperones are required, but said she could not comment further on pending litigation.

But even when chaperones are present, they are not always an effective prevention tool, according to at least one lawsuit included in Gothamist’s analysis. It alleges a chaperone was present during an abusive exam in 2005. Michele Phifer said in her lawsuit that another employee was present while a doctor rapidly moved a medical device in and out of her vagina and asked her if it “felt good.”

Phifer, who agreed to be named but declined to be interviewed, said in her civil lawsuit that she filed a grievance while she was detained but that no one ever followed up on her complaint. Other lawsuits do not mention whether detainees filed a grievance at the time the abuse occurred. Some women allege that medical professionals coerced them into silence, including in at least one case in which they threatened to send a woman to solitary confinement.

Merrill, the Correctional Health Services spokesperson, said detainees can report sexual abuse and harassment to any member of its medical staff, who are legally required to document allegations or knowledge of wrongdoing. Family members and friends who believe a detainee is being abused by medical staff can also call the agency to file complaints, which are shared with the Department of Correction, the Department of Investigation and the Health and Hospitals inspector general’s office, she said.

Department of Investigation spokesperson Diane Struzzi said the agency looks into allegations of sexual abuse if investigators believe they rise to the level of criminal behavior. Struzzi said substantiated allegations may be referred to prosecutors to pursue a criminal case and the correction department to discipline or terminate an employee or contractor.

Incarcerated people are legally incapable of consenting to sex with a jail or prison employee in New York. Sexual contact is also forbidden under city policy.

Dr. Leveille

At least one Adult Survivors Act lawsuit filed last year accuses Dr. Franck Leveille of sexual assault. Leveille is a former employee of Prison Health Services, which became Corizon Health during a company merger in 2011.

The lawsuit alleges Leveille fondled an incarcerated woman’s breasts in 2007 at the women’s jail on Rikers, where she went for blood work and follow-up visits for anemia. The woman’s attorneys asked that she not be named because they are concerned she could face retaliation by correction staff. Her lawsuit also states that Leveille penetrated her vagina with his fingers during at least one of those visits, and that she stopped seeking medical care as a way to avoid the abuse. Her claim accuses Leveille of sexually assaulting her about 10 times.

Three years later, Leveille was arrested in a separate case that accused him of groping a detainee’s breasts and forcing his penis into her mouth. The woman said she spit Leveille’s semen into a tissue, which she turned over to the Department of Investigation, according to court records. Prosecutors requested a saliva sample from Leveille to determine if it matched the DNA on the tissue.

A judge ordered Leveille to submit the sample after he refused to do so voluntarily, but no record of test results appears in his criminal case file. He told investigators that he did not engage in any sexual contact with the woman and that there was a chance he had sex with his wife before work, put a tissue in his pocket with semen on it and then threw it in the trash at the clinic, according to summaries of the statements Leveille made to law enforcement officials that were later shared with his attorney.

Leveille never stood trial.

He pleaded not guilty and stopped coming to court in 2011 after he posted bail. His case file shows a warrant is out for his arrest. News outlets have reported in the past that Leveille may have fled to Haiti. The Bronx DA’s office confirmed that he had absconded and said it is actively investigating his whereabouts.

The New York State Board of Professional Medical Conduct launched an investigation into Leveille and barred him from practicing medicine in the state while the probe was pending, according to an order issued by the state health commissioner in August 2010.

The woman who accused Leveille in her Adult Survivors Act lawsuit is seeking $25 million in damages for what her lawsuit describes as “great pain of mind and body, shock, severe emotional distress, depression, trauma, discomfort, physical manifestations of emotional distress, embarrassment, loss of self-esteem, disgrace, humiliation, and loss of enjoyment of life.”

City lawyers have denied her allegations in their initial response to her lawsuit, according to court records.

Leveille could not be reached by phone or email. An attorney who represented him in his criminal case declined to comment and said he does not know where his former client is.

The line between medical procedure and abuse

Alaysha Robinson said she first realized a Rikers medical provider’s behavior might not be normal when she asked her bunkmate if anyone had checked her breasts upon arrival. She said her bunkmate laughed.

“‘This is a jail. They don’t give you no breast examinations,’” Robinson remembered her saying.

It’s often difficult for patients to discern between a normal medical procedure and sexual assault, said Michelle Simpson Tuegel, a leading sexual abuse attorney who has represented many survivors of sexual assault by medical providers across the country, including against Nassar.

“It’s hard when you’re the person on the table, and you’re uncomfortable already, to identify that,” she said.

Female patients in custody are particularly vulnerable, she said. Studies and surveys show that a disproportionate number of women in jails and prisons have a history of sexual abuse and drug addiction.

Simpson Tuegel said some patients have a limited knowledge of health care protocols and tend to place their trust in medical professionals.

“We want to believe that medical providers and health care providers are there to help us and heal us, not to abuse us,” she said.

Robinson said she feels embarrassed that she didn’t heed her own internal warning signs. In a lawsuit filed last year under the Adult Survivors Act, she alleged that a medical provider, whose name she does not know, fondled her breasts 20 to 30 times between November 2013 and June 2014. She said the physician told her she had herpes — even though she had no symptoms and had never been diagnosed with the infection — and then summoned her to the clinic about once a week for checkups.

Robinson recalls removing her clothes and wrapping herself in a hospital gown. She said a nurse would check her weight and height. Then she would be alone with the doctor, whose strong cologne would overwhelm her, she said.

The doctor didn’t give her any medication for herpes, Robinson said. Her attorneys have requested medical records from her stay at Rikers but have not yet received a response.

Robinson said her mind was too preoccupied with the stresses of life in jail to focus on whether the doctor was sexually assaulting her.

“I don’t want to be here. I’m trying to find somebody out there that’s going to help me to get out of here,” she said. “That was my focus: leaving. All that other stuff that was happening, it became normal.”

Robinson hadn’t regularly gone to a doctor before she was incarcerated, she said, adding that she appreciated that the Rikers physician asked her questions and seemed to care about her health, at a time when she felt weak and alone. She said she came to trust him, though she now believes that trust was misplaced.

“I was violated,” Robinson said. “I didn’t feel like I had a voice.”

A history of dysfunction

Allegations like Levine’s and Robinson’s follow years of documented dysfunction in the city’s correctional health care system, especially when it was operated by Corizon Health.

A 2015 Department of Investigation report uncovered “significant breakdowns” in Corizon’s screening procedures for medical staff, including hiring a mental health clinician convicted of second-degree murder.

The report found that neither Corizon nor the city’s correction department had conducted a single fingerprint-based criminal background check on Corizon applicants since at least 2011. Instead, investigators found that a stack of fingerprints had piled up on a file cabinet outside the office of a deputy commissioner at the Department of Correction. The city ended its contract with Corizon after the report was published.

Corizon recently divided its assets and liabilities into two entities — Tehum Care Services and YesCare — as it attempts to shield itself from liability in a mountain of lawsuits related to its treatment of people in jails and prisons across the country. Tehum filed for bankruptcy. A lawyer representing the company in the bankruptcy proceedings declined to answer Gothamist’s detailed questions about the measures it took to screen applicants and prevent sexual abuse by staff. A spokesperson for YesCare declined to comment.

Prosecutors criminally charged at least three Corizon employees who worked on Rikers, including a nurse accused of smuggling alcohol and tobacco into the jail complex in exchange for bribes. A grand jury in 2017 indicted Sidney Wilson, a physician assistant employed by Corizon, on 43 counts of rape, sexual abuse and other charges that he sexually assaulted four women between 2013 and 2014.

He resigned in 2015, according to Bronx DA Darcel Clark’s office, who said Wilson would stand trial in 2019. But the trajectory of his case reflects what Clark has described as the “difficulty” of prosecuting Rikers staff accused of sexual misconduct.

“Difficulty doesn’t mean impossible. And just because it’s hard doesn’t mean that we don’t do it,” Clark said at a 2019 Board of Correction hearing.

Department of Correction and Department of Investigation staff sometimes contribute to those challenges by failing to immediately perform forensic exams after a detainee reports sexual assault, she said. She also noted that incarcerated victims are often hesitant to come forward because they can’t leave the place where the assault occurred and urged officials to provide confidential ways to report abuse.

Clark told Board of Correction members that her prosecutors had spent more than a year investigating Wilson’s case, including visiting three of the women at a prison near the Canadian border, and that a victim advocate was working with the women to help prepare them for trial.

But the DA’s office dropped the charges against Wilson in 2022, according to spokesperson Patrice O’Shaughnessy. Clark blamed her decision on discovery reform, a state law legislators passed in the spring of 2019 that requires prosecutors to turn over evidence more quickly. The law didn’t take effect until January 2020, six months after Wilson’s case was supposed to go to trial.

Wilson’s attorney, Cesar Gonzalez Jr., said in an interview that his client has always adamantly denied the allegations and believes he was falsely accused. Gonzalez said prosecutors offered Wilson more lenient plea deals as the case dragged on, which made Gonzalez doubt the strength of their case. He said he’s unsure exactly why the DA’s office ultimately dropped the charges.

“I would certainly like some clarification as to the motivations why these particular victims could not have had their day in court,” Gonzalez said.

O’Shaughnessy said in an emailed statement that the new discovery laws required prosecutors to gather hundreds more documents and pieces of evidence, which they were unable to do by the deadline. She added that all but one of the complainants decided to stop pursuing the case while serving sentences in state prison.

No lawsuits filed under the Adult Survivors Act list Wilson by name, and it’s unclear if any of the allegations against unnamed medical professionals pertain to him. Wilson, Corizon and the city of New York are currently facing a lawsuit brought by a group of Wilson’s accusers in 2016. But the litigation is on an indefinite pause because of the bankruptcy case.

Jessy Edwards and Jared Marcelle contributed reporting.