Mayor Eric Adams doubled down on Tuesday on his position that the New York City Law Department is the agency that should investigate allegations in more than 700 lawsuits that claim staffers at Rikers Island jails routinely sexually assaulted detainees over a period of about five decades.
That’s despite the fact that the Law Department is also the agency responsible for defending the city against those lawsuits, which pose a potential $14.7 billion liability for taxpayers.
Adams made the statement in response to questions about a new Gothamist story detailing allegations against a now-retired correction officer who is accused of sexually assaulting 24 women while they were incarcerated.
At his weekly press conference, the mayor emphasized that the city is investigating the hundreds of claims as part of the legal process.
“If there’s a lawsuit that’s taking place, you gotta investigate exactly what happened,” he said.
After Gothamist published its first story on the flood of lawsuits in March, Adams called for a “thorough investigation” into the allegations. But his office has since said the only agency responsible for that investigation was the Law Department, which handles litigation against city agencies and officials — not an independent oversight body.
When asked whether a culture at Rikers could have allowed hundreds of incarcerated people to be sexually assaulted, Adams said: “I can’t answer that.”
“That’s what the review, even with the Law Department, that’s the review that would have to be put in place,” he said. “But this is current litigation. I don’t want to tread on the litigation review that’s taking place. And it has to take its course.”
Gothamist has spent the last nine months investigating hundreds of lawsuits filed under the Adult Survivors Act, a state law that opened a one-year window for people to file civil lawsuits against alleged perpetrators of sexual assault even after the statute of limitations had passed. Rikers Island is the subject of nearly 60% of the lawsuits filed under the law in the city’s state supreme courts.
Gothamist’s analysis has revealed hundreds of accusations of rape and other assaults by Rikers correction officers and other jail staff.
Several Rikers employees are mentioned in multiple lawsuits. None of the accused men who spoke to Gothamist were aware that they had been named in the lawsuits, which suggests that no investigators have reached out to them about the claims.
City Department of Correction spokesperson Annais Morales said the agency couldn’t comment on pending litigation. In the past, she has said the department has a “zero-tolerance” policy for sexual abuse.
Other elected officials and advocates have called for more comprehensive action from the city to address the issues at the Rikers Island jails.
Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running against Adams in the upcoming mayoral primary, said the money spent to pay out lawsuits against city agencies should come out of their budgets.
“That is an agency that has a real problem with accountability,” Lander said on Tuesday, referring to the correction department. “And unfortunately, in this case it sounds like women’s bodily autonomy and lives were put at risk as a result.”
City Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who chairs the City Council’s criminal justice committee, questioned the department’s handling of sexual assault allegations and cited Gothamist’s reporting at a hearing in April. In response to the latest report, she said the department and Mayor Adams needed to make clear “exactly what steps are being taken to prevent sexual violence from happening to women in custody and women who work at Rikers.”
“The stories being shared by these women are horrific and illustrate the department’s historic and ongoing failure to keep people safe while they await trial,” she said in a statement.
Liz Glazer, the former director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice, said there was an “urgent need” to examine the conditions on Rikers — both in the past and present.
“Does this brutal and life-altering conduct continue today in the jails?” she said in an emailed statement. “What steps are the city and the multiple oversight authorities of the jails taking to ensure that those in their custody are free from sexual assault?”
Adams said on Tuesday that the assaults were alleged to have occurred “decades ago.” But according to Gothamist’s reporting, at least 30 people said in their lawsuits that they were assaulted in the last five years.
Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of the nonprofit Brooklyn Defender Services, said people “continue to face life-threatening conditions and systemic abuse in New York City jails.” She called for more accountability, a reduction in the city’s jail population and the appointment of a federal receiver to manage Rikers.
“These horrifying allegations of serial sexual assault are unfortunately consistent with what we know about the jails’ history of abuse from our decades representing people incarcerated at Rikers,” Schreibersdorf said.
Elizabeth Kim and Arya Sundaram contributed reporting.