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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll turn to a bombshell investigation from our Gothamist newsroom that uncovered allegations of systemic sexual abuse spanning decades at the women's jail on Rikers Island. A warning, this conversation will likely include descriptions of sexual assault that may not be suitable for some listeners. Make your choices if you want to tune in or tune out, but you remember the Adult Survivors Act, which opened a one-year lookback window, allowing women who experienced sexual assault to file claims against their abusers years after the statute of limitations expired.

The recent allegation against Mayor Adams came from that look-back window opening, so did the E. Jean Carroll case against Donald Trump. Now we learn, thanks to WNYC and Gothamist investigative reporting, that out of the 1,256 lawsuits filed in the whole look-back period, more than half, 719, come from women alleging they were assaulted while incarcerated at the Rose M. Singer Center on Rikers Island. Do the math. This amounts to over 60% of all suits filed in New York State under the Adult Survivors Act.

With us now to discuss the findings of their investigation and what they may mean are Gothamist and WNYC reporters Jessy Edwards and Samantha Max. Hi, Jessy. Hi, Samantha. Thank you for coming on.

Samantha Max: Thanks, Brian.

Jessy Edwards: Thanks, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: I will just ask the questions, you two can figure out who gets to answer them because I don't know which piece of the reporting you each did, but what did you look for for this story, and what did you find? All right. Samantha, you go first.

Samantha Max: Hi, Brian. Sorry. Just adjusting my microphone. First, I just wanted to mention one slight data note. Actually, the 1,256 lawsuits filed, those were specifically the lawsuits that were filed in state Supreme Courts in New York City. There were others filed across the state. It's more than 4,000 total lawsuits filed across the state but in New York City, the cases that were filed in state Supreme Courts, it's more than 60%, 719 lawsuits.

Brian Lehrer: Shocking. We'll talk about whether there is such a concentration of sexual assault in Rikers Island that that statistic reflects reality, but let's talk about an individual first. Jessy, you profiled one victim named Jenny, who's suing the city and the Department of Correction in particular. Here's a clip of her from your piece describing how she survived the abuse she faced while incarcerated and how systemic it was. Hardly an isolated incident in her description.

Jenny: They would come a few times a week. I would just pray that it wasn't as bad as the last time. I would pray that it wouldn't last as long. I would pray to God to be with me the whole time. That's what gave me some strength.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, my goodness. Jessy, can you tell us more about Jenny and the abuse that she alleges she faced at Rikers?

Jessy Edwards: Yes, Brian. Jenny, she's one of the more than 700 women who have filed these lawsuits under the Adult Survivors Act in New York City alleging sexual assault on Rikers Island. Jenny was sent to Rikers in 2015 on a federal conviction of driving while impaired. Jenny was 31 years old at the time. She'd been working at a call center. She had a five-year-old son at home. Jenny alleges that the sexual assault started within two weeks of her being at the Rose M. Singer Center. That's the woman's jail on Rikers Island.

Her lawsuit alleges this pattern of late-night abuse. She says that while she was sleeping in her dorm room, officers would come in after dark, after midnight, and they would call the names of certain women. The woman would be expected to get up, quickly get ready, and then they would be led, she says, down these long, dark hallways to another area of the facility. She doesn't know where she was. She'd be taken into a room, she says, that was pitch black. There, she says, the women were forced by officers to get on their knees and perform oral sex on the officers.

Jenny says that this could go on for hours, and then afterwards, they would be led back to their dorm room and be expected to go back to sleep, wake up a few hours in the morning as though nothing had happened. Jenny also alleges a pattern of abusive strip searches. She says that while she was held on Rikers Island, officers would sometimes come into their dorm room, and they would say that they had to urgently do a drug search or a contraband search. Women would be told to go into the bathroom, strip naked, they'd be told to stand in a line with their hands up against the wall, and squat.

Jenny says that male officers would then go down the line one by one, inserting a gloved hand into each woman. Jenny says that she tried to put these claims of assault behind her for many years, but when the Adult Survivors Act came in, she started seeing ads on her social media, and she decided that she was finally ready to come forward. She wants to be a voice for other women who may still be in danger.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Samantha, these 719 lawsuits filed during the look-back period that the Adult Survivors Act opened, is that from 719 different women?

Samantha Max: Our understanding is that each of these is a unique lawsuit filed by different people alleging all different kinds of abuse, spanning from as far back as 1976 to as recently as last year.

Brian Lehrer: Did anybody in the court system or anywhere else break down these numbers, or did you have to get the records of all the Adult Survivors Act lawsuits and figure out that there was such a concentration, a majority concentration, coming from people who were incarcerated at Rikers?

Samantha Max: We knew as the deadline was closing that many hundreds of lawsuits had been filed, both regarding alleged sexual abuse on Rikers, and then also many more alleging sexual abuse in the state prison system. Once we had that information, we decided that we would request a list of all of the lawsuits filed under the Adult Survivors Act. I was able to get this spreadsheet from the Office of Court Administration, which had been tracking all these cases, and it basically broke down for every single lawsuit an index number that they used to track these cases, who the plaintiff was, who the respondent was.

Some of them, you could see that the Department of Correction in New York City was being sued, and then there were several hundred others that were against the City of New York that we weren't sure if they were Rikers-related or not. We read every single one of those lawsuits against the City of New York to find out whether it was Rikers-related, and what we did find was that almost all of them were.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. Listeners, I wonder if there's anybody out there right now with connections to Rikers Island. Maybe you were incarcerated or even currently are. We get calls from Rikers sometimes or if you work at Rikers Island or ever have, have you witnessed or experienced sexual abuse at the jail? I assume we won't get any true confessions from present or former correction officers on the phones, but has anybody ever witnessed this in a way that you're willing to say, anonymously is fine. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692?

Maybe some of you with connections to the jail can shed more light on what appears to be the systemic nature of sexual abuse at Rikers Island, detailed in the 719 lawsuits filed by women who said they experienced it. 212-433-WNYC, call or text us with your story or questions for our reporters, 212-433-9692. Samantha, let me stay with you for a sec. Your piece compares the systemic sexual abuse that appears to have taken place against female prisoners to the abuse uncovered at other powerful institutions like, you said, Columbia University, USA Gymnastics, and the Catholic Church. Why do you make those comparisons?

Samantha Max: I think it's impossible to look at this law outside of the context of the MeToo movement, which has just brought forward so many patterns of sexual abuse against both powerful people and powerful institutions. Then also, obviously, far before the MeToo movement, the explosive reporting out of the Boston Globe related to sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. These are all patterns that have not just affected New York City, but across the US and across many years, so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison for that reason.

If you think about both Columbia University, where Dr. Robert Hadden has faced many, many allegations of sexual abuse from former patients, as well as USA Gymnastics, which Larry Nassar, who was a team doctor, faced many allegations of sexual abuse as well, those were more in the hundreds range. The Catholic Church, of course, is a much bigger institution. The sexual abuse there has been known about for longer. There are thousands and thousands of allegations in that case.

The interesting thing about the Rikers cases, particularly as it relates to the Adult Survivors Act, is we have these 719 allegations, and those just come from this one-year window that people had to file a lawsuit. Those 719 are only the people who were aware of the law and felt that they were ready to come forward with their allegations. Our understanding is that there are probably many, many more people who did not know about the law, or they did know, and they just didn't feel either ready to come forward or they didn't want to go through what will be probably a very intensive process as these cases wind through the court system.

Brian Lehrer: Jessy, based on your reporting and what Samantha was just describing, these are hundreds of individual lawsuits, has there also been an investigation yet of a pattern of abuse? If a majority of all the cases filed in New York City in this one-year lookback window are from women who are incarcerated at Rikers, it suggests a horrific environment of violent crime by the correction officers that needs to be investigated as a pattern.

Jessy Edwards: Yes, the history of sexual assault on Rikers Island is something that we're told goes back a long way. There was actually a Department of Justice report that came out in 2011-2012, and it found that sexual assault was reported at the Rose M. Singer Center at one of the highest rates across the country. There's also been other civil lawsuits where sexual assault has been alleged on Rikers.

There was a proposed class action lawsuit that was brought in 2015. We spoke with one of the attorneys that brought that suit. Her name is Barbara Hamilton. In that case, there were allegations that two former detainees brought that they were both sexually assaulted by the same officer, a correction officer, Benny Santiago. One woman alleged she was raped in 2008. The other alleged she was sexually assaulted in 2013.

This proposed class action was brought by the two women against the city and the officer, Santiago. It was a pretty public case that was covered widely in the media, and it settled for $1.2 million. Bearing in mind that is just one lawsuit with two plaintiffs, it didn't end up getting class action status because it settled. Certainly, we should see more attention, especially as our investigation has broken down many of the patterns that we've seen. We're reaching out to city officials and state officials to see if there is going to be further action as these patterns emerge.

Brian Lehrer: As these lawsuits go forward, the plaintiffs are seeking over $14.7 billion in damages from the city, when you add up all the claims, which you note is more than triple the cost associated with the migrant crisis, so a very significant financial burden for the city. I wonder if this will get all the attention that the migrant crisis gets from the mayor in particular, as also, in addition to others, as a financial risk to the taxpayer, in addition to, obviously, the inherent evil of sexual abuse. Listener writes, "Naive question. Aren't there cameras everywhere at Rikers? Can they help understand these claims?" Jessy, anything on that?

Jessy Edwards: Sam has actually looked extensively into the camera policies on Rikers Island, so I'm going to throw this one to her.

Brian Lehrer: Sure. Great.

Samantha Max: Yes. There are cameras almost everywhere in Rikers. Back when former mayor Bill de Blasio was running the city, he made this promise that there would be "complete coverage" on Rikers Island. The city is also under court order to have this complete coverage. That court order, which was signed in 2015, it did include a few carve-outs for what you would think would be essentially privacy. Those places are shower stalls, cells, a few other places where detainees might be undressed, perhaps.

We have found through going through these lawsuits that many of the allegations supposedly occurred in these spaces where there are no cameras, these hidden corners of the jails. Others happened years or decades ago, perhaps before there were cameras installed. Some, it is a question of whether maybe there is camera evidence, unclear if the evidence would still exist, even if it was only a few months ago. I don't imagine that the Department of Correction is saving every single piece of footage, but I am sure that as these lawsuits are going forward, that the attorneys will be trying to get any potential footage that may exist.

Brian Lehrer: Listener writes, "I was a social worker for four years in a program for criminalized survivors of gender-based violence facing criminal charges, many of them held at Rikers. Countless clients in our program described sexual, physical, and psychological violence while detained at Rikers. It was central to the culture there," writes this listener. "Keep in mind many of these women were in Rikers because they had defended themselves against gender-based violence and were now experiencing it again."

Another listener writes in this question, "Why are there men guards? In my ignorance," writes the person, "I'd have thought all guards of a female prison are females." What do you think, Jessy?

Jessy Edwards: Yes, that is something that the attorney Barbara Hamilton herself raised. She worked on Rikers at the women's jail from 2010 to 2015. She worked closely with women for eight years, and she describes how the population of women on Rikers are particularly vulnerable. A lot of the women going into Rikers Island, they either suffer from mental health condition, we know that even today, almost 50% of the people held on Rikers Island are diagnosed with a mental health condition. Then there's the other layer of substance abuse.

We've also just found through our survivor interviews that many of the women who were sexually assaulted or have claims of sexual assault on Rikers, they actually have a history of childhood sexual abuse as well. This is such a vulnerable population of women. It is also worth noting, though, that there are some allegations of sexual assault by female correction officers. The vast majority are against male officers, but there is a small pool of allegations against female officers as well.

Brian Lehrer: Similar in a way, Samantha, another listener asks, "I have yet to hear anything about sexual abuse of boys and men incarcerated at Rikers." Were there any of those in the Adult Survivors Act lookback period filed?

Samantha Max: Yes, there were a few. Out of the 719 cases that we reviewed, we found 13 brought by men who had been incarcerated and also another one brought by a male correction officer against a fellow CO. It's a very small amount, and we don't know if there are other men out there who, for the same reasons as women and perhaps other layers as well, might not have wanted to come forward.

Obviously, the power dynamics when you have a jail that is just for women and you do have male guards there, that is creating some dynamic that it seems was rife for allowing alleged sexual misconduct to occur. I would personally be curious to know if there are other men out there who have not brought assaults, perhaps because of fear of stigma or perhaps because of the Adult Survivors Act being targeted more toward women.

Brian Lehrer: I guess that's an invitation to contact Samantha Max or Jessy Edwards in the WNYC newsroom if you have such a story. Well, we will see what happens when these lawsuits make it to court or are settled by the city. My guests have been Gothamists and WNYC reporters Jessy Edwards and Samantha Max. Thank you very much.

Jessy Edwards: Thanks, Brian.

Samantha Max: Thank you.

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