UPDATED: STEVEN SPIELBERG, ANDRE 3000, PUFFY, BLOOMBERG LP, RIKERS GUARDS SUED AS SPECIAL SEX SUIT LAW ENDS
CLOSING HOURS OF NEW YORK’S ADULT SURVIVORS ACT SEES FLURRY OF FILED LAWSUITS, INCLUDING ONE FILED BY NEW YORK TIMES REPORTER
Steven Spielberg and wife Kate Capshaw at Lincoln Center in 2012. Photo Credit: JB Nicholas.
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Steven Spielberg, Andre 3000, Morgan Stanley, the Archdiocese of New York, former Mayor Mike Bloomberg's business, Bloomberg L.P., the Speaker of the City Council and dozens of guards at both women’s and men’s jails on Rikers Island, among others, were accused of sexual assault in the final hours of a special law that expired on Friday.
On Wednesday, lawsuits under the law were filed against rock star Axl Rose, actor Jamie Foxx, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, current Mayor Eric Adams and Donald Trump’s former spokesperson Jason Miller. Photographer Terry Richardson, actor Cuba Gooding jr and entertainer Sean "Puffy" Combs were also sued. Richardson and Gooding were each twice. Combs was sued three times: twice in state and once in federal court.
The suit against Spielberg was submitted by a woman acting as her own lawyer. She is identified in public court records as Christine M. Szuszkiewicz. The court returned her lawsuit "for correction," court records show. Szuszkiewicz also tried to file two more lawsuits on Friday; both were also returned "for correction.” Szuszkiewicz did not re-file any of the suits in time to meet Friday’s midnight deadline.
The lawsuit against Andre 3000 alleges he committed assault, battery and sex-trafficking. He "drugged, sexually assaulted and abused" the unnamed female victim in Manhattan, the summons in the case alleges. Because only a summons was filed, no other details are public at this time.
The special law under which all these case were filed is called the Adult Survivors Act. Gov. Kathy Hochul signed it into law in 2022.
Starting last November, the act opened a one-year window for people to bring lawsuits for sexual assault that otherwise would have been barred by strict legal time limits for filing such suits called “statutes of limitation.” The law launched more than 2,500 suits statewide, the Associated Press reports.
161 lawsuits under the Act were filed in New York City during the last three days of the law alone. There were zero lawsuits filed on Staten Island, 14 each in Queens and the Bronx, 16 in Brooklyn and 117 in Manhattan. By contrast, only three lawsuits were filed in the county covering Buffalo, Erie, in the last three days of the law. In Albany, the state capital, only one—filed by Brittany Commisso against Cuomo.
Dr. Darius A. Paduch was sued more than any other person: 63 times , court records say. Some of the lawsuits against Paduch name multiple plaintiffs. Paduch was a once prestigious New York-Presbyterian Hospital urologist. He’s currently jailed awaiting trial on federal charges he had sex with multiple underage boys. Federal prosecutors call him “a serial sexual abuser.”
In addition to the world-renowned hospital, many other New York institutions are defendants in lawsuits under the special sex suit law. More than a 100 lawsuits were filed against Columbia University. Others include Syracuse University, Lehman High School, the Archdiocese of New York, Rikers Island, the City Council, the 155-year-old New York Athletic Club, Morgan Stanley and Bloomberg L.P.
The unnamed female plaintiff in the case against Bloomberg L.P. alleges she was "sexually assaulted, raped, molested, abused and harassed at age 23 by her supervisor, Defendant Nicholas Ferris." Ferris, a high-ranking official with the company, drugged and raped her so many times she got addicted to drugs.
Mike Bloomberg, owner of Bloomberg L.P. and former three-term New York City mayor, was partly responsible because the culture of the company that bears his name created a sexual "playground" where male employees felt free to victimize female co-workers, the woman’s lawsuit alleges.
Colleen Hanley sued Morgan Stanley because when Steven Ruegnitz repeatedly groped her in 2002 the bank’s human resource boss, Eric Kayne, didn’t do anything about it—even after he saw security video capturing it. Hanley wanted to summon police and file criminal charges against Ruegnitz, but her boss, Joseph Rooney, threatened she’d be “blackballed” on Wall Street if she did, her complaint alleges.
“Against her own wishes, Plaintiff did not pursue criminal charges because she was a single mother supporting three young children.”
21 years later, Hanley is finally making Ruegnitz answer for his alleged crimes.
The lawsuit against the current City Council Speaker also names 9 other members of the City Council including Tiffany Caban as defendants. It even names Council Member-elect Yuseff Salaam—one of the Central Park Five wrongly convicted of rape and sent to prison for seven years before being released in 1997. The suit alleges they’re responsible for the ”City of New York’s structural and institutional racial, ethnic, and gender discriminations, and as to disparate treatment."
The Archdiocese of New York and other religious groups were accused of being responsible for Father Bruce Ritter's crimes. Ritter founded a shelter for teenaged runaways in lower Manhattan called Covenant House in 1972. He was forced to resign in 1990. Lionel Falero alleges he was "sexually battered, sexually assaulted, sexually abused" and "raped by Father Bruce Ritter" at Covenant House from 1984 until November 1987.
Ritter died in 1999. Other dead alleged sexual abusers include Father Robert Winterkorn (died 2005) and Syracuse University tennis coach Jesse Dwire (died 2003). Though long dead, their decades-old wrongdoing can be the basis of Adult Survivors Act claims today because the institutions the abusers worked for still exist today.
The vast majority of defendants are men—but not all.
Amy Brady was a security officer at a state mental hospital in Rochester when she first propositioned patient Gary Marzolf in 2022. Her idea of courtship was allegedly confessing “her heroin abuse history, her childhood sexual abuse and rape, her husband’s sexual history, her sexual history, her sexual history with her own family members, and her sexual desires and fetishes.”
When the recovering-but-still-seriously-mentally-ill Marzolf was released to a community treatment facility in Buffalo, Brady allegedly took him to hotels, plied him with “cocaine and alcohol” then forced “him to engage in sexual intercourse and abusive sexual fetishes.”
35 lawsuits were filed by former Rikers Island inmates in the last week of the Adult Survivor Act alone. These men and women allege a range of violations from rape to groping by same- and opposite sex guards and medical providers. Some named themselves in legal filings; many asked for court permission to use a pseudonym.
Boris Racine was 18 when he was so severely beaten by guards he temporarily lost use of one of his arms. Despite being unable to defend himself, he was placed in a housing unit with "a high concentration of sexual predators." The cell he was placed in did have a working lock. He was repeatedly raped.
"Rose Doe" is the pseudonym of a female Rikers prisoner. The complaint she filed says she was "repeatedly sexually assaulted, including by a male inmate who was permitted to stay in her Protective Custody dormitory in the women’s prison.”
The man had a beard. He did not even pretend to be transgender, Doe alleges.
When the male prisoner raped Doe in what was supposed to be a female-only protective custody housing unit on Rikers, guards failed to take action. Female prisoners banded together and forcibly ejected the man from the dormitory themselves.
“The perpetrator was not removed from the housing unit until the other inmates intervened and physically removed him from sexually assaulting Plaintiff and ‘packed him up’ meaning they threw his belongings out of the housing unit,” Doe's complaint alleges.
Some of the lawsuits appear to be last-minute filings. Others, the result of long quests for justice.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a New York Times reporter in 2023. Her lawsuit against Garth Wakeford alleges that, in the summer of 2001, "she was a bright, motivated, and optimistic 18-year-old who had just finished high school. She loved horseback riding and dreamed of a career in journalism."
Wakeford, then 31, raped a drunk Nir on beach in the Hamptons.
"The trauma of that night transformed" her life, Nir's complaint alleges. Now it’s time “to finally hold Wakeford responsible for what he did."
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