More than half of all sexual abuse lawsuits filed in NYC under the Adult Survivors Act took place at Rikers Island, a report released today shows.
More than half of all sexual abuse lawsuits filed in New York City under the Adult Survivors Act were focused on Rikers Island, with guards alleged to have assaulted inmates, an alarming new report released Tuesday showed.a state law that opened a one-year window for sexual assault survivors to file claims outside of the statute of limitations, which closed in November 2023.
According to the analysis, which took several months to compile, more than 700 victims — almost all of them women inmates — say jail employees sexually assaulted them by committing a variety of vicious acts that resulted in widespread institutional abuse. Officers are accused of forcibly kissing inmates, ordering them to perform oral sex and submit to abusive cavity searchers, and committing violent rape.
The women involved in the lawsuits are suing the NYC Department of Corrections and the City of New York, claiming the city failed to protect them, and seeking a total of more than $14.7 billion.The claims of abuse at Rikers go back 50 years, with a sharp spike in allegations in the 1990s and early 2000s. Female inmates are incarcerated at the Rose M. Singer Center, the only facility at Rikers Island that houses women.
“If you look at the overall population of Rikers, women make up a very small proportion of the number of people who are being detained at Rikers at any given time,” Werth said. “So you’re talking about a smaller subset of a subset of a subset, in a sense. To see these kinds of numbers of women who are coming forward from this rather small population on the island is pretty remarkable.”
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