NY Lookback Window Opens Next Week For Sexual Abuse Suits

Next week, the window for the Adult Survivors Act opens on Thursday, November 24. The window will remain open for initial suits to be filed for one year, allowing people who allege that they were the victim of one of a number of eligible sexual assault and harrassment related crimes as an adult in New York where the statute of limitations previously lapsed to file suits against responsible parties. 

The law is based in part on the Child Victims Act that opened a window in New York for suits related to child sex abuse from August 2019 until August 2021. It was signed into law by Governor Kathy Hochul in May 2022. 

“Today, we take an important step in empowering survivors across New York to use their voices and hold their abusers accountable,” Governor Hochul said when announcing the bill’s signing. 

Like the Child Victims Act, the law allows for suits to be filed both against alleged attackers but also against responsible parties. With the CVA’s lookback window (and lookback windows opened in other states for victims of child sex abuse), that included schools, religious institutions and organizations like the Boy Scouts of America. Now, the state is bracing for potentially hundreds or thousands of complaints looking to hold institutions and employers to account for sexual abuses that happened under their watch. 

Now that includes 750 formerly incarcerated inmates of New York’s Department of Corrections and Community Supervision who are suing the State of New York for failing to protect them from sexual assault while they were incarcerated.  

The lawsuits will be filed by Ben Crump of Ben Crump Law and Adam Slater of Slater Slater Schulman LLP, the law firms announced on Wednesday. 

“The detainee-guard relationship is one of the most extreme power imbalances that exists today. Under New York State law, a person in correctional custody is legally incapable of consent,” Slater said at a press conference announcing the filings in Lower Manhattan on Wednesday. “Officers and guards in these facilities have an unmatched arsenal of methods for exerting their will upon victims: physical confinement, force, withholding of privileges, and total control over their environments. They can threaten punishment or revoke privileges to force their victims into submission and silence.” 

“We passed the Adult Survivors Act because for too long, survivors of sexual abuse were shut out of the courthouse by New York State’s formerly inadequate statutes of limitations,” said Brad Hoylman, the New York State senator who who sponsored the legislation at the press event. “Survivors of horrific trauma deserve our support whenever they decide they are ready to pursue justice.” 

Jean Carroll, the author who has alleged that former President Donald Trump raped her and then allegedly defamed her by describing her accusations as a “hoax” and a “con job,” advocated for the bill’s passing and announced Thursday that she will be filing a claim against Trump under the ASA in the Southern District of New York the day the window opens next week.

Carroll said she will be suing Trump for battery for allegedly forcibly raping and groping her in a dressing room at the luxury department store Bergdorf Goodman between 1995-1996. 

In her letter to state legislators earlier this year, urging them to pass the ASA, Carroll wrote about its importance for victims: 

“By staying silent so long, I lost my chance to hold Trump accountable for raping me. It happened in the mid-1990s. At that time, the Manhattan District Attorney would have had only five years to bring criminal charges against a rapist. The time for me to bring a civil case was even shorter—one year,” Carroll wrote. 

“These are amazingly tight deadlines given that the number of rapes in New York was then approximately 4,500 per year, with roughly half of them occurring in New York City alone.” 

Now, victims of sexual assault who were unable to bring claims within that one year window and whose cases were either never reported, not picked up or unresolved within the criminal limitations, will have a chance to file against their attackers and other responsible parties. 

Victims eligible to file under the law have received high profile support from public figures who are survivors themselves. 

Evelyn Yang, the wife of once-presidential and New York City-mayoral candidate Andrew Yang, also supported the ASA before it was made law in the spring. Yang has been open about how she was assaulted in 2012 by Columbia University doctor Robert Hadden during an exam when she was pregnant. 

Yang appeared in a PSA pushing for the ASA earlier this year with Ambra Gutierrez, who was abused by disgraced producer Harvey Weinstein, and Tanisha Johnson, who was allegedly drugged and assaulted by pain doctor Ricardo Cruciani, each of them encouraging the state to pass the law and open the lookback window. 

On Friday, Safe Horizons will release another PSA educating adult survivors of sexual abuse about their options under the ASA in the upcoming lookback window. The event, happening in person at Times Square at 11am, will be livestream on the organization’s instagram.