By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2024-12-22 01:43:50 | Updated at 2024-12-24 01:43:03
2 days ago
An NYPD lieutenant alleged in harrowing detail how the department’s hulking top cop preyed on her financial and emotional vulnerabilities to repeatedly sexually demean her in his Police Headquarters office, according to a new complaint.
Lt. Quathisha Epps was facing foreclosure and desperate to keep her home the first time Chief of Department Jeffrey Maddrey asked for sex, she claimed in an exclusive interview.
“He wanted to have anal sex, vaginal sex, oral sex,” the mother of three said.
“He was always asking me to kiss his penis.”
Maddrey strongly denies Epps’ claims.
In one painful session, he bent her over a sofa in his 13th-floor office, she claimed to The Post, sobbing.
“I kept asking him, ‘Can you please stop?’ Then I stopped asking him to stop.
“‘Can you please just slow down? You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me!’ ” she alleged.
Epps, 51, recently made headlines for being the NYPD’s top earner at $400,000, which included more than $200,000 in overtime.
The chief, the highest ranking uniformed cop on the force, demanded “unwanted sexual favors in exchange for overtime opportunities,” between June 2023 and Dec. 16, 2024, according to an Equal Opportunity Employment discrimination claim filed against the city Saturday.
She alleged Maddrey also used what he knew about her past as an incest survivor to take advantage of her, according to the complaint.
“I think he’s a predator,” Epps said.
“He’d say, ‘We’re going to save your house’ like you’re supporting me when you’re really just f—ing me.”
When he wasn’t demanding sex, he was forcing Epps to do odd favors involving other female officers, according to the complaint filed by her lawyer, Eric Sanders.
The EEOC document is a precursor to a lawsuit.
Maddrey ordered Epps to keep two mistresses apart because “he didn’t want them to know about each other,” Epps claimed.
Epps worked as an administrator for Maddrey as he moved up in the NYPD from chief of housing to chief of patrol, but his alleged sexual demands didn’t start until June 2023 when he became chief of department, responsible for the entire 36,000-member force, Epps alleged in the complaint.
That’s when she claims she confided in him that she was facing bankruptcy and foreclosure.
“He told me I could do whatever overtime I needed,” she recalled.
“He told me I was like his sister.”
But Epps said the favors he demanded were anything but familial.
He frequently sent her messages that said “DAP” — slang for “Dat ain’t p—y” — which meant he wanted anal sex, Epps claimed.
He would also come into her office and “ask me to kiss it,” she claimed in her complaint, a reference to his penis.
He used to tell her all the time he has “a wish and a command,” and she would have to do what he said, she claims.
“He’d say ‘Strip for me right now,’” Epps alleged.
Bizarrely, he ordered her to pay for a vacation to Miami for Maddrey and his wife, Helen, Epps claimed in her complaint.
“There was a trip that I paid for, for $2,700,” she recalled.
“He said make it look like a gift. He has a whole script of what to say [to his wife].”
He also allegedly asked her to give her family’s Lower East Side apartment, which was in her kids’ names, to a detective who worked for Maddrey.
The first alleged sexual overture with Epps occurred in June 2023 when Maddrey was sitting at his desk with his uniform pants open, rubbing his chest through his white undershirt, Epps alleged.
“He said he dreamed about f–king me in my a–,” Epps claimed.
“I said, ‘But Chief, you’re the chief of department.’ . . . He was like, “But I’m still a n—-r and you look good.'”
Then he asked her to go to the back room in his office, where he has a couch and bathroom, she said.
“He bent me over the arm of the couch and when I tried to back away but he was telling me ‘Just let me put it in a little bit,’” she claimed.
Next, he reached into a locker near the couch and pulled out a jar of K-Y Jelly from a top shelf in the back, and rubbed it on himself, she alleged.
When she asked him to slow down, he said in a soft voice, “I’m not trying to hurt you, baby. I’m not trying to hurt you,” she recalled.
The two had sexual intercourse about 10 times after that, Epps alleged.
Epps, who claims she was raped by a relative starting when she was 4, said she was afraid to tell anyone about Maddrey.
“Who was I going to tell?” she said.
“Who would believe me?”
The last alleged sexual encounter occurred on Monday, after Epps went to Maddrey and said she wanted to retire following the Post expose of her excessive overtime, according to the complaint.
Maddrey told her he would speak to Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch on her behalf — but first demanded that she “kiss it,” meaning his penis, according to the EEOC document.
Epps, who felt she had no choice, “complied under coercion,” the complaint stated.
She filed for retirement immediately after, “marking the culmination of the severe emotional and professional harm inflicted upon her by Chief Maddrey’s abuse of power.”
The department then suspended Epps and opened an investigation into her.
Maddrey denies Epps’ claims.
“What a convenient time to accuse somebody of misconduct after she’s caught stealing time,” Maddrey’s attorney, Lambros Lambrou, said.
“She’s obviously drowning and in the deep end of the pool without a lifesaver. She wants to take down as many people as she can. This is completely meritless, and we deny every aspect of it.”
