By New York Post (U.S.) | Created at 2025-01-28 22:51:34 | Updated at 2025-01-31 09:09:37
2 days ago
Dozens of sexual assault complaints were filed against the city’s troubled juvenile detention facilities this week, bringing the total number of claims to a shocking 539.
The 115 new alleged victims, who each brought suit on Monday, joined hundreds of other survivors who have filed cases since last spring — based on claims they were sexually abused at youth lockups in Brooklyn and The Bronx.
“The system should be a place of rehabilitation, not harm,” Angel Sanchez, who says he was abused by a male staff member at the Crossroads Juvenile Facility in Brooklyn when he was 16, recalled on Tuesday.
“We cannot let the cycle of abuse continue,” he said.
Sanchez, speaking at a press conference announcing the suits, said that the sicko staffer molested and masturbated him several times over the three months he spent at Crossroads.
“The staff member threatened me, telling me that if I reported what happened, I would place more time in detention,” Sanchez said.
Some of the lawsuits’ allegations date back decades, when the city Department of Correction operated the facilities. Since 2018, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services has overseen the jails.
Kendra Monsanto, claimed in her suit that she was repeatedly raped when she was at the Spofford Juvenile Detention Center in The Bronx — where roughly 42% of the allegations took place — for four months in 1998.
“I was supposed to be safer there than in my own home, but what I encountered was far from safety,” said Monsanto, who was 13 when the alleged attacks happened.
“At the facility, I was coerced, manipulated, and exploited by staff members,” she said.
At first, a pair of guards at first were “kind to her and took an interest in her personal problems to gain her trust,” her suit states.
But soon, the depraved employees began raping her five times a week, leaving her to “scream in pain until she passed out,” according to the lawsuit.
One of the guards would “force the female inmates, including [Monsanto], to line up and perform oral sex on him,” her complaint alleges.
Jerome Block, a partner at Levy Konigsberg — the firm behind the nearly 540 cases — said that kids today are still being sent to Crossroads and Horizon Juvenile Detention Center in the South Bronx, where just under half of the alleged abuse occurred.
“We have seen no evidence that the inadequate procedures and the conditions that enabled this sexual violence have been fixed,” Block said Tuesday. “These survivors want accountability. They want justice, and they want this cycle of sexual violence at these juvenile centers to end.”
The lawsuits are being brought because of a look-back window granted under the state’s Gender Motivated Violence Act, which closes at the end of February.
The city has already moved to dismiss at least some of the claims, but a judge has yet to rule on their motion that argues some of the allegations took place before such civil claims were allowed to be made through the GMVA in 2000.
While “the overwhelming majority of these incidents predate this administration or ACS’s involvement with juvenile justice, we take these allegations very seriously,” said ACS spokesperson Stephanie Gendell.
