NEW YORK (NY)
New York Times [New York NY]
September 10, 2024
By Julia Jacobs
The law, which underpins several civil suits against Sean Combs, is the only remaining tool for reviving older claims in New York.
In New York, where state laws that extended the time to file sex abuse suits have lapsed, plaintiffs have found one remaining tool: Section 10-1105 of New York City’s administrative code.
The provision, known as the Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, has provided the basis for recent lawsuits against the Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler; the luxury real estate agents Tal and Oren Alexander; New York City’s Department of Correction; and the hip-hop mogul Sean Combs, who is a defendant in four.
“This statute continues to provide an avenue of relief for survivors,” said Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for a woman who sued Mr. Combs under the gender-motivated violence law, accusing him and two other men of gang-raping her in a New York recording studio in 2003. He has vehemently denied the allegations.
Lawyers say they have been increasingly using the law, first passed by the City Council in 2000, since the expiration last year of the New York state law that had allowed for the filing of lawsuits over sexual abuse allegations even after the statute of limitations had passed. The state law, one of many adopted around the country in the wake of a surge in #MeToo complaints, led to more than 3,000 state court filings relating to claims that often dated back decades — in addition to thousands more filed under an earlier law for people who said they were sexually abused as children.
Now plaintiffs are often relying on the city law that — because of a 2022 amendment — established a two-year window in which plaintiffs can sue over older allegations. That window closes at the start of March 2025, and the claims have to be related to events said to have occurred in New York City.
In recent months, though, defense lawyers have mounted significant legal challenges to the city’s amendment. They have argued that the City Council infringed on the jurisdiction of state lawmakers, and in several cases, judges have issued decisions limiting the amendment’s scope.
For Mr. Combs, who is facing a criminal investigation as well as lawsuits, the validity of the amendment has become a critical issue in his defense in several of the civil cases.
In court papers, his lawyers have argued that because state lawmakers passed laws that lifted the statute of limitations for discrete periods of time — including the Child Victims Act in 2019 and the Adult Survivors Act in 2022 — local legislators were effectively barred from passing legislation with the same function.
“It’s really undermining the State Legislature,” Marc Agnifilo, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, said in an interview, “and opening the Legislature up to the possibility it’s going to pass these laws thinking that it’s operating in the interest of all people in the state of New York just to have them change in ways they didn’t want.”
Though local and state legislators often pass statutes that address similar issues, courts in New York have ruled in some cases that the state law on a particular subject supersedes local law.
The amendment’s opponents argue that state legislators drew up a clear timeline for when the opportunity to sue for older claims should end. (For people alleging abuse as children, the state’s window in which they could sue closed on Aug. 14, 2021; for adults, it closed on Nov. 24, 2023.)
“That is about as specific as it comes,” Mr. Agnifilo said, “and that is what the Legislature wanted the state law to be.”
Because the state legislators did not address whether they wished to limit local legislation on the issue, it is now up to the courts to interpret their intent. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, a state senator who was a co-sponsor of the Adult Survivors Act, said in an interview that he did not think it was the Legislature’s intent to prevent local laws on the issue, noting that he would be monitoring the court cases to see “if further clarification is required.” Linda B. Rosenthal, a state assemblywoman who sponsored the bill, said she viewed the question as being up to the courts to decide.
Lawyers who represent plaintiffs in cases that cite the city law say defense lawyers are engaging in wishful thinking.
Michelle Caiola, a lawyer whose client is suing Mr. Combs over an alleged sexual assault in 2003, said there was no evidence that state lawmakers intended to prevent local governments from instituting their own laws on the issue.
“They could have said this was the final word on this issue, but they didn’t,” Ms. Caiola said, noting that the city amendment, like the law it modified, is broader than the state legislation and covers nonsexual abuse such as domestic violence.
The gender-motivated abuse law was first adopted in 2000, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the part of the federal Violence Against Women Act that allowed people who said they were victims of domestic abuse and sexual violence to sue their alleged perpetrators in federal court.
The City Council moved quickly to enact a law to fill what it viewed as a gap in protections for women, by adopting a measure to allow lawsuits by those who said violent crimes against them were motivated by an “animus based on the victim’s gender.”
In one high-profile case filed in 2017, a film industry publicist cited the law in a suit that accused Paul Haggis, an Oscar-winning filmmaker, of raping her. At trial, a jury ruled in her favor and ordered Mr. Haggis to pay the plaintiff $10 million.
In a pivotal decision in the case that applied the law to the #MeToo era, a New York appellate court ruled in 2019 that allegations of rape automatically indicated “animus based on the victim’s gender,” allowing plaintiffs to use the city provision to pursue claims even without additional evidence of animus.
But the City Council amendment, which broadened the law’s scope significantly, has been relatively untested; one judge effectively rejected it when it was cited in a case against Mr. Tyler.
He was accused of aggressively kissing and groping a 17-year-old girl in the 1970s, all accusations he denied. In a ruling this year, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of the Southern District of New York dismissed the case on multiple grounds. In part of his ruling, he wrote that the city’s amendment “is preempted by the state’s adoption of the Child Victims Act and the Adult Survivors Act, substantially for the reasons set forth by the defendant.”
The plaintiff is appealing Judge Kaplan’s dismissal, and his ruling contained little further explanation, which has allowed lawyers on both sides to embrace it or dismiss it as misguided. In at least one other case in state court, a judge accepted the amendment as a basis for civil claims.
Another issue under debate is whether the amendment can legally revive claims that date back to the 1990s and earlier, before the original gender-motivated violence law was passed.
Several judges, including Judge Kaplan, have ruled that the amendment cannot revive those older cases. At least one other jurist ruled differently, allowing claims from the 1980s to proceed.
As trial judges and appellate courts work out these disputes, plaintiffs have about six months to decide whether to file lawsuits, while knowing that the law behind them remains unsettled.
Helene M. Weiss, a lawyer who represents plaintiffs in sexual abuse cases, said decisions such as Judge Kaplan’s have jeopardized the future of the amendment, making some lawyers wary of taking gender-motivated-violence cases at all.
The purpose of this kind of legislation, she said, was to acknowledge how common it is for sexual assault victims to not come forward with their claims until many years later.
“This is just a major step backward,” she said of Judge Kaplan’s ruling, “in what we believe the City Council was trying to do.”
Hurubie Meko contributed reporting.
Julia Jacobs is an arts and culture reporter who often covers legal issues for The Times. More about Julia Jacobs