Suit: NYPD Sex Crimes Cop Investigating Rape Case Groped Victim
According to a report from the New York Daily News, a 25-year-old nursing student from Seattle is suing the NYPD after alleging earlier this year that two police officers—who had been assigned to investigate her rape case—got her drunk in a hotel room and sexually assaulted her.
The complaint, filed on Tuesday, alleges that the woman (Gawker has chosen to withhold her name) was sexually assaulted by a “social acquaintance” at an apartment in the city in January 2013. That June, having returned to her family in Seattle, she reported the assault to the NYPD by telephone and was notified—the complaint doesn’t specify whether she was told this on the initial call or later—that officers from the Special Victims Unit would travel to interview her.
On July 5, 2013, Detective Lukasz Skorzewski and his boss, Lt. Adam Lamboy, arrived in Seattle and met with the woman. The next day, Skorzewski requested a follow-up meeting; afterwards, he asked the woman to show him to the neighborhood where Lamboy was having lunch with a fellow NYPD officer, who the complaint alleges Lamboy was dating. Lamboy invited the woman to join them. When she hesitated, the complaint alleges, he reassured her: “We’ll protect you.”
This reportedly initiated a 10-hour-long “pub crawl,” during which time Skorzewski allegedly told the woman, “You’re my favorite victim!”
That night, the two officers allegedly convinced the woman to come back to their hotel with them. Lamboy, the supervising officer, left the woman in Skorzewski’s sole custody, telling him to “take care” of her. She slept in his bed while he slept on the couch. In the morning, Skorzewski, who is married, allegedly got into the bed and began attempting to kiss and grope the woman against her protestations. Eventually, the suit claims, he stopped, and she get out of bed, went into the shower, and cried.
Later, Skorzewski allegedly ordered the woman not to tell anyone what had happened. “It can’t leave this room,” he said, according to the complaint. Lamboy echoed this sentiment before the two officers left Seattle, allegedly telling the woman that her “credibility would be shot” if anyone found out what had transpired.
In November 2013, the plaintiff’s initial case was closed, without explanation. In December 2014, an Internal Affairs investigation “partially substantiated” the woman’s claims about the officers’ conduct. The Daily News first reported in January that Skorzewski and Lamboy had been transferred late last year:
Sources said Lamboy was bounced to the 90th Precinct in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in May. Skorzewski was knocked down from a detective to a patrol officer and moved to the 114th Precinct in Astoria, Queens, last week.
NYPD officials said Thursday that the Internal Affairs Bureau was investigating the allegations. A spokeswoman wouldn’t say why Lamboy, 44, and Skorzewski, 31, were still on the job.
Now, the woman is suing the city over violations of her civil rights, seeking $3 million for the officers’ “gross breach and abuse of their official police authority.”
“She was a victim made to feel re-victimized by the very people she sought for help: the police,” her attorney, Christopher Galiardo, told the Daily News this week. “The experience left her feeling exploited, helpless and alone.”
“I didn’t want to ruin his life,” the woman said in January, after the officers were transferred and demoted. “I just wanted somebody to know that this happened.”
Image via Shutterstock. Contact the author of this post: brendan.oconnor@gawker.com.