Christopher Werth: Hey, everyone, this is Notes from America. I know you were expecting Kai. This time of week, he's been getting on the call with people to talk about the election and about politics. You should not worry. Kai will be back covering all those important issues with insightful people throughout the election but this week he gave me a call, even though I don't cover national politics. My name is Christopher Werth. I'm an editor at WNYC. Kai and I actually used to work together on his show.

More recently, I've been working in our New York newsroom on an investigation into something very troubling and I think very revealing about the pervasiveness of sexual violence in our correction system. Kai heard that report and he thought we should share it with you. I'll do that now and then Kai is going to join us later in this episode to talk about what has happened since we first reported this story. Just a note, this episode contains detailed descriptions of sexual assault, so be mindful of that and who else may be listening around you.

It is not an easy listen, but I think you'll agree it's a really important one. Nine years ago, a woman named Jenny was convicted on a drunk driving charge and sentenced to 60 days at Rikers Island. When she got to the women's jail there, she says she was placed in a big dormitory-style housing unit with lots of other beds. Right away, the other women started to warn her.

Jenny: They were like, "Oh, you're one of the pretty ones. They're going to pick you and stuff like that."

Christopher Werth: At night, she says they told her, the guards would call out some of the women's names, take them to secluded parts of the jail, and force them to have sex.

Jessy Edwards: How many people would typically come the night?

Jenny: There'd usually be two people, and they will pick you up like if they're going to take you to go to work.

Christopher Werth: Reporter Jessy Edwards spoke with Jenny at length. We're only using Jenny's first name because she fears retaliation for speaking out.

Jenny: It definitely looked organized. It was something that you can tell was already happening for a while.

Christopher Werth: Then one night, she says, the guards called her name.

Jenny: I just cooperated with what I needed to do because I feel like when you don't cooperate when you don't have any control of the situation, the more you fight back, the worse it can become for you.

Christopher Werth: Jenny sued the city of New York last year, but she's just 1 of over 700 women who filed lawsuits claiming they were sexually assaulted by guards and other staff while they were held at Rikers. The lawsuits were all brought under this New York state law called the Adult Survivors Act. It opened this one-year window in the statute of limitations for sexual abuse survivors who may have never reported what happened to them.

Jessy Edwards: The claims go back almost 50 years, right back to the 1970s. The most recent claim was from last year in 2023. We read through all of these 700 lawsuits.

Christopher Werth: Jessy spent several months trying to get to the bottom of what exactly has been happening at Rikers. What she was most interested in was this pattern that she began to notice in a lot of these lawsuits against the city. Like Jenny, many of the women who've come forward didn't know the name of the staff member who they say attacked them. Most of those who did have a name only knew a last name but some of those names were coming up over and over again.

Jessy Edwards: There are names like Brown that you might expect to come up many times but then I noticed names like Cuffee. That name came up five times. Then there was a Reyes seven times, but there was one that I was noticing more than some of the others. I noticed it because it was a curious name. C.O. Champagne or Correction Officer Champagne. What struck me is that when I reached out to the city's Office of Payroll Administration, they had no record of any person called C.O. Champagne having ever worked at the Department of Correction.

Christopher Werth: Wow.

Jessy Edwards: I started calling these women who had named C.O. Champagne in their lawsuits. How did you know him as C.O. Champagne?

Lizette Gonzalez: You're kidding me. That name was so popular. Everybody knew him.

Jessy Edwards: Lizette Gonzalez met C.O. Champagne back in the '90s as she cycled in and out of Rikers Island. She was addicted to heroin at the time and was repeatedly picked up on drug charges. Was that the name on his badge?

Lizette Gonzalez: Yes. That was the name on his tag. Yes, Champagne. They won't call him C.O. Champagne. It would be Champagne just like that.

Jessy Edwards: She says that she first met Champagne in a hallway as she was walking to get food in the mess hall.

Lizette Gonzalez: He approached me and he was like, "Listen, if you need anything, let me know." I said, "I do need cigarettes." The fact that he spoke to me kindly because I was so accustomed to being spoken to in such a degrading manner by the officers, that made me feel a little, "Oh, okay. Not everybody's the same." I remember he didn't bring me a pack. He brought me one cigarette.

Jessy Edwards: Then one night, about half an hour after lights out, she said she saw flashlight.

Lizette Gonzalez: I saw the flashlight, the brightness,-

Jessy Edwards: heard the heavy door of her cell open.

Lizette Gonzalez: -and he walks in.

Jessy Edwards: It was Champagne.

Lizette Gonzalez: He didn't say nothing to me. He just said, "Turn around," and he had sex with me. He was very aggressive. Turned me around forcibly. His whole character, everything changed. The second time was he told me to give him a blow job. That moment, for me, was like, the woman that I hate. I just completely shut down because who's going to believe me? I'm a drug addict in jail, right? Because I don't know who is going to believe me. When I got out, I never told anybody. I didn't even tell my husband. I never told anybody.

I was ashamed. I was embarrassed. How many women have complained about him?

Jessy Edwards: Lizette, there's been 23 lawsuits filed.

Lizette Gonzalez: Get out. Of him?

Jessy Edwards: Yes, of C.O. Champagne.

Lizette Gonzalez: No. No. No way.

Christopher Werth: How is it possible that nearly two dozen women say they were sexually assaulted by the same guard at Rikers Island? Who is Officer Champagne? A jail guard that not even the Department of Correction has a record for? City officials either could not or would not provide the answers to these questions, so we found the answers ourselves. That's after the break.

Jessy Edwards: One thing to keep in mind as we're looking at this story is the 23 lawsuits that I looked at. The allegations span from between 1988 to 2004, and many of the allegations are from the 1990s. It was a peak period for drug arrests in New York City.

Rudy Giuliani: People are arrested, put in jail,-

Jessy Edwards: The mayor is Rudy Giuliani.

Rudy Giuliani: -so that we reduce, in our society the use of drugs as dramatically as we can.

Christopher Werth: The war on drugs was unfolding in a very big way in the 1990s.

Jessy Edwards: That's right. But what you might not know is it was also a peak period of mass incarceration for women in New York City.

Tasha Carter Beasley: Rikers Island, at the time when I was there, it was almost like a beautiful beauty pageant. You would wonder, where the hell did all of these pretty women come from?

Jessy Edwards: Tasha Carter Beasley grew up in Harlem and first entered Rikers Island around this time on a drug charge.

Tasha Carter Beasley: At that time, it was a regular story that the officers were fucking inmates.

Jessy Edwards: When she landed on Rikers Island in 1996, New York state had actually just passed a law that made it legally impossible for people in jails or in prisons to consent to sexual contact with jail staff. That year, more than 13,500 women were admitted to city jails in pretrial detention, and that was the highest number on record in New York City ever.

Christopher Werth: That's a lot of people crammed into one place.

Jessy Edwards: Many of those women were held at the Rose M. Singer Center. It's more commonly known as Rosie's. It's the women's jail on Rikers Island. What were your first impressions of Rosie's, Tasha?

Tasha Carter Beasley: My first impression really, was I started to pray to God. I said, "God, whatever you could do to stop my little sisters from coming in here, you could do it right now."

Jessy Edwards: Tasha was in her mid-20s at the time. She was in a pretty vulnerable situation. She was addicted to drugs. She was a young mother. She remembers that she was very shy. And she remembers encountering this man, Champagne.

Tasha Carter Beasley: That was the name on his tag. That's the name that I knew him by, and everybody else knew him by.

Jessy Edwards: Tasha says that she started working with Champagne in this little workgroup. He oversaw maintenance, which she says meant that he could select certain women to come and help him with mopping or sweeping, other cleaning tasks around the jail.

Tasha Carter Beasley: That's how he would come and pick me up because I worked maintenance and also a suicide prevention aide. This is how he went and apprehended a lot of his girls.

Jessy Edwards: Tasha says that Champagne would compliment her, and she wasn't used to that.

Tasha Carter Beasley: "You look good, you smell good," or whatever. Here he is. He smells like the best kind of cologne. His nails are clean.

Jessy Edwards: He was handsome, Tasha remembers. He had this way of gliding around the jail.

Tasha Carter Beasley: He was personable. Ask us, "How you doing? Do you need anything?"

Jessy Edwards: Then her and the other woman, she says, would be brought these little items of contraband chewing gum, a little bit of fast food from the outside.

Tasha Carter Beasley: It's almost like the kindness seduces you into feeling loved and comfortable. Look at me, I'm nobody.

Jessy Edwards: But then, she says, the sexual assault began.

Tasha Carter Beasley: The first encounter, I remember he came by to come and pick me and someone else up, but she went with another officer, and I went with Champagne. I remember it was hot as hell, too because he had brought me some iced tea.

Jessy Edwards: Where were you?

Tasha Carter Beasley: In the slop sink in the annex. It was the part of the jail that was off from general population.

Jessy Edwards: Today, much of Rikers Island is under camera surveillance, apart from a few areas. Suffice to say, there were many fewer cameras in the 1990s. Tasha says that Champagne, as the maintenance officer, he had access to some of these isolated areas of the jail that were camera-free. In fact, she says, he had keys to areas like the slop sink, where detainees dumped mop water, and the annex, where she says there were much fewer detainees around.

Tasha Carter Beasley: That part was very secluded and that's where it happened at. He started to first put his body up close to mine, and he sat in a chair, and I got down on my knees and started to suck his dick. I'm going to say it just like that. At the time, you're not thinking, this shouldn't be happening, that I should not have his penis in my mouth, and he should not have it in my mouth. At the time, your mind cannot reason that this is rape. This is sexual assault, Tasha.

Jessy Edwards: Tasha is one of the women who name C.O. Champagne in her lawsuit. She says she was sexually assaulted two or three times by Champagne. She can't remember exactly because it was a very long time ago, but she says that included forced oral sex and rape.

Tasha Carter Beasley: We sold ourselves away for the littlest things, chewing gum, candy, but one thing I could remember, though, I wanted it to be over.

Christopher Werth: What similarities did you start to notice as you spoke to more of these women who named Champagne?

Jessy Edwards: The similarities in the descriptions were stark even though the women didn't know each other while they were incarcerated. I tried to contact everyone who filed these lawsuits. Most of them declined to be interviewed but those I spoke to, they described Officer Champagne as being charming or as being handsome. All of the women I spoke to said that he wore a name tag that said Champagne. Others told me that they were assaulted by a slop sink, as Tasha described. Several women told me that he worked in maintenance.

That was echoed across many of the lawsuits that were filed by the women who did not want to be interviewed.

Christopher Werth: So you start to get this portrait of who this guy is, but you don't know who he is?

Jessy Edwards: Yes. I still had no idea who this Champagne could be. Until one night, I was going through these claims yet again, and I came across several lawsuits filed by women who said they believed that Champagne was a nickname. One of these women was Karen Klines, who arrived at Rosie's in 1999.

Karen Klines: My charge at that time was possession of a controlled substance and paraphernalia, which lent me six months sentence. Out of the six months, I had to do four months.

Jessy Edwards: Karen says she also met Champagne when she started working in the jail to earn money.

Karen Klines: I was working for KK, which is the officer's kitchen.

Jessy Edwards: She would serve officers their meals, and.

Karen Klines: That's where most of my abuse inside the prison came from.

Jessy Edwards: She said Officer Champagne would come in to collect his meal. He would come and offer her cigarettes in exchange for her meeting him in a specific area of the jail, which was secluded.

Karen Klines: It always was in the slop sink area.

Christopher Werth: Is this the same slop sink where Tasha said that she was assaulted in?

Jessy Edwards: It's hard to say. There are a number of rooms with slop sinks around the jail, as I understand. Karen described this particular slop sink room as being small, dark, dirty.

Karen Klines: It started with oral sex, the first incident, that progressed to intercourse. Leaning on the sink and your rear intuited in the air, and he has his back up against the door, and he's doing what he do. If your head is hitting the sink, oh, well, just don't make no noise. I felt like an animal in a corner. I recall a couple of times looking at the sink, and you know how the water dripped so much until it got rusty.

Jessy Edwards: You were looking at this during the assault?

Karen Klines: I had to look at something to keep my mind off of what was taking place. When he finished, he would always go out first. When he tapped the door, then it was your cue to come out. He always made sure the hallways was clear.

Jessy Edwards: Karen cycled through Rosie's on and off over the next seven years. She told me that Officer Champagne abused her again when she returned. What kind of things would he say when he saw you come back? Would he talk to you? Would he confront you?

Karen Klines: He said, "I know you back. You miss me." He would say it in a joking way.

Jessy Edwards: How would you describe the dynamic with Champagne? How did you feel? Were you afraid?

Karen Klines: I was afraid. I felt guilty. I felt embarrassed. I felt not worthy to continue to live. It was like the feeling of him leaving something nasty on my skin. It was like I could never scrub my skin enough to feel better.

Christopher Werth: Did Karen or anyone else who you spoke with say that they ever reported what was going on there?

Jessy Edwards: Yes. Karen told me that she actually, actually tried to report the abuse two to three times to people in the mental health clinic.

Karen Klines: This is how my housing unit ended up getting changed, because after speaking to the doctors about what I was experiencing on Rikers Island, it ended me up in what they call the MO building for the mentally insane.

Jessy Edwards: She says that she was put into this isolated mental observation unit.

Karen Klines: Then they started me on medication.

Jessy Edwards: She was given Prozac, she says, which is an antidepressant, and she was given Seroquel, which is an antipsychotic drug.

Karen Klines: So they labeled me as crazy.

Jessy Edwards: Did they investigate it? What happened?

Karen Klines: They said no more to me about it. Then I was under the influence of so much medication, I just suppressed it because I felt that was my reason for ending up out of general population now because I darn opened my mouth. No one cared.

Christopher Werth: What did the city's Department of Correction have to say about all this? It runs Rikers.

Jessy Edwards: I sent the Department of Correction a long list of questions, including Karen's claims that she tried to report the alleged abuse several times, and instead she was sent to a mental observation unit. They didn't address a single one of my questions. I've heard that from some of the other women, that they reported the alleged abuse, and nothing happened. The difference with Karen's case is she says she overheard other officers referring to Champagne by another name, and that name was Fant.

I reached back out to the Office of Payroll Administration, and they came back and told me they had two hits for officers with the name Fant who worked at the Department of Correction. One of them never worked at Rosie's, but the other one did work at Rosie's. His name is Keith Fant, and the dates that he worked there largely aligned with the dates of the allegations. In fact, there was one additional lawsuit that names Fant as opposed to Champagne.

Christopher Werth: So that's 24 lawsuits in total, that name either Fant or this Officer Champagne.

Jessy Edwards: Yes, 24 lawsuits. I filed a freedom of information request with the Department of Correction for his entire personnel records and all of his disciplinary records. What I got back was almost 20 years of personnel files. This is a document from February 13th, 1991. My colleagues Samantha Max, and I pored through more than 800 pages of documents. It is to the then-warden of Rose M. Singer Center. We could see certain things coming up which appeared to corroborate at least some of the woman's claims.

For example, we could see that at least on one occasion, Keith Fant was disciplined for not wearing his proper nameplate. It says, "Correction Officer Fant was ordered to write a written report by this writer. See attached to the fact of why he did not have a nameplate." This is really interesting because women have told us that he wore a name badge with the name C.O. Champagne on it. It looks like the department was aware that sometimes he did not have a nameplate that said C.O. Fant as he was required to. We could also see confirmation that Fant did work maintenance, as several women have said.

This document is a written reprimand. It says that it was the responsibility of the above Officer Keith Fant, to keep this area sanitised by an inmate worker during his tour of duty. We know that he was sometimes responsible for overseeing detainees cleaning the jail. We could also see that he worked in the recreation area. He took detainees to collect their medication. We don't know when he started doing these jobs, but we could see that he did them. Those were roles that came up in the lawsuits.

Perhaps what's even more interesting is we could see that he was investigated by the city's Department of Investigation, which handles more serious allegations of misconduct against officers.

Christopher Werth: What were they investigating?

Jessy Edwards: We don't know. The Department of Investigation won't tell me what the nature of the investigation was. They say because it didn't substantiate the claims against Fant.

Christopher Werth: What's he doing now?

Jessy Edwards: I found him on social media, on Facebook. According to his personnel file, he retired in 2005. As I started looking through his different Facebook photos, I could see that other former correction officers at Rikers Island were commenting and calling him Champagne. I shared the photos with some of the women who I've interviewed, including Karen Klines.

Karen Klines: When we first got the image, I looked at the picture, I had to give Tasha the phone.

Jessy Edwards: Now, Karen and Tasha Carter Beasley were actually together when the photos of Keith Fent came through. This is because they actually met years later after they were both incarcerated.

Tasha Carter Beasley: This was just 2019.

Jessy Edwards: Oh, so you met relatively recently?

Tasha Carter Beasley: Yes.

Jessy Edwards: They actually became a couple, not knowing that both had what they say are these experiences with this guard that they each knew as Officer Champagne.

Tasha Carter Beasley: When I seen the pictures, it looked like he didn't have a damn thing wrong with him. Meanwhile, I couldn't even be in a relationship with a man because I didn't know how to get past that. How do you get past that?

Jessy Edwards: One of the images is a selfie. Fant is sitting in his car, wearing this dark grey wool fedora, and he's kind of staring into the camera and biting on his bottom lip.

Karen Klines: He still holds his lip the same exact way, biting on that bottom lip.

Christopher Werth: How many of the women who filed lawsuits identified Fant through the photos that you shared?

Jessy Edwards: The four women who I've spoken to directly identified Keith Fant, and an additional eight women who didn't want to be interviewed identified Keith Fant as their alleged abuser.

Christopher Werth: So half of the 24 women in total who filed these lawsuits.

Jessy Edwards: Yes. Two women said they weren't sure when they saw the photos.

Christopher Werth: What happened when you tried to contact Fant yourself?

Jessy Edwards: I had listed out a bunch of numbers that could have been Keith Fant. Some of them were disconnected, some of them I got a voicemail, and I left a message. Then a couple of hours later, my phone rang, and it was him.

Keith Fant: As an officer when I worked there, I was very nice to them. I never intimidated them. I never was mean to them. I talked to them. They talked about their lives, their story. To be honest with you, they all liked me.

Christopher Werth: Coming up, Keith Fant admits he was the correction officer at Rikers who everyone knew as Champagne, but he denies the allegations against him.

Keith Fant: I have no clue why, where, who, after all this time, wants to say that I sexually assaulted them? No, that did not happen at all.

Christopher Werth: We hear from a woman who says she was sexually assaulted at Rikers in 2020 by a different guard, one who's still employed by the city.

Karina Collado: I was scared to go to sleep. I was scared to even be in that jail, knowing the power of authority that he had.

Christopher Werth: We'll be right back.

Jessy Edwards: I wasn't sure if Keith Fant would talk to me. 24 women either name him or his nickname, Champagne, in allegations that they were sexually assaulted by a guard at Rikers Island. Fant and I ended up spending almost an hour and a half on the phone together. He said he was shocked by what I told him.

Keith Fant: 24, this is crazy.

Jessy Edwards: He said it was the first time he'd heard of these allegations, even though the city has been aware of these lawsuits for months.

Keith Fant: I'm lost for words right now, but that's just not true. Just 24 people to say that I sexually assaulted them, when and where did I do all this?

Jessy Edwards: You didn't have any consensual relationships?

Keith Fant: No. Of course, as a male officer, they hit on you. They say stuff but I never crossed that line, ever. There was no secluded area to even do-- I wasn't in a secluded area like that to do anything. Now, my pants was not coming down at all.

Jessy Edwards: Some people say that you brought them food or chewing gum or cigarettes. Is that something that you did sometimes?

Keith Fant: I never did. No, I never did that. Never ever. I never bought cigarettes. No food. None. Now, maybe if I was eating something that I brought for myself and the inmate was working or whatever, and I didn't finish it, I said, "Hey, would you want to finish this?" Maybe that might have happened, but for me to just bring stuff for them, no, I've never done that.

Jessy Edwards: I want to ask you about this. The nickname C.O. Champagne. How did that come about?

Keith Fant: Like I said, I had a rapport with most of the inmates that I worked with. It was really funny, they said my personality was so bubbly, and they just started calling me Officer Champagne. I'm a bubbly kind of guy. Call me Champagne.

Jessy Edwards: Is that something that your colleagues would call you as well?

Keith Fant: Yes, actually, it caught on. Even officers were calling me that. Captains was calling me that. It's just like a name that just stuck.

Jessy Edwards: Some of the women say that that was the name that you wore on your badge. Is that right?

Keith Fant: Wow. They really-- [chuckles] An officer gave me a pin that had Champagne on it. I wore it one time. I didn't wear it all the time. I just wore it just for fun. I might have wore it once, maybe twice. I didn't wear it all the time because I really wasn't even allowed to wear it like that.

Jessy Edwards: Why do you think that your name and your nickname would come up so many times?

Keith Fant: Ma'am, I really don't understand. Like I said, I'm perplexed about this, why my name came up so many times. I get it. It doesn't look good. Unless they were mad that I didn't do what they wanted me to do, and now they found an opportunity to put this on me. I know that's a lot of people, and I know it raises eyebrows, but I have not touched anybody inside Rosie's. Either they was offered something that they said, "Let me just use his name." Maybe they're trying to get some money. That's the only thing I can think of, to be honest with you.

Jessy Edwards: I put all of this to Tasha and Karen.

Tasha Carter Beasley: We don't even care about money. This is not about a payday. This is about our healing. This is about our being able to speak our truth effectively.

Karen Klines: He couldn't pay me enough. He could not pay me enough from what I know today to stay shut about what was being done wrong. There's not enough money. You cannot get back the integrity that was taken, that was vamped from you. You can't give me enough money.

Jessy Edwards: Officer Fant says that he wore the nameplate with the name Fant on it the majority of the time, and that a fellow officer made him a nameplate that said C.O. Champagne,-

Tasha Carter Beasley: Why would he do that?

Jessy Edwards: -but he rarely used it.

Tasha Carter Beasley: How would we know Champagne unless you were going-- What officer goes around calling themselves a name that they not-- You wanted to be known by that name. It was a fictitious name. The whole time I thought it was your name, bro, because you had a tag.

Karen Klines: A tag that you wore often.

Christopher Werth: Just to be clear, these aren't lawsuits against Fant or any specific correction officers. This is the city of New York. This is the Department of Correction that's being sued here?

Jessy Edwards: Yes. Karen says the department has a lot of responsibility to bear for what she says happened to her.

Karen Klines: They knew what he was doing because it was told to them and those officers that covered for him because they were all cool and because they had each other's backs like jackets. We were the prisoners, so we didn't have no say.

Jessy Edwards: All of the lawsuits say that the Department of Correction failed to protect the woman in its custody. They say the department allowed a culture of sexual misconduct that made it possible for the same staff members to assault multiple women over a period of years. Fant retired almost 20 years ago. I wanted to know what women say about the culture there now. Women who've been held at Rikers Island much more recently told me that it's still like that.

Karina Collado: It was a fucking nightmare being on Rikers. Immediately I knew that that place was dangerous, and I was very in fear of if I was going to make it out alive to get back to my son.

Jessy Edwards: Karina Collado was detained at Rosie in 2020 on a felony drug charge and assault charges. Like many of the other women I spoke to, she says that she picked up a job within the jail.

Karina Collado: I was doing a little bit of, like, cleaning and maintenance. As long as I've been on the island, I was always doing my best to utilize my time productively.

Jessy Edwards: Karina says she met this one officer. She says his name is Anthony Martin Jr., who had the power to hand pick different women for certain work assignments. Very similar to what I've heard from other women who were detained 10,20 years prior to Karina and who named Champagne.

Karina Collado: He used to pick out whatever females he wanted for the morning and a different group of females for the afternoon.

Jessy Edwards: The assignment she says that she was chosen to work on was going to a storage room in the jail, but away from their typical housing unit.

Karina Collado: What he had us doing was cleaning the entire room, like, reorganizing, and there's no cameras in there. He gave us a lot of brand new things that was considered contraband, like a certain kind of comb or a certain kind of hairbrush or hair products or hair accessories, candy or whatever. I was even smoking a cigarette there.

Jessy Edwards: Then one day, she said she was in a part of the storage area by herself.

Karina Collado: Not all of the lights worked, so the room that I was in, I was getting the light from outside. I had the door wide open, and as I was stacking up the box and stuff, he came in the room. When I turned around, he scared the shit out of me. He said something like, "You ready to play?" The way he was saying it, my heart jumped, and I was like, "I'm not playing with you. What are you talking about?" Then he put his hand over my mouth, and then he forced his hand down my pants, [cries] and he started fingering me. I'm so sorry. Give me a second.

Jessy Edwards: Yes, take your time.

Karina Collado: Jessy, I was so scared. I was so scared. I was trying to get out. That's when he started applying more force and pressure on me. I was crying, and he was laughing. He was laughing and smiling and threatening me at the same time, telling me, "You shut the fuck up. Don't fucking scream. You fucking scream, it's going to be worse for you. If you scream, it's going to be worse for you." [sobs]

Jessy Edwards: She says Martin Jr. then took his penis out of his pants and began to perform oral sex on her.

Karina Collado: That's when I finally kicked him off of me, and he said, "Oh, I'm not done." I said, "No, this shit is done." Then that was that. He threatened me, saying that if I were to open my mouth, he was going to put me into solitary confinement. He was going to change the events of what actually took place, and he was going to say that I came on to him, and he even said that he would have inmates coming for me. I was scared to go to sleep. I was scared to even shower. I was scared to even be in that jail knowing the power of authority that he had.

Christopher Werth: How many women have made allegations against this one officer Martin Jr.?

Jessy Edwards: Karina is suing, but there's also another claim filed against the city from a woman who names an officer Martin from 2019, and her claims are very similar to Karina's. This woman says she was sexually assaulted in an area containing boxes with records and paperwork similar to Karina, with the officer forcing his fingers into her vagina. I sent this woman a photo of Anthony Martin Jr., and she positively ID'd him as the guard she says sexually assaulted her. The correction department confirmed to me that he was the only guard with the last named, Martin, who was working at Rosie's during the time of both of these allegations.

Then what's almost unbelievable is that in April of this year, Anthony Martin Jr. was arrested on a charge that he had raped a woman in Queens while off duty. Of course, this news comes after the women were detained on Rikers and after they filed their lawsuits.

Christopher Werth: Were you able to see the details in those criminal charges?

Jessy Edwards: Yes, we went to court. We pulled the complaint, and it says he was in a room with this woman when he allegedly pulled down her pants, forcibly inserted a finger into her vagina, and then raped her while she alleges that she told him to stop. Strikingly similar to the claims that Karina makes and the other woman with the claims from 2019. I spoke to Martin Jr. on the phone very, very briefly. He said the claims against him sound like, "a bunch of BS".

Christopher Werth: What about Karina? Did she report what she says happened to her?

Jessy Edwards: Karina says she was too scared to report it while she was on Rikers Island but when she got moved to an upstate prison, she did report her allegations in 2021. We know that because I've seen a copy of the report that she filed.

Christopher Werth: What happens in a case like that where you have someone reporting something in a different facility from the one that they said that they were assaulted in?

Jessy Edwards: Under a state and federal policy, the upstate prison would be required to notify the Department of Correction.

Christopher Werth: Did that happen?

Jessy Edwards: The upstate prison confirmed that it did send Karina's report to Rikers Island. It told me the date that it sent it. It told me the warden that it was addressed to. It even told me the time of day, 10:19 in the morning but the Department of Correction told me it had no record of it.

Christopher Werth: It's like, Karina files this report, and it just disappears into thin air.

Jessy Edwards: Yes. She'd never heard anything else about it, and she said she ended up feeling like no one wanted to do anything.

Christopher Werth: Is Martin Jr. still at Rikers?

Jessy Edwards: He was suspended after his arrest, but he is still a correction department employee. I've also identified at least five other officers who are named in these sexual assault lawsuits who are still working for the Department of Correction. That's according to city payroll records.

Christopher Werth: Jessy, I'm just thinking about the magnitude of what you've been describing, and it's pretty astonishing. 700 women who've sued saying they were sexually assaulted by staff at Rikers over decades. Some of them name the same guards. Some of those guards are still working at Rikers. What are officials doing to investigate all of this?

Jessy Edwards: What surprised me is when I spoke with Fant and Martin Jr., both of them told me that I was the first person telling them about these really serious allegations against them. Neither had heard about them before, they said. What's clear to me from my reporting is that city officials have been very reluctant to look into them. I reached out to the Department of Correction. The agency wouldn't make anyone available for an interview and didn't answer my list of questions.

Mayor Eric Adams: Abuse in jails, period, is not something that's new.

Jessy Edwards: Now, a couple of months ago, the mayor, Eric Adams, he did promise an investigation.

Mayor Eric Adams: But when you see it, you must address it and face it.

Jessy Edwards: This is when we first reported on the more than 700 women who had filed claims of sexual assault on Rikers Island.

Mayor Eric Adams: I believe that we need to have a complete investigation to determine the outcome of it.

Jessy Edwards: When I reached out to city hall, the mayor's office said that the city's Law Department is looking into the cases.

Christopher Werth: The Law Department would be looking into lawsuits against the city anyway.

Jessy Edwards: That's right. The Law Department is the agency that will be helping to defend the city against the claims.

Christopher Werth: Right. It is very difficult to see how that amounts to the kind of complete investigation that the mayor said would happen.

Jessy Edwards: Yes.

Christopher Werth: What about the Bronx District Attorney's Office? It has jurisdiction over Rikers. What has it had to say?

Jessy Edwards: The office did set up an e-mail address for women who alleged they were sexually assaulted on Rikers Island to e-mail them with their claims. This was after we started our reporting on all of these lawsuits against the city. Over the past three months, the Bronx District Attorney's Office told me it hasn't received a single e-mail to that address.

Christopher Werth: Wow.

Jessy Edwards: So I went back to them, and I repeatedly asked over several weeks if the office would be willing to proactively investigate these claims. It finally got back to me in July and said it would start reviewing the lawsuits for leads and for evidence to see if a criminal investigation should be opened. Now, a number of women that I've spoken to say they don't have faith that there is going to be an investigation, and that's because they say they reported these claims years and years ago and nothing happened then. Several of them have told me that it is what they want.

Lisa: Something has to be done, and that's that. Something has to be done.

Jessy Edwards: Lisa didn't want to use her real name, so we're just using her nickname. She says she was also raped by Officer Champagne, while she was on Riker's island. She also identified him as Keith Fant through photos. Although when I spoke to Fant, he denied he ever raped anyone but in Lisa's case, she says he got her pregnant.

Lisa: I didn't go in pregnant.

Jessy Edwards: You have a pregnancy test when you go into jail, don't you?

Lisa: Oh, yes. I had a miscarriage. I went to the bathroom and a gush of blood came out in the toilet. You could feel that was a baby or beginning of a baby.

Jessy Edwards: Lisa says the staff rushed her to a hospital in Queens, and they performed a procedure to remove the excess tissue that was still inside her uterus.

Lisa: They just sent me back to the jail. I never told anyone, though. I never even told him. I didn't dare tell him.

Jessy Edwards: Why didn't you tell him?

Lisa: I was afraid. You had to do whatever the officer said. Along with that comes a lot of emotional, physical pain that I'm still not over. That's been so many, so many years ago, and I'm just speaking about it. I look back and I think about it, it makes me angry now. I'm very angry now.

Jessy Edwards: What would you like to see happen?

Lisa: He needs to be held accountable. He needs to know that he was wrong. He wouldn't want someone to do that to his daughter. I know I'm not the only one. I thank God he's not in the system anymore to do it to any other women but how many are there behind him? That's the question.

Christopher Werth: Jessy, thank you so much for walking us through all of your reporting on this.

Jessy Edwards: I'm honored to do this work.

Kai Wright: I am joined now by Christopher Werth, who you heard in the reporting, who is the editor on the story, leads WNYC's investigations team. Christopher, thanks for coming to talk to us about this.

Christopher Werth: Hey, I'm really happy to do it.

Kai Wright: What we heard was wrenching and frustrating and maddening, I imagine, for everybody listening. You have continued to report this story. There is more to it. First off, we heard about two correction officers that you were able to identify. You have since identified more, correct?

Christopher Werth: Yes, that's right. We continue to dig into all of these lawsuits and these allegations. As we said in the story, a lot of these women only knew the last names of the officers but you do a little digging, you start to cross reference some of that information with personnel records, with payroll records that are publicly available through the city, and you can actually start to piece together a fuller picture. Since then, we've identified four additional guards who are currently working for the Department of Correction. Three of them are actually still working at the women's jail.

Kai Wright: Oh, wow.

Christopher Werth: We contacted the Department of Correction. It refused to answer many of our questions about these officers, specifically whether they've been investigated, whether they're going to investigate these officers, and whether any measures have been taken to protect women in detention until some kind of determination can be made about what these women have said happened to them.

Kai Wright: You've contacted the Department of Corrections. The investigations unit is the oversight body for them. Have they done anything, though? Have they responded or done anything about what you reported?

Christopher Werth: Yes. The Department of Investigation is the entity in New York City that has oversight over the Department of Correction. It's also independent of the mayor, which, as we said, had promised this kind of thorough investigation that never materialized. The Department of Investigation really has a role to step in here and conduct an investigation. It actually has a squad of investigators that are dedicated solely to oversight of the Department of Correction and what its staff do. We haven't been able to get a straight answer out of the Department of investigation.

Their spokesperson has said that they don't comment on active investigations, and so it's really difficult to get a sense of what is actually going on inside of that department.

Kai Wright: Part of it is, when there's the part in the story where you talk about the history that led us to this, the history of the drug war, and the fact that we're still living out the damage done by that ramp up in policing and the ramp up in incarceration that began in the '90s. How do you think our listeners should process this? What you have learned in the sort of broader national context of the moment we're in now, where there's a lot of people, again fearing crime and wanting to see more law and order.

Christopher Werth: I think that what this story shows is that you have to take into account all of the externalities that come as a result of mass incarceration because there are a lot of lives that are disrupted. There are a lot of lives that are ruined as a result of when people are locked up. As one of the women who Jessy, the reporter spoke to said, she felt like she was kidnapped off the streets and dumped in Rikers and put in a position where actually more harm was going to be done to her than could have ever been done on the outside.

That a lot of these women who Jessy spoke with for this story expressed this sorrow that they did not receive the help that could have put them onto a better path. Instead, they were put into actually a very violent place, and as they say, subjected to danger there. I think those are the kinds of things that you have to bear in mind when you start to think about the kinds of responses that are being talked about to crime now.

Kai Wright: Have any elected officials or anyone in New York responded to this reporting? I know that the mayor has shrugged it off. It's the best way I can describe his reaction, but what have any elected officials said about this?

Christopher Werth: There does not seem to be the type of thorough investigation that was promised. Several of the people who are now contending for the mayor's job have spoken out about this reporting. We have an election coming up in New York City next year. The comptroller, he's the person who basically writes the checks in New York City, he is running for mayor, Brad Lander. He has spoken up about this issue and said very vocally that more needs to be done about this issue. He's even proposed solutions, like, for example, if there is going to be a large settlement, because these lawsuits, you have 700 lawsuits.

Kai Wright: 700?

Christopher Werth: Yes, over 700 total lawsuits. They're seeking a total of $14.7 billion from the city. Now, obviously, if these cases settle, it won't be nearly as much of that but because you have 700 lawsuits, we're talking about a lot of money. What Lander has floated is this idea that, if the city is on the hook for these type of allegations, then perhaps the financial cost of that to the city needs to be borne by the department that is responsible. You turn to the Department of Correction, and maybe there needs to be some kind of impact on its budget when this many lawsuits are filed against correction officers.

Kai Wright: Defund something. This is an ongoing story. You guys are staying in it. What are you following next? What's the next step in your reporting here?

Christopher Werth: We're going to continue following these cases. 700 is a lot of lawsuits. We'll see how those play out in the city. We're also going to be tracking the charges that have been brought against that officer, Anthony Martin, Jr., who we talk about in the episode, he's been charged with rape in Queens, will continue following that case. We're also looking at how the jails in New York City have operated under Adams. There's a system in place for investigating allegations of sexual misconduct. We're going to be really diving into how the city has handled those kinds of allegations over the past several years.

Kai Wright: Thank you, Christopher, for this reporting. Thanks to Jessy for this reporting. It's so important and it's so enraging, and hopefully, we can get to a place of accountability for this stuff.

Christopher Werth: Thanks, Kai. Thanks for having me.

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.