For a year, a New York law has enabled a wave of lawsuits against famous men accused of sex crimes, including former President Donald Trump, hip hop star Sean Diddy Combs, actor Jamie Foxx and comedian and actor Russell Brand. The mayor of New York, Eric Adams, is the last to join the list and he does so – like Foxx, the actor Cuba Gooding Jr or Axl Rose, singer of Guns’ and Roses – after being denounced at the last minute , before the so-called Adult Survivors Act expired this Thursday, with an impressive summary: more than 2,500 lawsuits in 24 months, many of them filed by victims of sexual abuse in New York prisons.
Heir to the MeToo Movement, the peculiarity of this law is that it annulled the statute of limitations for crimes, that is, it included any claim regardless of the time that had passed since the alleged events. Thanks to the rule, columnist E. Jane Carroll was able to sue Trump for abuses committed in the mid-nineties, and win the trial: the Republican was sentenced in May to pay five million dollars for abuses and for defaming the victim. .
Adams’ case is also old, from 1993, when the now mayor and the alleged victim, who is seeking five million dollars in compensation, worked for the city’s police department, also a defendant in the lawsuit. Foxx’s, presented late this Wednesday, refers to an alleged attack on a fan who approached him to ask for a photo in a restaurant in the Big Apple in 2015. The woman accuses him of having inserted his fingers into her vagina and the anus without his consent.
On the same day, two others were presented against the actor Cuba Gooding Jr, who in June avoided a trial for rape after reaching an agreement with the victim. More than 30 women have attributed “inappropriate sexual behavior” to him in recent years, the standard definition used in the United States to refer to sexual violence. In the case of Axl Rose, the lawsuit is for an alleged sexual assault on a former model during a party in 1989, according to the media. TMZ.
In injury time, as demonstrated by the complaints against Adams, Fox, Gooding and Rose, the legal machinery has stepped on the accelerator. But even though the specific accusations, with names and surnames, grab the headlines, more than half of the 2,587 files covered by the law have been filed against the State, the city of New York and local counties, for cases of bad behavior. treatment in state prisons and local prison systems, and most especially in the Rikers Island jail, with 470 reported cases.
There are also attacks against hospitals, for not preventing abuse by doctors on subordinates: although anonymous, it is the same relationship of power, of subordination, that the famous defendants exercised over their prisoners. The very name of the law, and its explicit mention of the concept of survival, was intended to help victims overcome a trauma that usually takes years to heal, hence the erasure of the deadlines.
New York is not the only State that has reviewed the deadlines for civil lawsuits for sexual violence in recent years, although in many others the review has focused on abuse suffered during childhood. But the women who have sued Trump, Adams, Foxx or Combs were adults at the time of the events – to benefit from the New York law it was necessary to be over 18 years old – and that is another of the peculiarities of the law that now expires. In fact, it includes and expands a previous law that offered people who had suffered abuse in their childhood a longer period to file lawsuits. By the time the Child Victims Act’s two-year window closed in August 2021, nearly 11,000 people had taken legal action, many of them against the Catholic church.
The entry into force of the Adult Survivors Law, which only covered crimes committed in the State, had a special impact due to the identity of the accused. To the lawsuit filed against Trump, perhaps the most high-profile one — and the prologue to his legal ordeal — another, more recent one, but especially renowned for his direct relationship with MeToo, can be added. This is the lawsuit against the all-powerful producer Harvey Weinstein – a convicted sexual predator, convicted of rape in New York and California – by actress Julia Ormond, for an alleged sexual assault in 1995 and, later, for hindering her career to the point of making it invisible. . Ormond filed the complaint last month.
Rapper Combs was accused last week by his ex-partner, singer Cassie, of subjecting her to a toxic and prolonged relationship that included beatings and rape. The two artists announced a settlement a day after the lawsuit was filed. Brand is being pursued by lawsuits, after an initial one for sexual assault of a film extra, supposedly in 2020. British media published complaints in September from four other women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Brand, for whom the relationships were “always consented.”
Long before the cascade of complaints against Harvey Weinstein triggered the MeToo movement, in 2017, the case of Bill Cosby, accused in 2014 of an alleged sexual assault that occurred more than 50 years ago, had broken the silence on the figure of abusers who They take advantage of their position of power – it is the common denominator, from Trump to Weinstein or Cosby himself – to violate their victims. Cosby, in fact, has been in and out of court for a decade.
When the New York State Legislature passed this “look-back period” for prescribed sexual assault cases, advocates predicted the temporary measure would turn the trickle of lawsuits into an avalanche. In the last few hours, the avalanche has become an avalanche. And also in a legal milestone, judging by the assessment of NGOs defending victims of sexist violence such as Safe Horizon, which in a statement described the law as a “monumental victory for survivors, whose courage and commitment have given rise to a viable path to justice and healing for thousands of people.”
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