NY lawmakers hoping to strengthen sexual abuse survivors’ rights in 2024

With just a couple weeks until the start of 2024’s legislative session, New York lawmakers announced a package of bills on Tuesday expanding on recent measures that made it easier for sexual assault survivors to seek justice.

The proposals include:

• Eliminating the deadline for civil lawsuits for many child sex crimes.
• Suspending the statute of limitations for a set amount of time, similar to the Adult Survivors Act, for survivors of sex trafficking to file civil lawsuits against people they say trafficked them.
• Preventing people accused of sexual misconduct from mentioning in civil court their accuser’s past sexual behavior or what they were wearing during an alleged assault. Similar protections already exist for criminal sex abuse cases.
• Providing extra time for incarcerated people to file sexual assault lawsuits after their release from jail or prison.
• Requiring doctors convicted of sexual offenses or the institutions that employed them to notify patients about allegations against them.

State Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal said the measures reflect a growing understanding among both lawmakers and members of the public about the time it takes for many sexual abuse survivors to come forward. She called the current statutes of limitations — legal deadlines to bring cases in court — “arbitrary.”

“People’s experiences are varied,” she said. “Some people are ready to go to court the next day, and some people might take 30 years to deal with it.”

Rosenthal said many children who are sexually abused are “harassed into secrecy” and told that no one will believe them if they report what happened to them. She said similar patterns often play out with sex trafficking victims, who may be afraid to speak up or not even realize at first that they have been trafficked.

For patients who have been sexually abused, like the hundreds of women who have accused former Columbia gynecologist Robert Hadden of sexual abuse, Rosenthal said that if they’re not notified about a doctor’s alleged behavior, they may think what happened to them was an anomaly. Mandating that patients be notified would make it easier to uncover patterns of abuse.

The announcement comes just weeks after a one-year window closed for adult survivors of sexual assault to file lawsuits for years-old cases that would have otherwise been time-barred in court.

More than 3,800 civil claims were filed in courts across the state, including many against jail and prison officers accused of sexually assaulting incarcerated people. Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo also faced allegations under the act. Both have denied wrongdoing.

But the number of claims is far lower than the nearly 10,900 lawsuits filed under the Child Victims Act, a similar law that gave people who said they were sexually abused as children an extra year to bring lawsuits. The window was extended for a second year during the pandemic, and data show that thousands of claims were filed in the final month before the deadline.

Rosenthal and state Sen. Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who sponsored the Child Victims Act and the Adult Survivors Act, have both expressed interest in reopening the window for adult survivors, as well. But their latest batch of proposals does not include an extension for adult survivors. Rosenthal said she plans to file one in the coming days.

Both lawmakers have also told Gothamist that they’re interested in lifting the civil statute of limitations for many sex crimes altogether.

Hoylman-Sigal said he thinks there are many survivors who have not yet come forward, but might with more time and more publicity — especially among people of color, who he said filed lawsuits under the Adult Survivors Act at lower rates. He said making it easier for people to file lawsuits could also help prosecutors to identify and charge perpetrators of sexual abuse.

“There’s much more work to be done in rectifying the outdated statutes of limitations for survivors of sexual abuse,” he said.