Last fall, the rape victim who claims that two Special Victims Unit officers made highly inappropriate sexual advances toward her during their investigation sued the city and the NYPD. The 25-year-old woman is seeking $3 million after Lt. Adam Lamboy and Officer Lucasz Skorzewski, both formerly of the Manhattan Special Victims Division, exhibited "gross and repugnant dereliction" of duty in handling her case. But the city says it's not responsible for the two officers because they didn't represent the NYPD when the misconduct allegedly happened...even though they were reportedly investigating on behalf of the NYPD at the time.
“Lamboy and Skorzewski were not acting under the color of state law because (the victim) does not allege sufficient facts to find plausibly that they invoked the authority of the NYPD when they engaged in conduct prohibited by the NYPD,” city lawyers wrote, claiming that the two men went rogue when they flew out to Seattle to interview the woman (who had relocated from NYC after her rape) about the case.
They added that she “has not plausibly pled that the city failed to train and supervise” the pair, and argued that the NYPD isn't responsible to teach officers about sexual assault. “The NYPD does not have an obligation to train officers not to commit sexual assault because it is an obvious criminal act,” the city wrote.
To recap: the victim was attending college in NYC when she was raped by a man in his Union Square apartment in January 2013. Six months later, then detective-in-training Skorzewski traveled to interview her in Seattle with his then-boss, Lamboy.
After having lunch with Skorzewski, at the time a 31-year-old married father-of-two, the officer introduced her to Lamboy, who invited her out for drinks. "Looking back, it was totally naive of me to join them,” she previously told the Daily News. "But I was like, 'This is really cool.' I really looked up to them." She recalled that Skorzewski wasn't sure whether it was proper for her to come with them, but Lamboy insisted. "I was going through this all alone. My family didn't know," she said. "It felt good that they were being so nice."
At the end of the night of drinking, they also insisted she come back to their hotel room because she was drunk: "No, no, you'll be safe with us. Come back to our hotel, you can crash with us," they allegedly said. At some point the next morning, she says Skorzewski climbed in bed with her and said he wanted to kiss her: "He was insistent on feeling me up...He tried to work his way up my pants, I pushed his hand away," she said. In addition, Skorzewski allegedly told her at some point, "You're my favorite victim."
After this encounter, the woman says Skorzewski called her almost daily from New York for a month and was "like a big brother figure." He stopped calling her or returning her calls, and he allegedly became angry when she confronted him about it; he also never followed up about her rape case again. The victim noted, "I think what he did was bad enough that he shouldn’t be a cop."
Skorzewski was demoted from detective, docked 30 vacation days and suspended for 10 days without pay after pleading guilty to departmental charges of prohibited conduct during the investigation. He then filed a $2 million defamation suit against the woman for damaging his "good name and reputation."
The woman has stood by her statements: "After a fact-finding peer review, the NYPD disciplined both police officers with lost rank and/or suspension," said her attorney Christopher Galiardo. "It’s clear that trained police officers from a sex crime unit, while investigating a potential sex crime, should not take the victim out with them on a drinking binge."
