This week, it was reported that an NYPD detective was still on the job after being accused of making sexual advances on a rape victim during an investigation. Officer Lukasz Skorzewski has been accused of groping the 24-year-old victim, whose name has not been released, while visiting her in Seattle to interview her about her rape, which happened in NYC. Today, the victim has gone into details with the Daily News about their "nine hour bender," the bedroom encounter, and its aftermath: "God forbid he did this to someone more vulnerable than I am," she said. "It could end in a suicide."
The victim was attending college in NYC when she was raped by a man in his Union Square apartment in January 2013; after reporting the rape to police she relocated to Seattle. Six months later, Detective-in-training Lukasz Skorzewski traveled to interview her with his boss, Lt. Adam Lamboy.
After having lunch with Skorzewski, a 31-year-old married father-of-two, he introduced her to Lamboy, who invited her out for drinks. "Looking back, it was totally naive of me to join them,” she said. "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. The News writes:
At the Embassy Suites hotel in nearby Bellevue, Wash., Skorzewski loaned her his toothbrush and some clothes and slept on the couch, she said. They woke up with hangovers, and Skorzewski climbed in bed with her as they watched TV and talked, she said.
He asked to put his arm around her, and eventually said, “I really want to kiss you right now,” she claimed.
“He was insistent on feeling me up. . . . He tried to work his way up my pants, I pushed his hand away,” she said.
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 at some point and became angry when she confronted him about it: "He responded by blaming everything on me and saying I messed up his personal life," she said. The woman says he stopped answering her questions about her case, and no charges were ever filed against her attacker.
In December, after her allegations were "partially substantiated" against the two officers, she was told Lamboy and Skorzewski had been transferred from the Special Victims Unit, but were still on the streets.
But according to an NYPD spokesman, Lamboy and Skorzewski have since been slapped with department charges in recent weeks and could lose their jobs. "I think what he did was bad enough that he shouldn’t be a cop," the victim noted.
