A court summons filed on Wednesday charged New York City Mayor Eric Adams with sexually assaulting a woman in 1993 and he is ‘vigorously’ disputing the allegations.
The unnamed accuser named Adams of sexually abusing her in 1993 while they were both employed by the city. Adams was 33 years old and a captain in the New York Police Department at the time.
A three-page court summons filed on Wednesday lists Adams, the New York Police Department’s transit bureau, and the New York Police Department Guardians Association as defendants but does not go into detail about the alleged assault. A trial and $5 million in relief are requested in the filing. It was filed in Manhattan’s state Supreme Court.
Eric Adams told reporters on Thursday that he had no memory of meeting the woman and denied ever having sexually assaulted anyone.
“It absolutely did not happen. I don’t recall ever meeting this person, and I would never harm anyone of that magnitude. It did not happen,” Adams said, according to a video posted to X, formerly known as Twitter.
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He continued: “It did not happen, and that is not who I am, and that is not who I’ve ever been in my professional life, and, you know, it’s just something that never took place.”
Not only is the New York City Mayor the target of a lawsuit but it was filed shortly before the window closed, which was scheduled to happen after Thanksgiving.
The summons was served in accordance with the Adult Survivors Act, a unique statute in New York that suspended the customary one-year statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit over an alleged sexual assault.
The statute paved the way for a flurry of lawsuits against well-known men who were alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct; these cases arose in the final weeks before the statute was about to expire. The act has sparked over 2,500 lawsuits in the last year, including ones against comedian and actor Russell Brand, hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs, and former president Donald Trump.
The filing coincides with the FBI’s ongoing investigation into Adams’s 2021 campaign, which led to the agency seizing his phones and searching the residence of his main fundraiser.
Part of the investigation, according to reports, entails determining whether Adams improperly assisted the Turkish government in obtaining city approval to construct a 35-story skyscraper housing diplomatic facilities in 2021, despite apprehensions regarding the tower’s fire safety systems.
Adams, however, is alleged to have avoided discussing the FBI investigation, despite his insistence that he did nothing improper.