As Lawsuit Rages, NYC School Accuses Turkey of Using U.S. Courts to Target Opponents

Four years into a Brooklyn courtroom battle, a nonprofit school is defending itself against claims that it owes millions of dollars to a Turkish bank that no longer exists, but cooked into the legal case is a bigger concern — whether the Turkish government is conducting a foreign pressure campaign aimed at perceived enemies of the state.Liquidators of Bank Asya, a Turkish financial institution seized by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government in 2015, say Brooklyn Amity School, a PreK-12 institution serving hundreds of students in New York City, owes $12.5 million. The school contends that it already paid the debt with collateral it deposited when it took out the original loan in 2011, before the bank’s seizure.At the center of the dispute is the source of the collateral — a Turkish businessman supportive of a faith-based civic initiative promoting interfaith dialogue and education known as the Gülen movement. The Turkish government designated the Gülen movement, led by Fethullah Gülen, who died in October 2024 while in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, a terrorist organization. The designation followed a failed coup attempt in 2016 that Mr. Erdoğan blamed on Gülen’s followers. The United States and European Union have declined to make similar designations against the organization, citing a lack of credible evidence. On the contrary, the State Department’s most recent human rights report says the Turkish government has engaged in a worldwide effort to apprehend suspected members of the Gülen movement and exert bilateral pressure on other countries to take adverse action — without due process — against individuals tied to the movement.The seizure of Bank Asya and the installation of government-appointed trustees came one day after the publication of a 2015 opinion piece in The New York Times by Gülen warning that Turkey was sliding toward totalitarianism. Now, 11 years later, a legal analyst familiar with the case told The New York Sun that the ongoing pursuit of the school shows that Turkey, whose NATO status and geopolitical relevance helps to isolate it from criticism, is exploiting American courts to conduct lawfare against its political opponents, real or otherwise. “United States courts and the DOJ have a clear obligation to scrutinize whether these suits serve genuine commercial interests or are political retaliation in disguise,” said a political strategist and the managing director of Nestpoint Associates, John Thomas.“Allowing seized foreign assets to be turned into litigation weapons against Americans undermines the integrity of our legal system,” he said.The Loan That Became a WeaponThe question hanging over the case is whether the recovery of the cash secured by Brooklyn Amity School from Bank Asya to purchase its building is a legitimate case or something more calculated: Turkey’s long arm reaching into American civil courts to squeeze a Gülen-affiliated institution on American soil.The outcome may ultimately signal whether American courts will serve as unwitting venues for foreign government pressure campaigns conducted through civil litigation, or whether judges will recognize and halt such tactics when the evidence surfaces.“Washington has treated lawfare as a mere civil dispute rather than the hybrid warfare tool it truly is,” Mr. Thomas noted. “Physical kidnappings make headlines and trigger outrage, while sophisticated legal campaigns through the United States courts do not. This blind spot lets allies like Turkey weaponize our own justice system against people living on American soil while policymakers look the other way.”Lawyers for the bank, the Boston-based international law firm, Nixon Peabody, alongside co-counsel Dorsey & Whitney, frame the dispute as a simple financial transaction gone bad.“The defendant took out a $15.5 million loan, stopped making payments in July of 2016 and now hopes petty diversionary tactics will allow it to realize a massive windfall,” Gabriel Isaac of Dorsey & Whitney told the Sun.The other side claims differently. After the seizure, Bank Asya stopped accepting payments and later sued the school in the New York State Supreme Court, claiming it owed the full loan amount. The school says the $12.5 million collateral should have been applied to the debt, eliminating or substantially reducing what was left on the loan. According to sworn filings submitted by the school in March seeking summary judgment, before Ankara’s 2016 crackdown, the school was generating net income of more than $2.3 million annually — a figure that collapsed to roughly $640,000 the following year as Turkish authorities canceled students’ passports, threatened families with terrorism prosecutions for paying tuition, and opened criminal investigations into donors.A former board member also states in a sworn affirmation that Turkey’s Financial Crimes Investigation Board personally investigated him for donating to the school. “Unfortunately, and for almost a decade, the Turkish government has pursued an agenda with the school and others that has nothing to do with resolving a routine commercial dispute. We remain confident that a fair and thorough review of the facts and law will lead to a just resolution, dismissing the claims against the school,” an attorney for the Brooklyn Amity School, Michael Miller, told the Sun.Most striking, say the school’s defenders, the bank concedes that its enforcement decisions were influenced, in part, by its belief that the school was affiliated with what Turkey designates a terrorist organization.“The Brooklyn Amity School wants nothing more than to focus on the education of its students and deeply regrets being pulled into this protracted international dispute by the Turkish government,” Mr. Miller said.Tortuous ChargesThe prolonged case has been extended over what the school alleges is systematic obstruction by the plaintiffs. According to case filings, the parties stipulated in 2023 that the collateral had been applied to the debt. Months later, the plaintiffs sought to vacate that stipulation, claiming a pending Turkish lawsuit prevented them from using the funds.The school filed a motion to dismiss the case in August 2025. In its motion, Brooklyn Amity School noted that on January 16, 2025, the Istanbul Commercial Court dismissed a lawsuit plaintiffs had cited for why it rejected application of the collateral toward the loan. The school argues that the plaintiffs knew that they had been entitled to use those funds, but did not disclose the Istanbul court’s ruling to the judge presiding over the case, Reginald Boddie, for eight months. Mr. Isaac says that is incorrect. The Istanbul court issued a preliminary ruling in January 2025 but it was not formally entered until August 2025, at which time it was disclosed to the court. That ruling, he added, is still on appeal in Turkey and therefore still not yet final.“The suggestion that this was somehow hidden is false,” he said.Lawyers for the school also contend that when school representatives brought the Istanbul court’s ruling to the court’s attention, the plaintiffs revised prior discovery responses, admitting to hundreds of thousands of documents after earlier sworn statements had claimed did not exist. The school calls that reason to enforce New York’s sanctions statute for discovery misconduct, CPLR 3126, and dismiss the case. It argues that the plaintiffs engaged in willful concealment and misrepresentation. Mr. Isaac spurns that assertion as well.“The court has rejected the alleged discovery violations, which is again an effort to distract from the merits, that Brooklyn Amity received $15.5 million and has not made a payment to the bank in nearly 20 years,” Mr. Isaac said.The Broader CampaignBrooklyn Amity School received accreditation from the Cognia Global Commission in March 2025 and continues to operate, serving students from pre-K through 12th grade. But for the school’s supporters, the case fits a documented pattern of targeting Gülen-linked schools through diplomatic and economic pressure to secure their transfer to its state-run Maarif Foundation. This scenario has already occurred in Kyrgyzstan and Burkina Faso. American courts have begun pushing back. A United States federal judge last year rejected a Turkish government request for the financial records of five individuals linked to the Gülen movement, citing concerns the case was politically motivated and part of a broader transnational repression campaign. Notably, that petition was also filed through Turkey’s lawyers, Nixon Peabody.If settlement negotiations collapse, school officials say they hold a stronger position at a potential jury trial as an American nonprofit facing what they call an authoritarian government’s proxy litigation. So far, Ankara has been spared serious accountability, Mr. Thomas says, but the distinction between a commercial dispute and a pressure campaign matters more than Washington has been willing to admit.“Successive administrations have been reluctant to confront Turkey over repression campaigns for fear of losing air base access and complicating the Black Sea strategy,” he said. “This special treatment effectively grants Turkey permission to export its authoritarian tactics onto American territory with minimal consequences.”

As Lawsuit Rages, NYC School Accuses Turkey of Using U.S. Courts to Target Opponents

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