Letitia James Puts Cornell Case Front and Center While Her Office Fights Hundreds of Abuse Suits Against the State

New York’s attorney general is now the special prosecutor in a two-year-old alleged gang rape case involving a fraternity at Cornell. At the same time, Letitia James is the state’s frontline of defense against more than 1,600 people seeking relief from alleged abuse while in the state’s prisons and juvenile facilities.Governor Kathy Hochul handed Ms. James the Cornell University case late last week, saying newly released information had shaken her faith in the Tompkins County district attorney who had declined to prosecute two years ago.Ms. Hochul’s executive order lets the attorney general oversee the investigation and, if warranted, take evidence to a grand jury. The former student’s civil suit, filed last month, names seven fraternity members, the Chi Phi fraternity, the university, a bar, and her own sorority.That same level of scrutiny has not reached the thousands of proclaimed abuse survivors who say they have been waiting on the state for years to deliver justice. The 1,600 individuals filing lawsuits under the 2019 Child Victims Act and the 2022 Adult Survivors Act now face a recalcitrant Ms. James in the courtroom. Many face the potential of having their suits tossed over technicalities that weren’t addressed in the laws. A bill filed in the state legislature could have patched the gaps by allowing claimants to proceed despite gaps in essential details. It passed the Senate 57-3 on May 11 before stalling in the Assembly Judiciary Committee. The legislative session ended in early June with no floor vote.The attention and urgency shown in the Cornell case is not the same experienced by claimants, note litigants. Their lawsuits have dragged on while the office now leading the Cornell investigation is the one fighting them. The timing is uncanny, says one man awaiting his day in court.“I’m just simply wondering why the governor and the attorney general care so much now, one month before the election,” a Buffalo man who says he was abused as a child in state care, William Szczygiel, tells The New York Sun. “The attorney general has had since 2019 to resolve decades-old abuse cases and hasn’t said a word. Now there is an election, they care?”Despite his cogitation, Mr. Szczygiel points out that he is not defending the accused fraternity members. “I am in no way sticking up for the frat boys,” he says, adding that his anger is aimed at the timing and at the lack of movement in his own case.“Ours should have been a slam dunk. People went to prison for it,” Mr. Szczygiel says, contending that the governor and attorney general have “yet to settle a single Child Victims Act case.”Judges, meanwhile, have granted dozens of motions filed by Ms. James’s office to dismiss cases based on the date-and-place rules. A spokesman for the office has said only that it has a statutory responsibility to defend the state.A Date and a Place, or No CaseSurvivors who sue New York state must do what many cannot: name the exact day and place of an assault that happened years or decades ago. Miss that detail, or get it wrong, and a case can be thrown out before anyone hears the evidence.The rule comes from the Court of Claims, the separate jurisdictional body used for anyone suing the state. It requires each claim to state its nature, when and where it arose, the injuries claimed, and the sum sought. The state waives its sovereign immunity only in limited circumstances, so claimants must follow those filing rules to the letter.The Child Victims Act of 2019 and the Adult Survivors Act of 2022 opened windows to sue over abuse no matter how long ago the crime happened. About 10,000 claims were filed under the first law and roughly 3,700 under the second, across all courts. Roughly 300 of those were child claims filed against the state.Among them was the claim of Chi Bartram Wright, who accused numerous men of sexual assault over several years at a state-owned performing arts center at Albany. The abuse began in 1986, when he was 12, and ended in 1990, he alleged. The state sought dismissal after Mr. Wright’s filing gave no specific dates for the assaults and did not name individuals responsible. While the claim misstated the year of the alleged abuse, the mistake also appeared in the department’s own records. In March 2025, the Court of Claims unanimously dismissed the case. An appellate court reversed that ruling, accepting the four-year lookback span Mr. Wright alleged.The Court of Appeals then reversed that ruling, holding that the Court of Claims’ constraints exist so the state can promptly investigate a claim and weigh its liability. It also contended that the legislature never changed the specificity rules for child victims so courts lacked the leeway to exempt those claims. In a separate case, Ms. James’s office asked a judge to toss a claim because the department said it could not find a record of the accused employee. Reporters for the cooperative journal Hell Gate located the record quickly, and the office withdrew its request.Last year, attorneys for the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision announced plans to ask judges to dismiss 500 cases based on the filing requirements, according to two attorneys who represent claimants.Justice Delayed From Memory’s DeclineLawyers for women prisoners who have alleged assaults say the rule asks for the impossible. “Accepted sexual abuse trauma science makes clear that survivors block out details of the assault as part of their biological defense mechanism,” a partner at Slater Slater Schulman LLP, Konstantin Yelisavetskiy, tells the Sun.The scale is significant. A federal study found two of New York’s women’s prisons had the highest and third-highest reported rates of sexual victimization among 177 prisons surveyed. Among the claims filed under the Adult Survivors Act window, many were alleged by individuals who had been incarcerated.A legal source working with multiple survivors in New York, who spoke on background, points out who is affected. “I think there’s a lot of anger,” the insider tells the Sun, “because the population of women who have come forward who said they were abused in New York State prisons is overwhelmingly black and brown, but moreso black.”Compounding the pursuit for justice is ownership of the data. The ability to supply the missing dates sit with the defendant — the state — meaning the party being sued holds the proof against it. “Perversely, the records that would help a survivor pin down dates and locations such as staff lists, logbooks, transfer records, housing assignments, etc. are held by the very defendant being sued, and then the state faults the woman for not knowing what its own files show,” Mr. Yelisavetskiy says.Ms. James has said publicly that the focus should be on keeping women safe, believing them, and letting them speak their truth. Mr. Yelisavetskiy counters that the attorney general’s office stands out among all the institutions for how hard it is fighting to kill the cases. “We have encountered no other agency nationwide that has taken as aggressive of a scorched-earth litigation approach against survivors of sex abuse as the New York State Attorney General’s Office,” he says.Mr. Yelisavetskiy says moving forward, his firm will appeal every dismissal to the Court of Appeals, especially if the attorney general tries to opportunistically use the 2025 Wright dismissal to deny other survivors their day in court. “We will fight like hell to prevent that from happening,” he says.A Hospital With a Paper TrailFor children abused decades ago while in state care, the evidence is older and thinner still. That makes the effort to seek justice even more difficult. Nonetheless, a 1989 state report counted 32 separate child abuse and neglect cases over seven months in 1988 at the Western New York Children’s Psychiatric Center, a state-run hospital for children and adolescents located at West Seneca. A state investigation identified seven staff members in widespread sexual abuse of children at the facility through the 1980s.In 2021, an Erie County judge ordered a former nurse at the center, Marshall Krzos, to pay more than $1.4 million in default judgments after three men sued, saying he molested them in the early 1980s. Mr. Krzos never answered the allegations in court.Mr. Szczygiel, now 45, is among the survivors who joined the suit. Mr. Szczygiel grew up in Buffalo with an abusive father and a string of foster placements before ending up at the center in the 1980s. He alleges that children were put to sleep with needles, that he woke up in pain, and that he and three other children were abused.Proving that is another matter. The paper trail is sparse.“A lot of records are gone,” Mr. Szczygiel says, noting that former residents he is still in touch with have the same problem. “None of us can get our records.”Mr. Szczygiel filed his Child Victims Act suit more than five years ago, but has yet to see any semblance of justice. “I more or less gave up on it,” he says.Aging out of the system has also left him unprepared for the fight, he adds. “I had no life skills,” Mr. Szczygiel says. “I was pretty much on my own.” Today Mr. Szczygiel and his wife live in a Buffalo hotel in emergency housing. He does maintenance at the hotel to earn money.A Fix Stuck in CommitteeThe rule that may doom cases like Mr. Szczygiel’s is the target of a Senate bill that has gone nowhere in the Assembly.The Senate bill, S9848, sponsored by Sen. Julia Salazar, would waive the date-and-place requirement for claims involving sexual offenses, so survivors would not have to pinpoint the exact day and location to keep a case alive. The change wouldcover new filings and pending claims as well as dismissed claims that can still be appealed. A similar 2025 version cleared the Senate 57-5 but also stalled in the Assembly.Speaker Carl Heastie’s office raised concerns last year about how far the bill relaxes pleading standards and how much it changes the requirements for pending cases, according to a person familiar with the discussions. His office was noncommittal earlier this year. The bill’s lead Assembly sponsor says the delay carries a price. “It is unreasonable for the Court of Claims to expect survivors to recall the exact details of an incredibly traumatic event, which may have occurred years ago or when they were just a child,” the assemblywoman who sponsored the Child Victims Act and the Adult Survivors Act, Linda Rosenthal, tells the Sun.Ms. Rosenthal’s office says the bill will come back when the new session opens in January 2027. Lawmakers could return to Albany sooner, but only for an emergency. More cases, she says, now risk being thrown out.For claimants, every month counts. Evidence goes stale and records disappear. Delay helps the state. The Adult Survivors Act’s lookback window closed in November 2023. Lawyers handling the cases say they still see no trial and no resolution in sight.On Cornell, Ms. Hochul moved within days of the district attorney reopening the case and signed an executive order that handed it to Ms. James. The governor’s office, however, has stopped short of a commitment to the state’s alleged abuse victims. The governor will review the legislation should it reach her, a spokeswoman for Ms. Hochul tells the Sun.For survivors waiting, the politics are hard to miss. Ms. Hochul and Ms. James both appear on the November 3 ballot, and the Cornell case has put them in front of cameras on the subject of sexual violence. Male survivors in particular, Mr. Szczygiel says, are “often not heard loud enough.”“I’ve been trying to speak out about this for the better part of 20-some years,” Mr. Szczygiel adds. “It all comes back down to politics. Who’s going to take care of it?”

Letitia James Puts Cornell Case Front and Center While Her Office Fights Hundreds of Abuse Suits Against the State

Letitia James Puts Cornell Case Front and Center While Her Office Fights Hundreds of Abuse Suits Against the State

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