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A New York City woman claims that Mayor Eric Adams sexually assaulted her three decades ago, masturbating in front of her when she turned down his demands for oral sex, according to a bombshell $5 million lawsuit filed Monday.
The claims add another layer of tumult to Adams’ already-tumultuous tenure, which has the first-term mayor facing an FBI investigation into allegations he helped the Turkish government sidestep the city’s fire code to erect a 35-story diplomatic facility.
Federal agents in November raided the Bronx home of Adams’ top fundraiser, and seized Adams’ phones and iPad, as part of the probe.
Adams reached the rank of captain in the NYPD, was elected to the New York State Senate after he retired in 2006, and was elected mayor in 2021.
“I am proud to file this complaint on behalf of my client, a woman whose strength astonishes me,” Megan Goddard, a lawyer for accuser Lorna Beach-Mathura, told The Daily Beast in an emailed statement shortly after she filed the suit in New York State Supreme Court.
“She knew that filing this lawsuit would cause her significant personal challenges but she did so nevertheless, because she believes sexual abusers must be held to account, no matter who they are. Her fearlessness and quest for justice are as inspiring as they are important.”
“It absolutely did not happen,” he said in November. “I don’t recall ever meeting this person and I would never harm anyone in that magnitude. It did not happen. 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.”
In her complaint, Beach-Mathura, a former police administrative aide, says she approached Adams, then a Transit Police officer, at their stationhouse in 1993 and asked for his help with a “workplace issue,” Beach-Mathura’s complaint states.
She was up for a promotion that seemed to have stalled, and Beach-Mathura says she hoped Adams, the president of the Guardians Association, a fraternal organization for Black cops, might be able to find out what was holding things up.
