It's the Brian Laird show on WNYc,

welcome.

It's the Brian Laird Show on WNYc.

Welcome back everybody. I'm Matt Katz, reporter in the WNYC newsroom, and I'm taking Brian's spot today.

For the next 20 minutes or so, we're going to be talking about sexual violence.

So if that's troubling to you to hear at this moment, please turn down the radio, come back to us at about 1115.

Our guest is my colleague in the newsroom here at Gothamist and WNYC Jesse Edwards who along with reporter Samantha Max and editor Christopher Wirth has spent months looking at decades of sexual abuse at Rikers Island.

What these journalists did is they went through hundreds and hundreds of lawsuits

filed under New York's Adult Survivors Act. Now that law gave people a one-year window

allowing civil lawsuits to be filed over allegations of sexual abuse that

might otherwise have been too old to file over.

And the civil suits were not intended to be for jailed detainees necessarily,

but most of those suits ended up being centered on abuses allegedly

perpetrated at Rikers Island. Over the course of their nine-month

investigation our journalists found about 700 women filed suits alleging

sexual assaults, particularly at Rosie's, the women's jail at Rikers. They

reported the details of those findings earlier this year and you can find their new reporting in stories posted on Gotham's.com this week and in a special episode of NYC now or daily Podcast which will air on Saturday.

This new reporting centers on two specific correction officers allegedly responsible for

some of these sexual assaults and it dives deeply into the stories of

some of their victims. Jesse's articles also explain what city officials are

doing or more to the point not doing about all this.

Hi Jesse, hi Matt.

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