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 Goth Goth, Gothamist and WNYC, Jesse Edwards,

who along with reporter Samantha Max and editor

Christopher Worth, 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 these 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 assault,

particularly at Roses, 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 gothams.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,

...