Rape New York

How and Why I Started a Lawsuit Against My Landlord

56 | rny how and why i started a lawsuit against my landlord ON THE DAY FOLLOWING the attack, I was in the Police Archive on Amsterdam Avenue looking at mug shots, in the hope I might identify the rapist. The process seemed endless and senseless to a degree, because the selection was based on my estimation of the attacker’s age. I could remember his features , but wasn’t certain of his age. I made an effort to guess, but worried my guess might be wrong. I realized that I could be looking through a vast catalogue of images that might not include my attacker. I asked if we could conduct the search in a more random manner and look at various age ranges, since I was a poor judge of age. But because the police organize the photos in age ranges, I was told I had to review each range in sequence, finishing one before I moved on to the next. My recollection is that the age range I looked at was twenty to twenty-five. Several years later, I learned I had misjudged the age of the man who raped me. He was nineteen. The session took hours, and while I was there, I anxiously wondered how I could avoid being assaulted a second time. 57 | rny As I focused on the mug shots, I struggled to contain my fears. I felt trapped in the Police Archive, engaged in an absurd search, and was terrified about the assailant returning to look for me. Finally I spoke out. “What if the rapist is not here in the pictures but in my building waiting for me? Am I supposed to go back to an unprotected building?” “Calm down. He will not go back; they never go back,” a male police officer said. I didn’t believe him. A policewoman was staring at me silently, but it seemed to me with empathy. While a new mug shot file was fetched, I called the landlord’s office again, and asked for the locks to be fixed. I said I had been raped in the building. “You might as well be dead,” the man on the phone replied. Later I learned that the office had similarly responded to another tenant, one of my neighbors. She’d asked that the roof doors be locked after she’d been robbed in her apartment. “Do you think you live on Park Avenue?” Two men had made their way into her apartment at gunpoint. One of them had pushed her child to the floor. The woman was also violently pushed down, but the father struggled with one of the gunmen. The child saw his father wrestle the gun from the man and pull the trigger, but the 58 | rny gun didn’t go off. He watched the other intruder point a gun into his father’s face, as he crouched in fear with his mother. The thieves tied his father’s legs and wrists with duct tape, and ransacked their home. I asked the police officers if they could force my landlord to replace the locks and was told they had no authority to change the locks on a privately owned building. They also explained that though they couldn’t send a squad car to guard the door of my apartment full-time, they could help me find a shelter. “I don’t want to go to a shelter.” I didn’t want to go to a shelter and feel even more displaced . I wanted my home to be safe. Before the assault I had repeatedly asked the superintendent to fix the locks and had complained to the managing office about the lack of security. Nothing had happened, and I was confused about who was responsible. The police told me that the owner was ultimately responsible for the locks in the building, and that he owned not just my apartment, but the entire building. I had not assumed this because it is very rare for one person to own an entire apartment building in Spain, and responsibility for maintenance is normally shared communally. When you live in a dangerous situation in Spain, responsibility is transferred to a Juez de Guardia, a judge who has the power to overrule maintenance agreements and enforce other rules. I couldn’t understand why the police wouldn’t do anything to enforce security in...