It had been a tumultuous year for Mary Soto, a high school freshman. She had been in and out of juvenile courts and struggling with her home life when an altercation with a police officer outside a party about 15 years ago led to her being held in custody at Horizon Juvenile Center in the Bronx.
Ms. Soto, who was then about 14, said she was terrified when the metal doors to her cell closed on her first night at Horizon. But over the next few days, she found a “family” of other girls who helped her navigate her new surroundings, including teaching her how to get candy, snacks and other items. One girl told her that a particular staff member would bring her anything she wanted from the outside world if Ms. Soto was “really nice to him.”
What that meant, Ms. Soto said she soon found out, was enduring repeated sexual assaults over the next four months of her detention, according to a lawsuit filed Monday. The staff member would enter her room at Horizon about three times a week and kiss and fondle her, and force her to engage in oral sex, according to the suit.
What happened to Ms. Soto, now 30, did not happen in a vacuum, said her lawyer, Jerome Block. She is one of about 150 people who filed lawsuits on Monday against New York City — including the Administration for Children’s Services and the Department of Correction — for the abuse they said they endured while in the city’s custody as minors.
The suits — all filed through the law firm Levy Konigsberg LLP — show “long-term, institutionalized sexual abuse” from the 1970s through the 2010s, Mr. Block said.
The lawsuits were filed under the city’s gender-motivated violence law, passed in 2000 to allow victims of domestic violence or any crimes linked to gender to sue their attackers and institutions for damages. In 2022, a New York City law was enacted with a two-year look-back window to file lawsuits that might have passed the statute of limitations.
“Overall, I think these cases show a broken juvenile justice system in the city of New York,” Mr. Block said. “A juvenile justice system that inflicts sexual trauma on children.”
“Sexual abuse and harassment is abhorrent and unacceptable, and we take these allegations very seriously,” said a City Hall spokeswoman on Monday. “While these cases predate this administration, the Law Department will review them once served and respond accordingly.”
The lawsuits are the latest in a series of legal actions against the city and staff members at the city’s juvenile detention centers over allegations of abuse and cover-ups. Last year, federal prosecutors charged two supervisors at Horizon with civil rights offenses, saying they had beaten a 16-year-old boy and tried to hide their actions by filing false reports.
In 2019, the city settled a lawsuit with a 22-year-old man who said that a supervisor at Horizon repeatedly sexually assaulted him during his detention when he was a minor, according to news reports.
According to Levy Konigsberg, nearly 80 percent of the people suing are men, and a large majority were under 17 when they say they were abused. Many said their abuse happened in the 1990s and 2000s. A majority of the cases — 65 percent — are related to Spofford Juvenile Detention Center, later renamed Bridges, a troubled center that permanently closed in 2011. The rest include allegations of abuse at two other Bronx facilities, Horizon and Rikers Island, and people who say there were abused at multiple locations.
In 2017, New York State enacted the “Raise the Age” law, which required adolescents to be housed in detention centers where they can receive age-appropriate services instead of in adult jails. In the city, 16- and 17-year-old detainees were moved from Rikers Island and placed at other facilities.
The lawsuits filed Monday tell of a juvenile detention system where reports of abuse were systematically ignored and hidden.
Ms. Soto said in her lawsuit that she feared reporting her abuse while she was at Horizon because another girl reported the same staff member, and “she was physically assaulted.” The staff member who abused Ms. Soto also built a relationship with her outside of Horizon, she said, in what she said she later came to understand was “grooming.” When she ran away from home while still a minor, he paid for a room for her and kept tabs on her as she got older.
It took years of therapy for her to realize that the relationship the staff member cultivated with her was abuse, said Ms. Soto, who is a mother of two and lives in Florida. Now she wants to tell her story.
“The biggest reason why I’m doing this is because I have a daughter — she’s 2 — and I never want my daughter to go through what I went through,” she said through tears, adding: “You have to learn it can happen again and it can happen to people that you love and you care about.”
