A nursing student says in a new federal lawsuit that two NYPD officers assigned to investigate her 2013 rape complaint took her barhopping and got her drunk, and one of them sexually assaulted her in a hotel room.
The woman, who identified herself as a 25-year-old originally from Seattle, said in the lawsuit that Lt. Thomas Lamboy and Det. Lukasz Skorzewski visited her hometown to investigate the complaint, bought her shots of whiskey during a 10-hour pub crawl, and flirted with her, using lines like, “You’re my favorite victim.”
She stayed in Skorzewski’s hotel room, the suit said, and the next morning the detective crawled into bed with her and spent about 30 minutes trying to touch her inappropriately, warning her afterward to keep quiet or it would hurt her credibility in the rape case.
“It can’t leave this room,” the suit says he told her.
The incident, which has been previously reported in newspapers, was investigated by the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau, and both officers were disciplined, the suit said. Skorzewski was demoted, and Lamboy has retired, it said.
The lawsuit seeks $3 million in compensatory and punitive damages from the two officers and the city.
The NYPD declined to comment, and a spokesman for the city law department said it would review the suit once it is served.
The woman’s name is being withheld because Newsday does not identify victims of alleged sexual assaults.
The woman said in the suit that she was sexually assaulted by a “social acquaintance” in a Manhattan apartment in January 2013, and returned to her hometown before reporting it in June.
She said that after the two officers returned to New York, Skorzewski kept in close contact, sending her hundreds of text messages, speaking on the phone every day and telling her he had “bonded” with her.
But the lawsuit described that as a “self-serving” effort to make sure she didn’t report the officers’ misconduct, and said she delayed doing so, fearing that reporting them would compromise the investigation of her original complaint.
The woman returned to New York in 2014, and now lives in Brooklyn, the suit said, but no charges were ever filed in the underlying incident.
