She Says She Was Sexually Abused in New York Prisons. Now She’s Fighting the State From Her Hospital Bed

“It’s not just about me. If it was, I would have just ate it,” she said. “But I don’t know if I’m gonna make it through this year. And no matter what, when it comes to the treatment of inmates, we should be treated as human beings.”

Johnson filed her lawsuit under the Adult Survivors Act, which in 2022 temporarily allowed sexual assault survivors to file complaints outside of the typical statute of limitations. She’s one of nearly 1,600 women who have filed claims against the state of New York alleging they were sexually abused by prison staff, according to a Hell Gate and New York Focus analysis. Collectively, the complaints paint a damning portrait of a longstanding, systemic pattern of sexual abuse in the state prison system, according to the women’s attorneys.

In her complaint, Johnson alleges that three corrections officers and a doctor sexually assaulted her during two separate stints in New York state prisons, the first beginning in 2014 and the second in 2017. She details several instances in which prison staff allegedly raped her, groped her, and in one case, performed a sexually abusive medical procedure. One of the officers, David Stupnick, brutally raped her in her dormitory room, she says.

Two years later, Stupnick was arrested and sentenced to six months in prison, in a separate case, for a criminal sex act with an imprisoned woman. He is also accused of sexual assault by at least 20 other women who have filed Adult Survivors Act cases.

Johnson’s attorney, Anna Kull, a partner at Levy Konigsberg, alleges that prison leadership has known for years that guards have been sexually abusing incarcerated people, often with impunity.

When Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Adult Survivors Act into law in 2022, she said it was “an important step in empowering survivors across New York to use their voices and hold their abusers accountable.” Yet her administration has since taken an uncompromising defensive approach to survivors suing New York itself, attorneys say.

Rather than resolving Johnson’s claim with urgency, for instance through negotiations or a settlement, the state is taking her to trial, said Kull, even though one of her alleged abusers had already been found guilty of a sex crime involving an incarcerated woman, and is alleged to have abused tens of other women. The approach risks retraumatizing victims, she said, by forcing them to repeatedly relive the alleged assault in an adversarial setting. It’s an early indicator of how the state intends to approach the nearly 1,600 cases that are still pending, Kull added.

“These cases deserve a process that reflects the seriousness of the harm and the courage it took to come forward,” she said.

Kull recently convinced a court to expedite Johnson’s case due to her illness, making it one of the first Adult Survivors Act cases with allegations from the five largest women’s prisons to move toward trial. But Kull estimated that the other cases could take years to resolve due to the state’s aggressive approach to the lawsuits.

In total, New York is being sued for at least $30 billion in damages by claimants who allege they were sexually abused in state prisons, according to a Hell Gate and New York Focus analysis.

The AG has taken the trial-centric approach in Johnson’s case.

According to state records, Johnson was first incarcerated in New York in 2014 at Albion Correctional Facility, due to a parole violation for an earlier attempted robbery charge.

When she arrived at the prison, located between Rochester and Buffalo, an officer whose name she says she can’t remember told her to perform oral sex on him twice in a secluded corner of a shower area, she alleges. If she didn’t, Johnson said he told her, she wouldn’t get access to her needed contact lenses.

On two other occasions, an officer who worked at the prison rubbed his groin on her as she sat at a desk in a school building. He made sexual and racist comments, like calling women “Pocahontas” and referring to another inmate as his “favorite Indian,” Johnson said.

“I felt so singled out,” she said as she began crying. “But then I noticed the real rules of surviving there. Everybody knows it’s all about sex trade. It’s all about using your body, using manipulation, and having to give up the fact that you’re human.”

Johnson, who suffered from on-and-off substance use issues, was sent to prison again in 2017. At Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, she was abused by a doctor during intake, she says in her complaint. On the day of the alleged abuse, Johnson said, she was summoned to the doctor’s office, informed that she had abnormal results on a gynecological test, and told that she needed a biopsy on her uterus then and there.

Johnson said she was held down as the doctor forced a speculum and their fingers into her vagina, causing pain and tearing, while she said “no.” Afterwards, she said, she bled for several days, and has never had a menstrual cycle since.

She was then sent to Albion again. It was there, she says, that she was targeted by corrections officer David Stupnick.

The first time Stupnick abused her was in the prison’s showers, Johnson alleges in her complaint. The officer, whom she described as young, white, and covered in tattoos, came in when she was showering and groped her chest and groin, while insulting her body and laughing, she said.

Another time, Stupnick followed Johnson out of the shower and to her dorm, she said. While she crouched in her dorm cubicle in a pink robe, she said Stupnick walked in, shoved her head into her closed locker, and anally raped her.