Beverly Footman wants to forget the three prison staffers who she says abused her while she was incarcerated — but they haunt her. One was a cook at Groveland Correctional Facility, where she was locked up in the early 1990s. Around three times a week for over a year, he would corner her in the walk-in refrigerator and other parts of the kitchen, where she worked, and force her to have sex with him, Footman alleges. She only knew him by his last name: Fitzpatrick.

Footman didn’t report Fitzpatrick while she was in prison. He called her degrading and racist names and told her “bad things” would happen if she made trouble, she recalled. She believed him. Staff covered for one another’s abuse, she told New York Focus.

“If you tell them something, they say you’re lying,” Footman said. “Everything you do is a lie.”

Decades after her alleged abuse, Footman got her chance to push for some accountability. In 2023, she sued the state under the Adult Survivors Act, a law that opened a yearlong window for sexual assault victims to file civil lawsuits outside the normal statutes of limitations.

But last November, state Attorney General Letitia James’s office, which is defending the state against Adult Survivors Act suits, asked a judge to toss the case — among the first of hundreds of dismissals the state has planned to request. One of the state’s central arguments: A search conducted by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the prison agency, turned up no record of anyone named Fitzpatrick ever working at Groveland prison.

New York Focus conducted its own search — and quickly found a former employee matching Footman’s descriptions.

The top investigator at New York’s horse racing regulator has resigned after a New York Focus investigation last month revealed that the agency spent years ignoring key evidence in a massive horse doping scandal.

The former director of racing investigations, Andrew Rakowsky, “resigned rather than face termination,” New York Gaming Commission spokesperson Lee Park told New York Focus.

Rakowsky could not be reached for comment. His government phone line was disconnected as of publication time.

In December 2024, the New York state prison system made national news when guards were caught on video beating an incarcerated man to death. Soon after the footage’s release, Governor Kathy Hochul publicly sprang into action, visiting the facility where 43-year-old Robert Brooks was killed and announcing a suite of initiatives aimed at boosting prison oversight and accountability.

“The system failed Mr. Brooks, and I will not be satisfied until there has been significant culture change,” Hochul said at the time.

The governor’s measures included $2 million for the Correctional Association of New York, or CANY, a 182-year-old nonprofit organization tasked by state law with overseeing prison conditions.

Now, the governor is pulling the plug: Her budget proposal for next fiscal year includes no state money for CANY.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “Tin Cup Day” in Albany was dominated by talk of two big-ticket policy proposals: making buses fare-free and raising taxes on millionaires and corporations. But New York City’s mayor has made a multitude of other promises that also hinge on state approval, which now appear to be on the back burner.

Mamdani’s campaign platform included more than a dozen distinct policies that require signoff from Albany, many of which have gotten relatively little attention. Mamdani said he wanted to nearly double the city’s debt limit in order to borrow another $70 billion to build housing; vowed to champion state bills banning non-disclosure agreements and junk fees; and promised to push for more state funding for the city’s beleaguered public housing system.

None of those figured into his four-hour hearing on Wednesday. And the mayor seemed to acknowledge that he is putting those lower-profile asks on hold for now, as he pushes lawmakers and Governor Kathy Hochul for permission to raise taxes to help close the city’s budget gap for the coming year.