It was the fall of 1978, and the 13-year-old boy was reluctant to attend his counseling session.

Vincent Festa, the school psychologist at Herricks Middle School and High School in North Hempstead, had a reputation. Around the Long Island schools, students reportedly referred to him as “Festa the Molesta.”

On his third appointment with Festa, the seventh grader’s fears came true, he said: The psychologist molested him. The boy said Festa threatened to send him to a boarding school upstate if he told anyone what happened.

Now, more than 40 years later, John Doe R.D. is one of 21 individuals who have sued the Herricks Union Free School District alleging Festa abused them. They have filed claims under New York’s Child Victims Act, passed by the state legislature in 2019 to extend the statute of limitations for filing civil suits over alleged child sexual abuse. Nearly 11,000 claims have been filed statewide, according to Child usa, a think tank that advocates for statute of limitations reform in child abuse cases.

The claims reveal long-hidden, rampant abuse at schools, religious institutions, hospitals, youth organizations, and other sites, according to an analysis of state court records. Thousands of claims have been filed against jurisdictions of the Catholic Church. But there are also cases against other high-profile institutions like the Boy Scouts of America and Rockefeller University Hospital, where pediatric endocrinologist Reginald Archibald is accused of abusing hundreds of patients.

Standing on the steps of City Hall in September 2022, David Do, the chair of New York City’s Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC), looked positively ecstatic.

Grinning widely, Do pumped his fist to the crowd of cab drivers assembled behind him to celebrate a milestone in a new debt relief deal for the city’s beleaguered taxi industry. “Good afternoon, everyone,” he began. “We are at the finish line!”

Standing alongside the TLC chair, US Senator Chuck Schumer shouted out drivers in the crowd who had participated in the protests that had led to the deal, including Dorothy LeConte, a Haitian immigrant who had been driving a taxi for more than 35 years. “Their hunger strike,” Schumer said, “just lit that fire, and said, ‘New York is not gonna turn our back on you.’”

But LeConte, along with hundreds of other drivers, has yet to see the benefits of the debt relief program, known as Medallion Relief Program Plus (MRP+).

Over the past couple of decades, more than 2,000 taxi drivers have racked up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt to purchase medallions, the small metal plates that serve as licenses for New York City’s yellow cabs. When Uber, Lyft, and then the Covid-19 pandemic arrived on the scene, the value of those medallions plummeted, leaving drivers suffocated by debt.

New Yorkers have a lot to say about their energy bills.

But fighting utility rate hikes is not easy, or cheap. It takes lawyers, expert witnesses, and — among other things — a whole lot of photocopies.

Laurie Wheelock, executive director of the Public Utility Law Project, or PULP, estimates that her small consumer advocacy nonprofit spends upwards of $5,000 a year just printing documents for the court-like proceedings that state regulators hold to decide utility rates. (Groups testifying at hearings have to bring paper copies of certain documents for everyone in the room.)

That’s no small expense for most climate and consumer advocates participating in utility proceedings. But photocopying costs are only the beginning. It takes far more money to hire economists, accountants, and other experts to mount a serious challenge to utilities’ requests to hike rates.

Nonprofit groups have persuaded regulators to block hundreds of millions of dollars in gas infrastructure and won alternatives, like programs to subsidize heat pumps for low-income customers. Yet they say they’re hamstrung by a lack of capacity. Even the most active have only about 10 people on staff and can rarely afford to hire outside consultants, while the utilities and corporations they’re going up against spend millions on each case.