Former Rikers detainee sues city; says correction officers sexually assaulted him

by Tandy Lau

(New York Amsterdam News)A Black man filed a civil rights lawsuit in December 2025, accusing Department of Correction (DOC) officers of sodomizing him in 2024 during his pretrial detention.

Court documents in the lawsuit filed on behalf of Kyle Knight, 29, name two DOC officers who allegedly participated in forcibly inserting a finger in his rectum during a retaliatory strip search after one accused guard struck and pepper-sprayed him. The filing also alleges the defendants exposed Knight in front of the entire housing unit with just a sheet over him, while also blowing kisses at him and commenting on his genitals.

A third DOC staff member — the supervising captain — is also named as a defendant in the lawsuit. The filing alleges that this individual probably did not report the incident because he learned about it afterward. Knight also reported the incident through 311 and through the DOC’s confidential hotline, established by the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA).

“The officers at Rikers are supposed to protect us, not hurt or humiliate us,” said Knight in a statement. “They had no right to sexually violate me. I want to hold them and the Department of Correction accountable for what they did, so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Knight has enlisted the Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel (ECBAWM) law firm to represent him in suing the city. One of his attorneys, Debra Greenberger, said the discovery process will shed more light on how the DOC addressed the incident, including whether and how the department conducted a mandated PREA investigation after Knight called the hotline.

The defendants will also have to testify under oath about the incident’s details. The lawyers believe the officers contradicted themselves when they separately reported use-of-force after the encounter. They both accuse Knight of refusing to surrender and attempting to dispose of an “unknown” item, but one officer mentions a second object. Disciplinary measures against Knight over those claims were later dismissed.

“The hearing officers said that there was no evidence that Kyle was doing the bad things that they said [he did], which is pretty notable, because that’s not a forum where there’s full due process and lawyer,” said Greenberger. “For that complaint to be dismissed speaks to how baseless the officers’ claims were about the accusations they made against Kyle.”

The discovery process could force the city to present a recording made by another corrections officer with a hand-held camera showing “some or all” of the alleged sexual assault. The footage is currently missing despite Freedom of Information Law requests by Knight’s lawyers, but they believe it exists since other recordings from stationary jail cameras show the DOC staff member taping the encounter.

For Greenberger, substandard documentation of Knight’s incident draws from broader oversight concerns. She separately co-represents plaintiffs for the Nunez class action, arguably the most crucial lawsuit about excessive and unnecessary force in NYC jails, which led to a settlement agreement mandating a body-worn camera pilot in DOC facilities. The litigation also brought in a court-appointed monitor whose reports addressed proper use of chemical agents like pepper spray.

The city fell short of meeting court-ordered reforms from Nunez for nearly a decade, leading to a federal judge greenlighting a receivership-like takeover of DOC jails by a court-appointed, third-party “remediation manager” last year.

“The reason that we’ve been pushing for a remediation manager is that there is an ongoing culture of the officers not following the rules,” said Greenberger. “There’s just humanitarian crisis after humanitarian crisis. And the point of a receiver or a remediation manager is to have a place where people in custody and officers feel safe walking into the individual buildings [and] walking onto the Island.

“If we had a culture of safety, that would stop not just the pepper spraying, but would also go a long way toward alleviating the sexual assaults that this case is about.”

The DOC declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

Link to the article here.