Mayor Adams’ attorneys are requesting that a civil lawsuit accusing him of sexual assault be dismissed on the basis that the woman who filed it is in bankruptcy proceedings.
In a Manhattan Supreme Court filing late Friday, Adams’ Law Department attorneys wrote they had not realized his accuser, ex-Transit Police employee Lorna Beach-Mathura, was in Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings until the Daily News first reported it earlier this month.
Citing case law holding that individuals in bankruptcy cases lose “standing” to personally bring civil suits, the attorneys wrote that the presiding judge should promptly schedule a hearing on dismissing Beach-Mathura’s suit outright. They argued any civil suit by an individual in bankruptcy must be brought by the person’s “estate,” a temporary ownership structure meant to give more say to creditors who are owed money.
“Plaintiff lost her capacity to sue when she filed her Bankruptcy Petition nearly five months,” Adams’ attorneys wrote.
Beach-Mathura’s attorney didn’t immediately return a request for comment on the dismissal request.
Beach-Mathura declared personal bankruptcy in her home state of Florida this past Sept. 11, revealing she owes nearly $333,000 to various creditors, including banks and hospitals.
A few weeks before she declared bankruptcy, Beach-Mathura also filed a slip-and-fall lawsuit charging the city should pay her at least $75,000 after she fell in Queens due what she described as a “defective and uneven” kink in a sidewalk, as also first reported by The News.
Beach-Mathura, who’s seeking some $5 million in damages over the alleged assault, says in her suit that Adams tried to force her to perform oral sex on him in a parked car in 1993 while they both worked for the city’s since-defunct Transit Police agency. When she refused his overture, she alleges he masturbated and ejaculated on her leg.
Adams has vehemently denied the accusations and says he can’t recall ever meeting Beach-Mathura, who first filed her suit in March 2024.
According to court papers filed earlier this week, Beach-Mathura, Adams and the NYPD, which is also named as a defendant in her action, have agreed to extend discovery on the sexual assault claim through June 20. If that timeline stays in place, it would mean the case will continue past the mayor’s scheduled Manhattan Federal Court trial in April on corruption charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.
Beach-Mathura recently sat for a deposition in the sexual assault case, though no details from that interview have been publicly disclosed to date.
Before Friday’s dismissal filing, Megan Goddard, Beach-Mathura’s attorney, told The News that discovery has been bogged down by a lack of production of records from Adams’ administration.
“We’re still waiting on basic discovery production, like employment records,” Goddard said, referring to documents she’s seeking from the city detailing the Transit Police work history of her client and Adams.
A Law Department spokesman said the employment records are proving hard to locate as they are from over 30 years ago and produced by Transit Police, an agency that no longer exists as it was merged with the NYPD in the mid-1990s.