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#Bronx prosecutor claims DA ignored her rape, sex assault

#Bronx prosecutor claims DA ignored her rape, sex assault

A Bronx prosecutor says an NYPD officer sexually assaulted her and an investigator from the Bronx District Attorney’s office raped her — but both agencies ignored the allegations, according to a new lawsuit.

The woman, identified as Jane Doe, claims Officer Edwin Crespo slid his hand up her thigh in her cubicle on Nov. 15, 2016 while they were preparing for trial, according to the federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York on Oct. 8.

“After moving his chair so close to Plaintiff’s so that their chairs were basically touching, Officer Crespo placed his hand on Plaintiff’s right inner thigh and slid his hand up and down her thigh,” the suit reads. “His hand reached about one or two inches away from her vagina.”

Despite Doe reporting the incident, the Bronx District Attorney’s Office “made no effort” to “ensure her health and safety by making some sort of alternative arrangements,” the suit alleges.

Crespo was later suspended over a domestic incident and arrested in June 2018 after allegedly drunkenly crashing into a marked NYPD car, but nothing ever came of the unnamed woman’s allegations, according to the suit.

Reached by phone, the now-retired cop confirmed he wasn’t disciplined over the encounter.

“I was interviewed but they never found nothing… nothing came out of it,” he said before abruptly hanging up.

In another separate incident, the lawsuit accuses Gino Pelaez, a senior accountant investigator in the DA’s office, of rape following a party with colleagues on Aug. 15, 2019.

The suit claims Pelaez followed Doe to into her cab where he became “vulgar and aggressive,” trying to kiss the woman and telling her “It’s OK, you want it,” when she tried to fend him off.

She alleges he touched her inappropriately during the cab ride and forced himself into her apartment, the suit says.

“In the morning, Plaintiff woke up in her apartment, knowing she had been raped. Her body was ‘black and blue’ and her vaginal area was injured to the point where she could not sit down or urinate comfortably for weeks,” the lawsuit says.

The woman immediately alerted her supervisors and made a report with NYPD Special Victims Unit and Manhattan DA’s Office. That’s when the NYPD’s Internal Affairs finally contacted her about her run-in with Crespo, the suit says.

A few days later, Pelaez apologized for his behavior, the suit says.

The lawsuit claims the DA’s office “botched” the investigation by outing witnesses in email chains and sharing a confidential subpoena “improperly.”

No charges were brought in the case due to a “notorious loophole” in New York law that says “voluntarily intoxicated individual is not considered mentally incapacitated,” the suit reads.

That loophole, according to the suit, leads to few charges in “cases where the victim became voluntarily intoxicated and was unable to consent, even if a reasonable person would have understood that the victim was incapacitated.”

The Bronx District Attorney’s Office and NYPD both declined to comment on pending litigation.

Pelaez could not be reached for comment.

Lawyer and PR specialist Josh Nass said of the damning allegations in the lawsuit, “it’s a crisis from a PR standpoint.”

“It’s unfathomable in the Me Too era in which we live a human resource department at major district attorney’s office would be so negligent and grossly reckless and irresponsible this is a matter that obviously it’s an outrage if true,” said Nass, who works as CEO of Dignified Online.

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