Updates to our Terms of Use

We are updating our Terms of Use. Please carefully review the updated Terms before proceeding to our website.

Thursday, April 18, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

$100 Million Demand for Alleged Child Abuse

BROOKLYN (CN) - A father who claims his daughter was molested by the director of an after-school program demands $100 million from the New York City Housing Authority.

Jeffrey Madison sued the NYCHA and Nicholas Rodriguez on June 5 in Federal Court.

Madison claims that Rodriguez admitted to wrongdoing, and was to appear in criminal court this week stemming from a 2013 federal lawsuit with similar allegations.

Madison claims that a worker at the Jonathan Williams Community Center in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood repeatedly complained of Rodriguez engaging in "sexual and/or grossly improper behavior with female children" at the center as early as 1998.

But her complaints fell on deaf ears, Madison says.

He claims that the woman reported that Rodriguez had been seen with a 6-year-old girl on his lap and whispering in her ear, stroking another girl's cheeks, grabbing her and fondling a child's privates, playing hide and seek with the lights off, exposing himself and letting the girls rub his hairy chest, which the girls described as being "like a rug."

He told the children "don't rat" because "when you squeal ... you're a rat, you get stitches, somebody's hurt you and beat you up," according to the complaint.

He also gave them money for sexual favors, the lawsuit claims. One 14-year-old girl said her 16-year-old sister got more money because she performed oral sex on him, according to the complaint.

Rodriguez was transferred to a Brooklyn Public Housing development, and was director of that community center's after-school program from 2007 to 2010. That's when he committed "multiple acts of sexual assault and/or other unlawful and indecent sexual acts" on Madison's daughter, the father say.

Rodriguez was indicted by a Kings County grand jury in March 2012 on multiple counts of sexual assault and other indecent acts on children, according to the complaint.

Madison claims that children at the center "have experienced traumatic psychological consequences which will ... interfere and destroy their ability to enjoy a natural emotional life in the future and will forever bar them from the opportunity to fruitful and appropriate educational and emotional success and will cause them substantial and emotional adverse financial consequences, medical expenses for psychological counseling and psychiatric counseling and medications required to maintain a nondestructive emotional status."

He seeks $20 million on each of five counts.

The New York City Housing Authority did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.

Both lawsuits were filed by Bill Greenberg.

Categories / Uncategorized

Subscribe to Closing Arguments

Sign up for new weekly newsletter Closing Arguments to get the latest about ongoing trials, major litigation and hot cases and rulings in courthouses around the U.S. and the world.

Loading...