Beverly Footman wants to forget the three prison staffers who she says abused her while she was incarcerated — but they haunt her. One was a cook at Groveland Correctional Facility, where she was locked up in the early 1990s. Around three times a week for over a year, he would corner her in the walk-in refrigerator and other parts of the kitchen, where she worked, and force her to have sex with him, Footman alleges. She only knew him by his last name: Fitzpatrick.

Footman didn’t report Fitzpatrick while she was in prison. He called her degrading and racist names and told her “bad things” would happen if she made trouble, she recalled. She believed him. Staff covered for one another’s abuse, she told New York Focus.

“If you tell them something, they say you’re lying,” Footman said. “Everything you do is a lie.”

Decades after her alleged abuse, Footman got her chance to push for some accountability. In 2023, she sued the state under the Adult Survivors Act, a law that opened a yearlong window for sexual assault victims to file civil lawsuits outside the normal statutes of limitations.

But last November, state Attorney General Letitia James’s office, which is defending the state against Adult Survivors Act suits, asked a judge to toss the case — among the first of hundreds of dismissals the state has planned to request. One of the state’s central arguments: A search conducted by the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the prison agency, turned up no record of anyone named Fitzpatrick ever working at Groveland prison.

New York Focus conducted its own search — and quickly found a former employee matching Footman’s descriptions.

Upon uncovering the cook’s employment records, New York Focus sought comment from state officials as well as Footman’s lawyers, who subsequently alerted the judge to the findings. Within hours, the attorney general’s office rescinded its request to dismiss the lawsuit. For now, the case is moving forward.

New York Focus tried to reach Fitzpatrick through multiple phone numbers and email addresses found online. After publication, a man identifying himself as Fitzpatrick and as the former head of the mess hall at Groveland reached out to deny the allegations in Footman’s lawsuit. He was unaware of the lawsuit, and claimed that its description of his height, weight, hair and glasses are incorrect. He said that he remembers Footman, that he doesn’t remember any other employee fitting the description in the lawsuit, and that he wasn’t aware of sexual abuse taking place in the prison. New York Focus was unable to independently verify whether he was the same Fitzpatrick who worked at the prison.

In response to a request for comment, a spokesperson for the attorney general’s office said that it was the prison agency’s responsibility to find Fitzpatrick. They referred questions about why the state didn’t identify him to DOCCS, which said it does not comment on pending litigation.

The state’s reversal in Footman’s case is a pivotal moment in the effort to hold DOCCS accountable for alleged sexual assault by staff. Her lawsuit is one of roughly 1,600 Adult Survivors Act claims that have alleged abuse by state prison employees — and the state is fighting them hard. In December, New York Focus and Hell Gate reported that the state’s attorneys were planning to ask judges to dismiss up to 500 of the cases before they got off the ground, citing rules that require initial claims in lawsuits against the state to include exact details of the alleged harm. Those filing requirements are stricter than in other kinds of civil cases, and create an especially high hurdle for trauma survivors, who often can’t remember specific details of their abuse, advocates for survivors said.

Available data indicates that sexual abuse in DOCCS facilities is a rampant problem: National surveys of incarcerated people have consistently ranked New York women’s prisons among the nation’s highest in reported staff sexual misconduct.

Asked about whether it plans to move forward with the dismissal requests, the attorney general’s office said it could not comment on its legal plans. “[Adult Survivors Act] cases can be emotionally painful and difficult, especially for survivors,” the spokesperson added.

So far, New York Focus and Hell Gate have identified two cases in which the attorney general’s office has tested the early dismissal tactic. In the first, a judge tossed the lawsuit over typos in the claim.

The other case is Footman’s. In her lawsuit, she alleges that Fitzpatrick and two other employees at Groveland prison, which now only incarcerates men, fondled her or orally or vaginally raped her hundreds of times between 1990 and 1991. In addition to Fitzpatrick, the lawsuit accuses a guard with the last name Harrison and a guard whose name Footman doesn’t know. Her claim describes the employees’ roles, shift times, physical traits, and in Fitzpatrick’s case, a mole on his penis.

In moving to dismiss her case, an assistant attorney general argued that the physical descriptions of the three men were “too vague” and noted that the claim only provided the months, rather than the exact dates, that the assaults allegedly took place.

On top of that, the state said it couldn’t locate records of any of the accused employees, including Fitzpatrick. It submitted declarations from a DOCCS human resources employee named Daniel Maloney, who swore “under penalties of perjury” that he searched for Fitzpatrick. No one with that last name worked at DOCCS in 1990 or 1991 and no one with that last name ever worked at Groveland, the declarations said.

Footman’s lawyers pointed out in a court filing that a public database of payroll and pension records did show that someone with the last name Fitzpatrick retired as head cook at Groveland prison in 2010. The state argued that was irrelevant: “There is no value in learning” that, the assistant attorney general wrote, “when there was not a ‘Fitzpatrick’ who worked at Groveland in 1990 and 1991.”

Yet that Fitzpatrick did work at Groveland during those years, New York Focus found. A public records request to the state Department of Civil Service, which maintains payroll records, yielded two records that show that someone with the same first and last names and middle initial had worked as head cook at Groveland from 1985 to 2010. He was the only Fitzpatrick to come up in the department’s search. The records came from the state’s NYSTEP payroll system, one of the databases that Maloney, the DOCCS human resources employee, swore he had access to.

(Maloney also couldn’t find records of the Harrison described in the lawsuit. In response to a records request, the Department of Civil Service said it did not have any records of someone with the last name Harrison working at Groveland in 1990 or 1991.) Attempts to reach Maloney by phone were unsuccessful, and he didn’t respond to a message sent to his DOCCS email address.

On Feb. 12 12, Footman’s lawyers submitted a letter to the court asking for an emergency conference to discuss the employment records that New York Focus uncovered. Later that day, the assistant attorney general submitted a one-page letter rescinding both her request to dismiss the case and the DOCCS human resources employee’s declarations, without explaining the error.

Footman’s lawyers said the ordeal illustrates the win-at-all-costs posture that DOCCS and the attorney general’s office have taken in defending against Adult Survivors Act lawsuits.

“What DOCCS and the AG’s Office just tried to do to Ms. Footman is happening to thousands of women, who cannot get justice because of these types of litigation tactics,” said Konstantin Yelisavetskiy, partner at the law firm Slater Slater Schulman, which represents Footman and more than 1,200 others in cases alleging prison abuse filed under the Adult Survivors Act. “Until the state is held to account, not only will Ms. Footman and other women with pending lawsuits continue to be needlessly retraumatized, but the women still in state prisons will continue to remain easy targets for the sexual predators the State is protecting.”

To Footman, the state’s approach is reminiscent of what she experienced in prison, when staff wouldn’t believe incarcerated women’s complaints about mistreatment.

“I’m not surprised at all,” she said about the state’s claim that it couldn’t find Fitzpatrick. “Those officers, they all stick together.”

She added, “They’ll always say you’re lying.”

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This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a non-profit news publication investigating how power works in New York state. Sign up for their newsletter at tinyurl.com/368trn9p.