EXCLUSIVE: A Top Lawyer's Tips for Adult Sexual Assault Victims

A New York law opens up a window for victims to file civil suits over historic assaults

TW: Mention of S.A. and rape

Today we are extremely fortunate to hear from fierce litigator and women’s rights advocate Jeanne Christensen, who shares her thoughts about New York’s brand-new Adult Survivors Act (ASA). The law temporarily obliterates the statute of limitations for adult survivors of sexual offenses, which means if you were at least 18 at the time of your assault you have 18 months from now to seek justice through the legal system—no matter what year the assault occurred.

I have opted to share Christensen’s interview as a straight Q&A (edited for length and clarity). I urge you to settle in and give it a good read when you find a quiet moment, because her words will resonate with anyone who has been a victim of a sexual offense and struggled in its aftermath.

Christensen is a partner at New York law firm Wigdor LLP and is a 2022 National Law Journal Elite Trial Lawyer winner. She and her firm have been involved in the litigation of numerous high-profile sexual harassment and assault lawsuits in recent years, taking on Uber and representing women suing Fox News and The Weinstein Co. among other companies.

Christensen’s knowledge and expertise is highly sought after—you’ll see her name everywhere: CNN, Good Morning America, the BBC, NPR, NBC, ABC, CBS, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Reuters, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, TIME Magazine, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, Financial Times, Barron’s, Law360, The Guardian and more.

You can see her full bio here and the firm’s #MeToo page here.

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Christine Blasey Ford. Virginia Giuffre. Amber Heard. These are a few of the women who have spoken out publicly and faced death threats, harassment and smearing of their name.

Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein. Between them, the alleged victims who have come forward are too numerous to count. Women speaking out against powerful men and powerful institutions with seemingly bottomless resources face a difficult choice, but in many cases, there is no choice at all if the statute of limitations have passed.

In New York, adult victims of sexual crimes have a rare chance to take back control of their decisions.

Jeanne Christensen is all too familiar with sexual assault victims who are hesitant or even terrified to pursue a case against their assailant and/or the company who harbors him.

“During an interview with CNN about the Uber case, Christensen noted her prior experience suing Uber on behalf of individual women, saying “Uber has done a miraculous job of keeping the story quiet.” With her proposed class action, she is taking her fight against Uber to a new, much more public level. “We’re not simply going to file cases so Uber pays women and their lawyers money to be quiet about it, and that was a conscious decision that we made,” she told CNN. (Yahoo News via Law.com)

Q&A with The Landing

The Landing: Do you think this law is going to help a lot of adult victims of historical abuse?

Jeanne Christensen: There shouldn’t be a statute of limitations on cases like this at all. I’m happy it happened, but it should have happened long time ago.

It’s important to write stories about [the ASA]. People need to find out about it. It’s not a decision anyone’s going to make in a split second. If they’ve not said anything for many years, simply because this law has passed, they’re not all of the sudden going to say, “I’m going to speak.” They’re going too have to think about it. It’s one thing to say it and it’s a very different thing to say, “I’m going to actually file a lawsuit about this.”

I urge victims to read it for themselves and see what it says. (Find it here).

I’m grateful for all the people who spent all the time they did to get this act passed, and that the people who at least, even if they decide not to come forward, will have a choice. They should have had it before. At least they have it now, and they’re going to be able to make that decision for themselves.

Even if they don’t do anything, it is a good thing they have that choice. Three months into [the 12-month filing period] it’s going to be interesting to see where we are.

Q: Can victims file a civil suit against an attacker or a company anonymously?

You have to get permission from the court to file a motion as Jane Doe. We do that fairly often. The other side can contest it. Almost always [it’s allowed] when rape is involved.

Q: How many plaintiffs are needed for a class action lawsuit?

I do a fair amount of class-action work. Across states and federal law, the on-or-about number is 40. It’s not a black-and-white number. The whole purpose of the rule is to streamline a set of cases that otherwise would be clogging up the court system individually. If you have 35 people, I think a judge might say, this makes sense, we’re going to let you proceed as a class.

We file cases that aren’t class actions, but are multi-plaintiff cases, all the time. I could have 12 people in a case, 12 plaintiffs. I have a case with 17 plaintiffs [right now], and let’s say hypothetically if it never becomes a class action, that’s fine, I can still proceed with 17. You don’t have to have any magic number. We can proceed for 10 people or 15 people. We would refer to that as a multi-plaintiff case.

Q: What are some of the fears and concerns victims share with you when they approach you about possibly taking legal action against their assailant or a company/entity that protected him?

This comes up every day for me. Again, we might have some outliers to this, but generally in sexual assault and rape cases the victims all fear retribution. They usually fear their attacker. Their fear is that he will try to physically harm them. That’s so overwhelming it takes up most of that space. Then, if they don’t fear their own safety, they might fear for their little kids, they fear they might lose their job, or that their employer will find out. “Is this going to affect me at work?”

Everyone says almost the same exact things. It’s pretty universal fears, and rightly so, if you’ve experienced violence and he did it once to you, of course you’re going to think he’s going to do it again. When they’re asking me about the process, what they really want to know is, is this guy going to be held accountable? Is all this going to be worth it? Is this man going to have some repercussions? Is this going to matter?

Otherwise they’re not going to do it. They know the victim-shaming and blaming aspect combined with the aspect of fearing for their safety might not be worth it.

It might be enough that they can tell their story about what happened. He’s free to say whatever he wants to say, but for a lot of victims it might be enough that they get to tell their story. [Especially if they] believe he’s done it to others, which is almost always true, then they’re willing to come forward. [They might think], perhaps it would help another person to come forward. Then really this guy might have consequences in his life.

Q: And then there’s online harassment and threats…

There are two worlds for this…when you’re talking about a perpetrator who’s a high-profile person, many of the things that are true for them are not the same for private individuals.

I think the online harassment [that people worry about experiencing] fits in the box of, “People don’t believe me, I’m going to be doubted and called all sorts of names.” That’s a fear.

But [I hear], “I don’t want to be found in a ditch somewhere.” That’s how they see it.

They’re not just afraid of Sally down the street [saying something about them]. It’s much more about bodily harm to them or their children. By definition in 99% of these cases [the perpetrator] is not in jail, because this person has not spoken up yet.

Q: Christine Blasey Ford publicly saying Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her, as just one example of a high-profile woman sharing her story, is one situation that has had a chilling effect on some victims who haven’t spoken out yet…

She was attacked [for that]. That’s victim blaming. The second category [that plaintiffs fear] is victim blaming, which has many different forms. It’s when they are attacked verbally and there’s a mob mentality of ganging up and basically saying she’s a liar and has ulterior motives. “You’re only saying this for money.” Or attention. Nobody does that for attention.

Q: What do you say to victims who come to you for advice about whether to take legal action?

At the end of the day it’s always their decision. Nobody is going to force them to do this, and they’re the only ones that can make the decision. They really should do what they, deep down, feel is the right thing for them to do.

Usually I can tell—maybe they don’t know it, but I can tell from things that they’ve said—if they’re going to do it or not. I had a woman who said she called and hung up 15 times before she reached me. This is how conflicted they are. They’re petrified.

Nobody makes a decision like this lightly. They’re afraid to even talk to somebody like me because it gets them one more step closer to the decision. They’re going to feel a lot better regardless of the decision they make if they have spoken to someone like me and found out what their rights are.

“Tell me what this would look like if I decided to do this. Walk me through the process.” That’s what they want to know. It’s only then they can make an informed decision whether or not to do this. What I say is, learn as much as you can. You’re already doing the right thing just trying to get more information so you can make the best decision for yourself.

They don’t want more regrets. They don’t want to spend any more time regretting anything. Maybe some of them have told people [about their assault], but they’re well past the statute of limitations, and they never had the option so they’ve never really allowed themselves to think about it.

Q: There’s so much shame around this topic, too

They’re always there, the issues of shame, but that often comes out later.

But for many of these men, they see these women as all the same, and that’s a sad thing too. They’re not seeing it like, “oh, you wore this dress.” The [assailant] is at the right place at the right time for their individual way of doing these things. The women are just there. [The assailant] is not saying to himself, “oh, she’s wearing that.”

They’re just not. The woman is part of this sick, twisted, deviant act that they’re going to perform, and that’s what the women are to them, that’s their role. What’s really hard is so many victims know the perpetrator. How can they not think it has something to do with them personally? The reality is this perpetrator knows hundreds of women. Right place, right time, usually.

Q: We see cases in the public eye where it’s not just the alleged perpetrator who can hurt the victims. They sometimes have powerful friends who can pile on, too

How many of Weinstein’s friends are standing behind him now that he’s in a jail cell? They were all there in the beginning, some of them doing dirty work for him—I’m sure they wouldn’t have seen it that way, they were standing up for their friend—and then, look how the tide has turned.

Q: A lot of us wonder how these men find the time to hurt so many victims…

Talk about prolific. Age has something to do with it in the sense of, we know that once they start getting away with it, that’s when it really escalates. No man wakes up at age 40 or 42 and decides today’s the day he’s going to do that. That never happens.

They start young. And it’s only when they’ve gotten away with it and enough time has passed, they think, “I’m not going to get called out for that. I’m going to do it again.” They get to a certain point where if they’re not going to get caught, they start doing it a lot.

Epstein’s the quintessential example of that. The answer is pretty easy: it’s because they are usually highly functioning, they’re going to have a really high IQ, and they’re going to have endless energy. They literally do more than the average person does in a day. There’s not a lot of deviation of the prototype of who’s doing this, the public figure kind vs. the CEO type or the upper-level executive, which is a lot of them in our cases.

They’re in their own category in that high-functioning sphere. And for women who experience violence by them, it would be understandable for them to think they themselves are outliers because these men are doing all these other things during the day. Maybe they’re the world’s greatest stock trader, then go coach their son’s baseball in the afternoon, then they’re online. Where do they get the time? They don’t sleep as much as the average person, they really don’t.

They’re almost all like that. Otherwise they couldn’t get away with it. How could they do it otherwise? You can’t generalize, but they might have a lot of “friends”—and yet they’re not guys who have two or three close friends. If they did, they’re like Epstein’s really close “friends” like Leon Black and others.

Outside of something like that, they have to know that they’re not normal. I have to believe that while they can yuk it up at Little League for an hour or two, they’re never going to go spend a day with little Johnny’s dad doing normal stuff. They’re not usually normal.

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