ZMO Law PLLC is delighted to announce our resilient, brilliant client Katerina Pusepa has settled her lawsuit against top officials of the New York prison system for $425,000. While money can never compensate Kat for what the state did to her, the amount is a clear acknowledgement that allowing a guard to sexually assault an inmate and then punishing the inmate for it is no way to run a prison. ZMO Law attorneys Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma and Tess Cohen partnered with the Law Offices of Daniel McGuinness to achieve this result.
Kat was confined at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in a leafy corner of Westchester County. Years earlier, she had committed a serious crime that screamed from the tabloid headlines. According to the complaint we filed for her, she was sexually assaulted by a guard–all sexual contact in prison is assault as a matter of law–and rather than put a stop to it, prison officials held her out as bait to try to catch the guard in the act.
They failed, leaving her vulnerable and unprotected.
But prison officials did eventually catch the guard trying to arrange a rendez-vous with Kat at the prison infirmary (after being caught he did the right thing and settled with Kat for a much smaller amount). Prison investigators acted against the guard, but they also locked up Kat in solitary confinement for months and months on a flimsy pretext. After Kat was finally released, she was attacked by a different guard after a news article about the case came out. In yet another incident, guards purposely left her with a violent inmate, who assaulted her in the prison yard after having threatened her in the past.
The message to Kat and other women incarcerated at Bedford Hills was crystal clear: if you are sexually assaulted by a guard, you will be treated as a perpetrator, not a victim.
Kat did not stand for it.
She hired us even before she was released and, in 2017, we filed a lawsuit against the commissioner, deputy commissioner, warden and various guards at the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the agency that runs the state’s 42 prisons. She was fearless in the face of threats of retaliation. Eventually, she finished her time and was deported to her native country in Europe after a stint in ICE detention.
In 2019, the lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss and continued not just against low-level guards but also against the prison administrators including the Acting Commissioner of the department. The lawsuit stalled during COVID and picked up steam again recently, with depositions and expert reports that made absolutely clear that the prisons were at fault for the devastating harms inflicted on Kat — the sex assaults, the indefensible solitary confinement, and the insidious retaliation by narrow-minded guards.
Kat never gave up. As we were preparing to defend a summary judgment motion and bring the case to trial, the state officials came to the negotiating table. A skilled and tireless mediator, assigned by the court, came in and worked through the issues with the parties over various mediation sessions. No one knows what would have happened at summary judgment, but we were confident some of the claims would have proceeded to trial, Kat would have been a compelling witness, and the jury would have made a large award.
All that wasn’t necessary though because the state came to understand the risks and agreed to the settlement, which was approved today by the Judge Ronnie Abrams of the Southern District of New York.
As all this was going on, Kat built herself a wonderful new life. She settled back into Europe, learned various languages, obtained a law degree, and is now working in a corporate job and starting a family. Her resilience, grit, and determination in the face of overwhelming odds are an inspiration. The settlement will help her get a head-start on life, but as she told us once it was finalized, more important is that it will set a precedent for women who are mistreated in New York’s prisons.