When New York lawmakers passed the Adult Survivors Act, they described it as a moral reckoning. The 2022 law temporarily reopened the courthouse doors to survivors of sexual assault whose claims had long been barred by statutes of limitations, acknowledging what advocates have argued for decades: trauma, fear, and institutional power often prevent survivors from seeking justice until it is too late.
In most respects, the law has functioned as intended. Courts have allowed hundreds of cases against private defendants like schools, churches, hospitals, and employers to move forward in recognition of the legislature’s purpose. But that access to justice has largely not applied when the defendant is the State of New York itself.
A recent investigation by New York Focus illustrates the problem in stark terms. The outlet reported on a woman who filed suit under the Adult Survivors Act alleging that she was sexually abused in the early 1990s while incarcerated at Groveland Correctional Facility. The New York State Attorney General’s Office moved to dismiss her case, arguing in part that prison records did not show that a staff member she identified had ever worked at the facility. New York Focus found him. After the outlet reported its findings, the state withdrew its motion to dismiss.
The state did not argue that the alleged abuse could not have occurred or that sexual assault by corrections staff would fall outside the Act’s scope. Instead, it sought dismissal based on procedural deficiencies in the pleadings. Only after a journalist surfaced records the state itself failed to produce did the office reverse course, but even that withdrawal does not mean the end of any attempts to dismiss the case.
In recent months, the AG’s office has moved to dismiss large numbers of Adult Survivors Act cases alleging sexual abuse by state employees, particularly corrections staff. The argument is rarely about the underlying conduct, but about whether the survivor remembers enough details about assaults decades earlier. Because claims against the state must be filed in the New York Court of Claims, they are subject to unusually strict pleading rules that require detailed factual specificity at the outset.
The consequences are stark. Survivors whose filings contain minor errors like incorrect dates, imprecise descriptions of facilities, uncertainty about an employee’s exact title, or even typographical mistakes have seen their claims thrown out before any evidence can be compelled or weighed. Judges have agreed that even small technical defects can deprive the court of jurisdiction, even when the state plainly understands the substance of the allegations and possesses the relevant records.
Lawmakers who wrote the Adult Survivors Act have said this is not what they intended. Advocates point out that formerly incarcerated people often lack access to personnel files, shift logs, and internal documents that only the state controls. Trauma itself makes perfect recall unlikely. As a survivor of childhood sexual assault myself, I know there is no world in which I could meet the Court of Claims’ pleading standard decades later.
Yet in Chi Bartram Wright v. State of New York, the Court of Appeals held that claims under the Child Victims Act—nearly identical to the Adult Survivors Act but for survivors abused as minors—must satisfy the Court of Claims’ strict jurisdictional requirements. Because both revival statutes channel claims against the state into the same court, hundreds of Adult Survivors Act cases now face dismissal not on the merits, but on formalistic grounds that risk recreating the very barriers the legislature sought to dismantle.
The deeper issue is structural. The Attorney General’s office presents itself as a champion of civil rights and institutional accountability. It has brought high-profile cases against private employers and organizations for sexual misconduct and cover-ups. But it is also, by design, the state’s chief defense counsel. Its institutional mandate is to minimize the state’s legal and financial exposure, even when that means advancing arguments that narrow survivor-centered reforms.
The Groveland case shows how that mandate can produce injustice. When the office’s top priority is defending state agencies, it places itself in the position of contesting survivors’ memory, invoking technicalities, and even relying on incomplete internal searches to defeat claims. The same conduct that would be framed as an abuse of power if committed by a private employer becomes, in court filings, a legitimate tool to avoid liability.
New York is not alone. In Maryland, after passage of a sweeping Child Victims Act, the state initially invoked sovereign immunity to limit claims against public institutions even as private defendants faced broad liability. In Oregon, damages caps and procedural constraints have narrowed survivors’ recoveries despite legislative reforms. The pattern is familiar: when governments expand access to justice, they often preserve procedural defenses for themselves.
Defenders argue this is unavoidable. Sovereign immunity protects public finances, and attorneys general need to present as vigorous a defense as they can. But that view understates the discretion involved. States choose how aggressively to litigate revival statutes, how narrowly to interpret notice requirements, and whether to seek dismissal over clerical errors rather than test claims on the merits. They choose whether to treat revival laws as remedial measures to be construed broadly or as inconveniences to be worked around.
More fundamentally, sexual assault by a government employee is not just a private wrong. It is a failure of a public institution vested with extraordinary power over people’s lives. When the state responds by insisting that justice hinges on clerical perfection, it reinforces the imbalance of power that enabled abuse in the first place.
The problem is not that attorneys general defend the state. It is that the institutional design of the office rewards ethical compartmentalization. Abuse is intolerable when committed by private actors but it becomes a liability problem when committed by public ones. Survivors understand the distinction immediately. Whether they receive a hearing often depends less on what happened to them than on who signed their abuser’s paycheck.
Legislatures could clarify that revival statutes like the Adult Survivors Act override procedural traps that defeat their purpose. Courts could interpret jurisdictional rules flexibly where the state has clear notice and exclusive access to key records. Attorneys general could exercise restraint, declining to pursue dismissals that serve little purpose beyond insulating the state from embarrassment and liability.
The Adult Survivors Act promised a reckoning. But as the Groveland case demonstrates, that promise remains contingent on whether the state is willing to subject itself to the same accountability it demands of everyone else.