A top aide and close confidant to Mayor Eric Adams whose behavior has drawn scrutiny from city investigators has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually harassing a police sergeant and then punishing her when she refused his advances.
The aide, Timothy Pearson, is already the subject of a continuing investigation by the city’s Department of Investigation stemming from a brawl with security guards at a Midtown Manhattan migrant center in October. The department is expected to investigate the new accusations against him, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
The sergeant, Roxanne Ludemann, is now retired. She claims in the suit that Mr. Pearson, who oversaw a special mayoral department where Ms. Ludemann was the chief of staff, often put his hands on female subordinates.
In an interview on Thursday, Ms. Ludemann described how Mr. Pearson had cornered her at an office party in December 2022 and had asked her to show him the designs for the new work space for the department, the Mayor’s Office of Municipal Services Assessment, which Mr. Adams created to improve government efficiency.
“He’s like, ‘Show me where my office is,’” Ms. Ludemann recounted in the interview. “And while he’s doing this, his hands are on my shoulders, and then he’s like rubbing it up and down, and I’m like trying to move my body a little bit away from him and he’s holding on.”
Ms. Ludemann said in the interview and in court papers that her direct supervisor, Miltiadis Marmara, then walked in.
“And he moves his hand rapidly off me, like a snake retracting its body,” Ms. Ludemann said.
Mr. Pearson and Mr. Marmara did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Adams and Mr. Pearson have known each other for more than 30 years. Their relationship attracted attention after the mayor appointed Mr. Pearson, a retired police inspector, as a senior adviser with a salary of $242,600 and, in an unusual arrangement, let him keep a lucrative second job as the security chief at a Queens casino.
After The New York Times reported that Mr. Pearson was simultaneously collecting a city paycheck and a police pension, he left his job at the casino, Resorts World New York City Casino, the city’s biggest gambling enterprise.
Last year, the Department of Investigation, which investigates corruption and malfeasance, waste and abuse, opened an inquiry into his involvement in the violent melee at the migrant center.
In December, the mayor described Mr. Pearson as “a value asset” and “a good public servant.” In October, he called him “a sharp, ethical, nonviolent person.”
Commenting on Ms. Ludemann’s suit on Thursday, Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams, said: “We will review the lawsuit and respond in court.”
The suit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, also names Jeffrey Maddrey, the Police Department’s chief of department, and Joseph Profeta, a deputy police inspector, as defendants. She accuses them of being complicit in retaliatory actions Mr. Pearson took against her.
Inspector Profeta declined to comment. Chief Maddrey did not immediately response to a request for comment.
The accusations against Mr. Pearson come just days after Mr. Adams was accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a police colleague in 1993. He has denied any wrongdoing.
Mr. Pearson’s loosely defined portfolio at City Hall has encompassed such disparate responsibilities as advising the mayor on the city’s recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic, meeting with business leaders and managing the unit where Ms. Ludemann served. According to Ms. Ludemann, members of the unit were required to sign nondisclosure agreements that precluded them from discussing their work in any detail.
Ms. Ludemann said she initially loved her job with the unit, which at first was under the direct authority of Philip Banks, Mr. Adams’s deputy mayor for public safety, and operated out of a building where Mr. Pearson also worked. It was a break from routine policing, she said, and she felt like she was making a difference.
But when the unit was moved from Mr. Banks’s direct supervision to Mr. Pearson’s, she said the incidence of sexual harassment increased.
Mr. Pearson would regularly touch women when talking to them, according to Ms. Ludemann’s suit, which was first reported by The New York Daily News. He would also “lick his lips” and “open his legs when speaking to women in an overtly sexual way.”
Before the unit was shifted to Mr. Pearson’s oversight, Mr. Marmara had recommended Ms. Ludemann for a promotion to sergeant special assignment, a title that can come with extra pay of more than $25,000 a year.
After Mr. Pearson took over, he told Ms. Ludemann that if she wanted the promotion, she would have to become his personal driver, a de facto demotion that would also have required her to spend time alone with a supervisor who she said was harassing her.
Ms. Ludemann, a married mother of four, declined the offer.
Following the episode at the office party, Ms. Ludemann said, Mr. Marmara insisted that she file a complaint with the Police Department’s equal employment opportunity office. She did not do so, saying that similar complaints against police officials never seemed to result in anything positive.
As a compromise, Mr. Marmara told the unit’s supervisors that Mr. Pearson should never be left alone with a woman in the office.
Ultimately, Ms. Lundemann says in the suit, she was denied a promotion, her colleagues rose up in protest and Mr. Pearson and his colleagues subjected her to demotion, disciplinary proceedings and several transfers. In the end, she resigned.
Now, she is suing for compensatory and punitive damages.
“If they care about the safety of the women employees who work in City Hall and around Tim Pearson, they need to remove him from his position,” said John Scola, the lawyer representing Ms. Ludemann.
