For years, Dana Rachlin, an anti-violence activist from Brooklyn, was included in high-level meetings with top officials in the New York Police Department. She attended galas and fund-raising events with Jeffrey Maddrey, now the chief of the department, and won the praise of Mayor Eric Adams, a former police captain, for her efforts to strengthen ties between the police and the community.
Those relationships chilled, she said, after she publicly accused a former precinct commander of “violent policing.” Soon, according to a federal lawsuit, police officials retaliated against her, using confidential details of a sexual assault that she reported to the police in 2017 to smear her reputation.
Ms. Rachlin’s defamation lawsuit was filed amid growing criticism of Police Department officials — including some who Ms. Rachlin said went after her — for verbally attacking their perceived antagonists in what many considered to be a break from protocol.
At a news conference on Monday, after her lawsuit was filed in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Ms. Rachlin characterized the treatment she received by the police as part of a larger pattern. “It has been an extremely draining and exhausting thing,” Ms. Rachlin said.
Her lawyer, MK Kaishian, said the Police Department was “being unleashed on whoever they perceive that enemy to be.”
In the past month, top department leaders, including John Chell, the chief of patrol, and Kaz Daughtry, the deputy commissioner of operations, have engaged in a protracted social media spat with a Daily News columnist, calling him “deceitful” and a “gadfly”; dared a lawyer and a political commentator who sparred with the mayor about his approach to public safety to attend the funeral of an officer killed in the line of duty; and suggested that the public should vote out a councilwoman who had questioned the size of the police budget. Chief Maddrey has also criticized the media in deleted social media posts.
Police executives have defended their comments as a strategy to highlight the work of police officers and give the public a different “narrative” from what they typically see in the news media, which they criticize for focusing too heavily on negative stories about the department.
During a meeting with business leaders and police officials at Times Square on Thursday, Chief Chell said he would continue to speak out “to give the public the right story.”
“We want to lay out the facts — good, bad and indifferent — and let the public decide,” he said.
He declined to comment on Ms. Rachlin’s lawsuit, as did the mayor. The Police Department said the lawsuit had “no merit” and declined to comment further on pending litigation.
Mr. Adams has generally defended police officials publicly and has said he supports their statements and actions. But this week, the mayor seemed to suggest that there was a fine line between simply responding to critics and being abusive.
The mayor said he had called his commissioners and even individual police officers privately if he felt they needed correcting. “No one should do anything to be abusive to anyone in the city,” Mr. Adams said. “If someone crosses that line they should be held accountable.”
Jennifer Gutiérrez, a Brooklyn councilwoman who represents Williamsburg and has worked with Ms. Rachlin in the past, said the behavior of top police officials might lead to less faith in the department.
“They say it’s important to New Yorkers to feel safe, but if New Yorkers can’t file a complaint without it snowballing or becoming a victim of shaming, that doesn’t create trust,” Ms. Gutiérrez said.
Ms. Rachlin said the lawsuit was about holding the police accountable.
She said her problems with the department arose from her criticism of Craig Edelman, a deputy inspector who in 2020 was the commanding officer of the Brooklyn precinct in Brownsville. Residents had been complaining about him, saying he was enforcing low-level offenses like public drinking too aggressively. Calls for his removal grew in June of that year, when an officer pushed a woman to the pavement during a George Floyd protest and Inspector Edelman did not intervene.
The attention given to Inspector Edelman led a radio host to ask Dermot Shea, the police commissioner at the time, why he remained in his post. Ms. Rachlin said in her lawsuit that she had prompted the host to ask about the situation. Inspector Edelman was soon transferred; he did not respond to an email requesting comment.
A law enforcement official with knowledge of Inspector Edelman’s transfer said the decision was made after a review of his record in the precinct and complaints from other residents in the community.
But Chief Maddrey told Ms. Rachlin in a text that police officials blamed her for the transfer.
“Everyone spoke your name,” he wrote to her, according to the lawsuit. “That wasn’t a good move.”
Chief Maddrey did not respond to a request for comment.
Soon after the transfer, Ms. Rachlin said police officials began circulating “libelous letters and memos” showing pictures of her and her home address, as well as “the spurious and harmful claim that Ms. Rachlin had lied about being raped” in 2017, the lawsuit stated. The anonymous letters asserted that police detectives had investigated and closed the case.
The lawsuit said that one letter was sent to elected, religious and community officials, and placed inside the lockers of multiple Police Department leaders. The lockers are in an area restricted to police personnel.
Meryl Conant Governski, a partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher in Washington, D.C., who has represented clients in defamation cases, said Ms. Rachlin faced a steep challenge in winning her lawsuit. The suit, she said, relies on demonstrating “that these statements were published with the knowledge that they were false.”
But to show that statements accusing her of lying about a sexual assault were defamatory, she will also have to prove that the attack happened, Ms. Governski said.
“It places on this woman a tremendous legal burden,” she said.
Ms. Kaishian, Ms. Rachlin’s lawyer, said the police collected evidence that she and her client believe proves the attack. But Ms. Rachlin made the decision not to pursue criminal charges against her assailant out of a fear of “additional humiliation and trauma,” Ms. Kaishian added.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Ingrid Lewis-Martin, the mayor’s chief adviser, called the allegations in the lawsuit “news to us, just like it’s news to you,” noting that Mr. Adams was the borough president of Brooklyn and not in charge of the Police Department at the time of the alleged defamation.
“We hold everyone at the N.Y.P.D. to the highest standards, and their hard work delivering for New Yorkers speaks for itself,” said Kayla Mamelak, a spokeswoman for the mayor. “We will review the lawsuit.”
Jillian Snider, a former police officer who once worked under Chief Maddrey, said the chief gave Ms. Rachlin extensive access to the Police Department and described him as “one of the most community-oriented police officers that I’ve worked with in my whole career.”
But as crime rates rose after the coronavirus pandemic, top department officials began pulling back from engaging with criminal justice reform activists, she said.
“There has to be a line drawn on working in partnership with the community or being in a position where the community is trying to tell you: ‘Law enforcement, this is how you should be doing your jobs,’” Ms. Snider said.
Ms. Snider, who is now a lecturer at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a policy director at the R Street Institute, a center-right think tank, believes the antagonism from police officials on X was sparked by emotions over the killing of Detective Jonathan Diller, who was fatally shot during a stop in Queens on March 25.
Still, she said she was shocked to see the public spats materialize online.
“I would encourage high-ranking officials to be prepared to be criticized,” Ms. Snider said. “It comes with the position that you’re in.”
