Mayor Eric Adams sex assault lawsuit stalled as lawyers say Hurricane Sandy destroyed his NYPD personnel file

Chris Sommerfeldt, New York Daily News on Jul 17, 2025

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NEW YORK — Discovery in the civil sexual assault suit against Mayor Eric Adams has hit a snag as his lawyers say they can’t produce his NYPD employment records because they were destroyed in Hurricane Sandy more than a decade ago.

Adams’ accuser, former city Transit Police administrative aide Lorna Beach-Mathura, has been seeking his NYPD personnel file as part of her Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit against him, filed in March 2024. The records, she has argued, will substantiate that she and Adams worked at the same police command in Brooklyn around the time she claims he sexually assaulted her in 1993, an accusation the mayor vehemently denies.

But late this spring, Adams’ Law Department attorneys sent Beach-Mathura’s legal team a letter saying the mayor’s employment file was destroyed.

“With the exception of a personnel assignment record … all physical personnel records and employment folders maintained for Defendant Adams were destroyed when the Kingsland Avenue warehouse suffered extensive damage from flooding during Hurricane Sandy in October 2012,” Maxwell Leighton, an assistant corporation counsel at the Law Department, wrote in the May 15 letter, which was made public on the court docket Thursday.

The Kingsland Ave. warehouse is in Greenpoint, and news reports from 2012 confirm the facility suffered damage when the Newtown Creek flooded during the devastating hurricane, contaminating hundreds of “drums” of police records.

But Megan Goddard, Beach-Mathura’s attorney, said she found it odd Adams’ attorneys are only now providing this explanation.

“We were surprised to learn, only on May 15, 2025, and 11 months after we first requested them, that Defendants now claim Eric Adams’s physical personnel file was destroyed during the 2012 flooding of the Kingsland Avenue warehouse,” she told the Daily News.

“This alleged loss was never mentioned in any prior response, letter, or conversation, not even when we specifically raised the issue in our original discovery requests or our deficiency letter,” Goddard continued. “Eric Adams became mayor nearly four years ago, and we have to ask: when did the City actually learn that these records were allegedly destroyed?”

Spokespeople for Adams and the Law Department didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

In a letter also released on the court docket Thursday, Beach-Mathura complained that Adams and the NYPD have engaged in “willful obstruction” of discovery in her client’s case, producing nearly no records in response to repeated requests. Beach-Mathura asked the court to schedule a discovery conference to address the matter.

In her suit, Beach-Mathura, who’s seeking at least $5 million in damages, alleges Adams tried to force her to perform oral sex on him in his car after he picked her up at the end of a shift to talk about a workplace issue. When she refused, she alleges Adams masturbated and ejaculated on her leg before dropping her off at a subway stop.

Adams has strongly denied the accusations, saying he can’t recall ever even meeting Beach-Mathura.

Earlier this year, The News first reported that Beach-Mathura, who now lives in Florida, has filed for personal bankruptcy as she pursues the suit against the mayor. The suit also names the NYPD, the city and a police department fraternal organization Adams used to lead as defendants.