CIVIC CENTER — Detectives investigating a 2014 sexual assault in the East Village failed to catch the attacker before he struck again because they didn’t take the incident seriously, one of the man's victims said during his sentencing this week.
The woman, 28, speaking on Monday at the sentencing for her attacker, Juan Scott, told the court that detectives made a lackluster effort to catch her abuser in the weeks following the brutal, hours-long Sept. 21, 2014 assault, possibly allowing him to stay free long enough to attack another woman a month later.
The victim's testimony was provided through an unofficial transcript released by the Manhattan District Attorney's office.
Scott, 28, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after pleading guilty in June to first degree burglary as a sexually motivated felony and two counts of sexual abuse in connection to three separate attacks on women in the East Village and Stuy Town in June, September and October of 2014.
Before the sentencing, the woman, who had briefly dated Scott before the attack, outlined the brutal details of the assault and its lingering effects on her professional and personal life. She singled out detectives from the NYPD Special Victims Unit, whom she accused of treating her like a “vengeful girlfriend” and at one point telling her it was unlikely Scott would be in much hot water.
“As we were wrapping up at the station, the detective glanced over my police report,” she said. “He scoffed, tossing my papers aside and said, ‘He’s not going to jail for this.’”
The NYPD did not respond to a repeated requests for comment.
Adding to her feeling that police were not taking her seriously, she said, was the fact that one of the detectives on the case, Lukasz Skorzewski, was the very same detective who a year later, in 2015, was sued by a Seattle woman for allegedly groping her when he was supposed to be interviewing the woman about being raped in Union Square in 2013, according to court documents.
A spokeswoman for the Manhattan District Attorney’s office confirmed that Skorzewski, who later sued the Seattle woman for defamation after being demoted and eventually leaving the force, worked on the Scott case.
Knowing that one of the men tasked with tracking down her attacker was himself accused of sexual assault made the woman even more angry at how she felt police had treated her case.
“When I heard this disturbing news, it all started to make sense,” she said.
The woman, who was 26 at the time of the attack, first met Scott on the East Village street they both lived on in 2014, and for several months they carried on a “careless summer fling,” she said.
But things took an ugly turn on Sept. 21, when she and Scott were hanging out in her room, she said. Scott, who up until then, she said, had been gentle and kind, told her that he had a habit of going onto his roof, watching women naked in their apartments, and asking them out on the street.
“Makes you wonder how I found you,” she recalled him saying.
She was creeped out, and Scott tried to change the subject by suggesting they have sex, but she said no, and that’s when he got violent, she said.
According to her statement, Scott smashed a beer bottle on the floor, littering it with broken glass and making it difficult for her to escape. Over the next five hours, she said, he repeatedly sexually assaulted her, slamming her head against the wall so badly she got a severe concussion.
“This is it. This is how I die,” she recalled thinking.
Scott eventually relented and fled, but her ordeal was just beginning, the woman said. The attack left her with a sprained hip, a broken rib, and post-concussion syndrome, she told the court. Since the attack she said she has only had her period four or five times, leaving her worried she might not be able to have children, she said.
The woman, who that summer had landed her dream job at an advertising agency, said her quality of work “plummeted” in the aftermath of the attack, and the concussion made it difficult to carry a conversation, let alone write for work.
“I was no longer the quick-witted girl, who could make people laugh at any given moment,” she said.
According to the victim, officers at the Ninth Precinct were sympathetic and helpful, but the tone changed when the case was transferred to SVU, she said. She described a lackadaisical effort by detectives to find Scott after issuing a warrant for his arrest, and an attitude among the detectives that she was just trying to get back at her ex.
“The ordeal should have ended when I filed my report, but instead, my nightmare had just begun,” she said. “Initially, I was patient, allowing for justice to take its course. One week passed. Then two. Then three.”
She told the court that it was a mystery why police weren’t able to track down Scott, who lived just down the street from her apartment.
“I couldn’t understand what was taking so long,” she said. “Despite the evidence against Scott and the brutality of his crime, they still weren’t convinced Scott was dangerous.”
Meanwhile, in the weeks that followed the attack, the woman told the court that Scott repeatedly called her and sent threatening texts, saying that what he had done that night was not illegal because they were dating. She continued to live in fear, she said.
“Where was the urgency when I begged the police to protect me from my violent offender?” she asked. “Why did I have to plead with law enforcement to enforce the laws Scott had broken?”
More than a month after the attack, on Oct. 16, Scott showed up at the woman’s door and asked to be let in, she said. A roommate called police, but by the time they showed up, Scott had disappeared, she said.
He didn't disappear for long. Hours later, at about 4 a.m. on Oct. 17, he followed a woman into the elevator in her Stuy Town building and tried to rape her, according to police. She fought him off and he fled, hiding for hours in a tree nearby before making his escape, but this time police managed to track him down, prosecutors and police said at the time.
After his arrest police linked him to a third assault on June 2, 2014, when he followed a 23-year-old woman into her East Village apartment building just before midnight and sexually assaulted her before she managed to escape, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said.
“It just took Scott hurting someone else for them to finally take action,” said the victim of the Sept. 21 East village attack. “If the police had taken me seriously, this third assault could have been prevented.”
According to the victim, her case — and others like it — were less urgent because she knew the attacker.
“I hesitate to tell my story because it only proves that a man can get away with viciously assaulting the woman he’s dating,” she said. “But victims of sexual assault by an acquaintance deserve the same urgency as victims of sexual assault by a stranger.”
Before finishing her remarks, the woman turned her attention to her former tormentor, telling him that she had refused to let his attack define her, despite her uncertainty that she will ever recover physically. She encouraged him, in turn, to do what he could to make sure that his life is not defined by his “heinous acts” against her and the two other women.
“You may have made my life a living hell, but I genuinely hope you end up okay,” she said. “Because in this scenario, it means you’ve been rehabilitated, and I can rest easy knowing you won’t hurt me, or anyone else again.”
