Rikers guard charged with rape while off duty has a string of accusations from detainees

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Warning: This story contains descriptions of sexual assault.

The video was a routine part of the prison intake process at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in May 2021.

New arrivals would gather on hard chairs to watch the recording of other imprisoned women sharing advice on how to deal with sexual assault during their incarceration. The women on the screen urged prisoners to file a report if they were attacked.

"You have to speak up," says a woman in the video. "If it's kept and pushed under the rug, there will be people after you that go through the same ordeal."

Karina Collado watched, surrounded by other women who, like her, had just arrived at New York’s largest women’s prison, located about 40 miles north of Manhattan. As the video played, Collado was overwhelmed with anxiety and fled the room in a near panic.

About an hour later, a female guard came to visit Collado in her new cell. She’d noticed Collado’s reaction and offered her a cigarette and a sympathetic ear.

That’s when Collado recounted an attack that she said happened a year earlier, when she was 22 and awaiting trial at Rikers Island on the drug and assault charges that would eventually land her a 14-month prison stay that began at Bedford Hills. While at Rikers, she said, a male guard cornered her inside a storage closet and forced his fingers into her vagina.

“That video triggered me, and I was very not OK,” Collado said.

The female guard helped Collado file a report. In neat handwriting, Collado described her alleged attack and the name of the correction officer she said did it: “CO Martin Jr.” As required by state policy and federal standards, the report was sent to Rikers officials within days. Collado should have been interviewed within 72 hours, according to the federal regulations.

And identifying the officer Collado said assaulted her should have been relatively simple because only one guard with that surname worked at Rikers Island when she was held there: Correction Officer Anthony Martin Jr.

Yet no probe was ever launched, regardless of what was promised in that intake video. In fact, the video’s warning about future victims may have been prescient.

A new Gothamist investigation has found that the failure to follow up on Collado’s claims may have indeed enabled her alleged attacker to assault other women. In April of this year – three years after Collado reported the attack — Martin Jr. was arrested on charges he raped a woman while off duty in Queens.

While news of his arrest was publicized at the time, until now nobody has linked Martin Jr. with alleged assaults inside the women’s jail on Rikers Island. He remains employed by the city’s Department of Correction but on unpaid suspension, according to agency spokesperson Annais Morales.

Martin Jr. has pleaded not guilty to the criminal charges. He also has denied attacking Collado and another woman who named him as her attacker in lawsuits against the city.

For several months, Gothamist has been examining the details behind more than 700 lawsuits filed against the City of New York for sexual assaults that former detainees say they suffered while incarcerated on Rikers Island. The earliest allegations date back to the mid-1970s; the most recent occurred in the last few years.

The civil lawsuits were filed after the state Legislature passed the Adult Survivors Act in 2022, which allowed a one-year window for people to sue over sexual assaults that would have otherwise fallen outside the statute of limitations. While the law applied to assaults that happened anywhere in the state, Gothamist has found that nearly 60% of the 1,256 lawsuits filed in New York City’s state supreme courts describe attacks on detainees at Rikers Island.

The plaintiffs seek a total of $14.7 billion in damages from the city.

Taken together, the lawsuits suggest a pattern of sexual predation at Rikers that was largely ignored for nearly 50 years, and which may have foreshadowed attacks outside of the jail as well.

Another woman who sued the city also identified Martin Jr. as the guard who she says attacked her. In a filing that eerily echoes Collado’s claims, the woman claimed that in 2019 Martin Jr. forced his fingers into her vagina in a storage area at Rikers containing boxes of records. The woman behind that suit did not want to be named in this story due to fears of retaliation, but she positively identified Martin Jr. as her attacker when shown a recent photo of him.

Three additional women, who did not want to be interviewed, filed lawsuits accusing a guard with the surname “Martin” of attacking them between 2016 and 2021. Martin Jr. worked at Rikers during that time, and Gothamist confirmed that he was the only correction officer with that surname to work at the jail between 2019 and 2020. Jail officials have so far refused to confirm whether he was the only officer with that surname to work there between 2016 and 2018 and in 2021.

When reached by phone, Martin Jr. said the allegations against him from former detainees “sound like a bunch of BS.” His attorney, Steven Gaitman, said neither he nor Martin Jr. were aware of the lawsuits that identified his client.

Martin Jr. isn’t the only Rikers employee named in multiple lawsuits. There are at least 20 jail staffers whose names appear again and again in separate filings. One man was named in 24 lawsuits. Gothamist spoke with four of the men identified in multiple lawsuits. None were aware that their names appear in the lawsuits, indicating that those with power to investigate the claims continue to do little, if anything, about them.

That current lack of interest in thoroughly investigating claims of assault was also evident in how Collado's report was handled three years ago.

Collado’s detailed report of how she said Martin Jr. attacked her was emailedto a New York City correction official at 10:19 a.m. on May 17, 2021, according to state prison officials. It was addressed to Warden Sharlisa Walker, according to state prison officials.

Collado said she never heard anything about the report after she wrote it.

When Gothamist asked about what happened to that report, city Department of Correction officials said they had no record of ever receiving it. Walker, who retired last year, also said she didn’t recall receiving it. She said she was no longer working at the Rikers Island women’s jail at the time, although she was employed in another part of the jail complex.

Throughout Gothamist’s ongoing investigation, multiple spokespeople for the Department of Correction have refused to answer a list of detailed questions about these incidents, including whether Martin Jr. was ever investigated for sexual assault allegations. The spokespeople said they cannot comment on pending litigation.

Two years after her release from prison, Collado, a mother of two, keeps an accordion-style file folder at home crammed with every scrap of paper she’s collected about her sexual assault claim.

She said Martin Jr. had the authority to create special work assignments for detainees, and he had chosen her to organize a storage area full of jail logbooks, clothes and other items. The area was isolated from the rest of the detainees. One day in early 2020, she was moving cardboard boxes in a dark closet with her back to the door, she said, when Martin Jr. stepped inside the room.

“He scared the s— out of me,” Collado said. “He said something like, ‘You ready to play?’ The way he was saying it, my heart jumped.”

He put one hand over her mouth and another down her beige Rikers uniform, and he forced his fingers inside her vagina, Collado said, adding that she was only able to break free when he removed his penis from his pants and started to perform oral sex on her.

“He was laughing and smiling and threatening me at the same time,” she said.

Martin Jr. threatened to send her to solitary confinement and order other detainees to physically attack her if she said anything, Collado said. She said she didn’t feel safe enough to file a formal report of the alleged attack until she was transferred to the Bedford Hills prison.

“Nobody wanted to help me. And look — look how real it is,” she said. “The man was f---ing arrested for rape, for the same exact thing.”

The criminal complaint against Martin Jr. includes details that are similar to Collado’s allegations. Prosecutors say that on March 26, he was in a residence with a woman in Springfield Gardens, Queens, when he pulled down her pants, forcibly inserted a finger into her vagina, and pushed her onto a bed. The woman tried to push him off but he held her down with his hands and body and raped her as she repeatedly told him to stop, according to the complaint.

Alex Reinert, a professor at Cardozo Law School who specializes in incarceration issues, said failing to investigate reports like Collado’s would violate federal standards meant to protect incarcerated people from sexual misconduct.

“It’s contrary to any basic standards of decency,” he said. “This is just reflective of the general indifference that the city has towards the lives of people who are held at Rikers."

Former sex crimes prosecutor Sarena Townsend worked for the city’s Department of Correction when Collado was detained at the Rikers women’s jail and served as a deputy commissioner overseeing investigations into alleged misconduct. She faulted both city correction officials and the state prison agency that forwarded Collado’s sexual assault allegations against Martin Jr. for not following up on Collado’s complaint.

“I don't know if their protocol is so effective if all they planned on doing was emailing just one warden,” Townsend said.

State prison officials should have notified multiple people at Rikers, she said, including staff specifically tasked with investigating sexual abuse allegations. While federal guidelines require officials to notify the head of the detention facility where the alleged abuse occurred when a prisoner files a report, they do not specify how those notifications should be made.

Nonetheless, it’s up to the agency that received the report to ensure that the allegations are investigated, and Townsend said the correction department also needs better protocols for receiving complaints from other facilities so that reports like Collado’s aren’t ignored again.

The Correction Officers Benevolent Association, the officers’ union, did not respond to questions about the allegations against Martin Jr.

“Everyone deserves the presumption of innocence and Correction Officer Martin is no different,” Benny Boscio, the union’s president, told the Daily News in April after Martin Jr.’s arrest. “We believe a jury of his peers will render a fair and just determination after all the facts are evaluated. He is entitled to a vigorous defense, and that’s exactly what he’ll get.”

Martin Jr.’s next court appearance is scheduled for Aug. 26.