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2024-10-06 | WebClipping | 2024-10-06 | https://gothamist.com/news/he-was-officer-champagne-at-rikers-24-women-accuse-him-of-sexual-assault-in-jail | true |
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He was Officer 'Champagne' at Rikers. 24 women accuse him of sexual assault in jail.
Lisa wasn’t pregnant when she entered Rikers Island.
It was February 1991. She was 22 years old, addicted to crack cocaine and had just been sentenced to six months for selling drugs — the first in a long string of stays at the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s jail more commonly known as “Rosie’s.” As part of the intake process, she submitted to a medical exam that included a pregnancy test.
“Going to prison was very, very, very scary at a young age,” Lisa said. She longed for the comfort of her mother’s four-bedroom apartment in the South Bronx where she grew up. If she followed the rules at Rosie’s, she recalled being told at sentencing, she could leave jail two months early.
“Those 60 days meant everything to me. I wanted to go home,” Lisa said.
But shortly after arriving, she said, a guard threatened to take away that early release if she didn’t comply with his demands. He repeatedly raped her, forcing her to submit to intercourse and perform oral sex in a part of the jail used to store recreation equipment, she said.
Lisa learned the guard had impregnated her, she said, when she sat on one of the jail’s cold, stainless steel toilets and felt a gush of blood leave her body.
“I had a miscarriage in the bathroom,” Lisa said. “You could feel that was a baby, or beginning of the baby.”
Jail staffers transported her to Elmhurst Hospital, where excess tissue from the pregnancy was removed from her uterus, she said. Afterward, she was sent back to Rikers. No one ever asked how she came to be pregnant inside a women’s-only jail, said Lisa, who asked to only be identified by her nickname due to fears of retaliation from correction officers or law enforcement.
Lisa hardly said a word about her experience over the next three decades. That changed in 2023, when she and 700 other women who were held at Rosie’s sued New York City. New York’s Adult Survivors Act opened a one-year window that permitted civil lawsuits to be filed over allegations of sexual abuse that would have otherwise been too old to bring to court. The accusations in the lawsuits span more than five decades.
A new Gothamist investigation has found at least 20 jail staffers’ names repeated across multiple lawsuits, suggesting that Rikers Island had several serial sex abusers on its payroll. In almost every case, it appears officials have done little, if anything, to investigate the women’s stories and hold the alleged attackers accountable.
That includes Lisa’s accused rapist. The man she says raped and impregnated her is identified in 24 lawsuits. She knew him by the name “Champagne.”
Lisa, who asked to use a nickname because she fears retaliation, said she was raped and impregnated by a correction officer she knew as "Champagne" while she served a sentence at the Rikers women's jail.
Jessy Edwards
From at least the late 1980s to the early 2000s, Champagne raped, groped and forcibly kissed dozens of women in their cells or in secluded areas of the jail, according to the lawsuits. Many of the women who claim to have endured abuse at Rikers didn’t know the name of their attacker or only knew a surname.
In city records, Champagne is a ghost. The Office of Payroll Administration has no record of anyone with that name who worked at Rikers during the period of the allegations.
But hidden in a handful of the lawsuits was a clue as to his real identity.
Some of the 24 women said they believed Champagne was a nickname – a moniker he sometimes wore on a silver name tag while walking Rosie’s long cinder-block halls.
His real surname, they said, was Fant.
Using a combination of social media posts, payroll and personnel records, and other public documents, Gothamist determined that only one guard with the last name Fant worked at Rosie’s during the time of the allegations: Correction Officer Keith Fant.
Reached by phone, Fant confirmed he was known in the jail as Champagne, a name given to him by some female detainees, he said, because of his “bubbly” personality.
His employment at Rosie’s aligns with the times each of his accusers say they were jailed. The city’s Department of Investigation, which handles the most serious misconduct complaints against correction officers, said it had investigated Fant in the past but would not provide details because the matter hadn’t been substantiated.
Gothamist shared photos of Keith Fant that he posted on his Facebook page with 14 of the women who named Champagne in their lawsuits and could be reached for this story. Four of them, including Lisa, told Gothamist that he was their attacker; another eight confirmed it was him, but did not want to be interviewed by a reporter. Two of the women couldn’t be sure.
Fant, who retired in 2005 and earns a pension of over $45,000 a year, said all of the women are lying.
“I know that's a lot of people and I know it raises eyebrows, but I never, I have not touched anybody inside Rosie's,” Fant said. “The only thing I can think of is maybe they're trying to get some money.”
It is true there is considerable money to be paid. In all, the 700 lawsuits involving Rikers amount to a potential $14.7 billion liability for city taxpayers. The women who identified Champagne alone seek more than $500 million. But several said a payday isn’t their motivation.
“There's not enough money in the world that will ever take away the scars that I have, the pain,” Lisa said. “The truth needs to be told. The real ugly things that happened, everything that's been swept under the rug.”
Perhaps most astonishing is that when Gothamist contacted several accused guards who were identified in lawsuits, the men said it was the first time they had heard of the allegations against them.
City officials have shown a reluctance to proactively investigate the flood of allegations. Mayor Eric Adams promised a “thorough investigation” in March in response to Gothamist’s initial reporting on the lawsuits against the city, but no investigation was launched. The Department of Correction has repeatedly refused to answer detailed questions about the accusations against Fant and others.
Only after repeated questions from Gothamist about why the lawsuits have not been examined has the Bronx district attorney’s office, which has jurisdiction over Rikers, said it would begin reviewing the lawsuits to determine whether to open criminal investigations into current and former staffers.
‘Where the hell did all of these pretty women come from?’
Most of the allegations that name Champagne occurred in the 1990s, a decade when the number of women held in city jails profoundly increased. Then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “broken windows” approach to policing included NYPD officers conducting dramatic, carefully planned drug sweeps of neighborhoods in northern Manhattan, the South Bronx and southeast Queens.
Tasha Carter Beasley grew up in the canyon of brick apartment buildings on West 147th Street in Harlem. Her father was addicted to heroin, her mother crack cocaine, “along with mostly everybody else that I could think about,” she said. Carter Beasley was using heroin by the time she was 25 years old.
She entered Rikers on a robbery charge in 1996, when more than 13,700 women passed through New York City jails — the highest number of women ever detained pretrial in the city’s history. Rosie’s became so crowded an adjacent men’s jail was used to house the deluge of women. That same year, the state Legislature passed a law formally declaring that incarcerated people are legally unable to consent to sexual contact with jail or prison staff.
“It was almost like a beauty pageant,” Carter Beasley said of the women passing through Rosie’s. “You would wonder, ‘Where the hell did all of these pretty women come from?’ And it was like they had just swept us up off the streets.”
The parade of new detainees created ripe conditions for the serial abusers of Rikers Island, she said. “It was a regular story that the officers were f---ing inmates.”
Tasha Carter Beasley was held at Rikers in 1996 and said she was raped by a correction officer she knew as "Champagne."
Stephanie Keith
Carter Beasley said she was a shy and impressionable young woman when she met Fant, who she identified through photos as the officer she knew as Champagne. She said she worked shifts cleaning areas of the jail under Fant’s supervision. He was 40 years old at the time, according to his personnel records, and had been working at Rosie’s since Mayor Ed Koch cut the opening ribbon in front of the 800-bed facility’s pale pink facade in 1988.
Fant’s nickname was so ubiquitous within the jail that even his superiors – captains and wardens – called him Champagne, he said.
Gothamist spoke with Fant via phone for more than 90 minutes for this story. While working at Rosie’s, Fant said he interacted professionally with detainees, and had a good rapport with the women he oversaw.
“I never was mean to them. I talked to them. They talked about their lives, their story. To be honest with you, they all liked me,” he said.
But Carter Beasley said Fant used his charm — and his power as an officer who oversaw detainees on maintenance duty — to get women alone in a facility packed with people. She said Fant’s role gave him the authority to choose which women would work those shifts, pluck them out of crowded housing units and take them to isolated parts of the jail.
“That's how he would come and pick me up,” she said. “This is how he went and apprehended a lot of his girls.”
At least three other women who named Champagne in their lawsuits described being sexually assaulted during these types of work shifts. One woman claimed in court filings that on a weekly basis he would force her to perform oral sex by the garbage area, and he threatened to throw her in solitary confinement if she didn’t comply. Other women allege they were raped in cleaning closets, kitchen freezers, empty hallways and in other remote areas of the jail that Champagne could access when he worked as a recreation officer or brought them to the jail’s medical clinic.
Fant’s personnel records confirm that he worked as a recreation officer and as a medical escort over the course of his 20-year career, although the documents do not specify when he started working those shifts.
Carter Beasley said Fant first touched her in a secluded closet with a slop sink in a part of the jail known as the annex. Fant sidled up behind her as she filled a mop bucket with fresh water, she recalled, complimented her waist-length hair, pressed his body against hers and kissed her. Days later, she said, he brought her an iced tea from the officers’ kitchen on a hot summer evening and took her to the maintenance closet.
“I think he did a double [shift], because I remember this night he was around,” she said.
He sat on a chair, she claimed, unzipped his pants and directed her to perform oral sex. Fant denies the allegation.
“At the time you're not thinking this shouldn't be happening, that I should not have his penis in my mouth and he should not have it in my mouth,” she said. “At the time, your mind cannot reason that this is rape.”
“No one cared”
Karen Klines thought Rikers Island would be the place that finally helped her get off of crack cocaine. She grew up in an abusive Washington Heights household and was on the streets by the time she was 13 years old. Klines started using and selling drugs, and she was picked up in one of the Giuliani administration’s many drug sweeps.
“All of my pickups was anywhere between 158th Street to 161st Street between Amsterdam and Broadway,” she said. “Anytime there was a sweep, it's like I was standing out like a sore thumb because I had a crack addiction.”
Instead of finding refuge at Rosie’s, Klines said she met Champagne. While serving a six-month jail sentence for drug possession in 1999, she took a job serving meals to him and other guards in the officers’ kitchen to earn money for her commissary account.
“Doesn’t pay much, but I was able to get the things I need, like deodorant,” she said. “And maybe a little cookie or a bag of chips.”
Karen Klines thought Rikers Island would be a refuge from her addiction to crack cocaine. Instead, she said she was further traumatized from being raped by a correction officer inside the jail.
Stephanie Keith
While working there, she said she overheard other guards calling Champagne by the last name Fant – a name her attorneys added to the details of her lawsuit, which alleges a string of sexual assaults that most often took place inside a mop closet.
The first time, Klines said, Fant forced her to crouch on the ground with her back pressed against a white-painted concrete slop sink and perform oral sex in exchange for cigarettes. As it became more routine, she said, Fant would come to the kitchen just before her shift was over, lift a pocket on the leg of his dark-blue uniform and reveal a pack of Newport 100s to indicate that he wanted to meet.
She remembered being bent over the sink as he raped her from behind, watching the water drip from the faucet into a rusty drain.
“I had to look at something to keep my mind off of what was taking place,” Klines said. “When he finished, he would always go out first. And then he tapped the door, then it was your cue to come out. But he always made sure the hallways was clear.”
Klines’ incarceration record shows she was jailed multiple times while Fant was working at Rosie’s. She said he continued to rape her when she would return.
“He said, ‘I know you back, you miss me?’ And he would say it in like a joking way. Like, ‘I know you came back to see me,’” she said. “I was afraid. I felt guilty. I felt embarrassed. I felt not worthy to continue to live. It was like the feeling of him leaving something nasty on my skin, and it was like I could never scrub my skin enough to feel better.”
Klines reported the alleged rape to jail officials in 1999, she said. But instead of investigating her allegations, she claimed they placed her in a mental observation unit and gave her the antidepressant Prozac and Seroquel, an antipsychotic.
“I was under the influence of so much medication, I just suppressed [the abuse] because I felt that was my reason for ending up out of general population now because I done opened my mouth,” Klines said. “No one cared.”
The Department of Correction did not answer questions about whether any measures were ever taken to investigate Klines’ abuse allegations. Fant denies having sexual contact with anyone at Rikers.
“Those things just did not happen.”
Fant’s 878-page personnel file is a trove of work schedules, occasional reprimands and scrawled hand-written notes — a window into one man’s career as a New York City correction officer. The documents were obtained by Gothamist through a public records request.
Records show he was reprimanded in 1991 for failing to wear his proper nameplate. The four women who spoke with Gothamist and who were detained at Rosie’s over a span of 14 years said Fant regularly wore a name tag that said Champagne.
Fant confirmed to Gothamist that a colleague had made him a Champagne tag but said he rarely used it. “I didn't wear it all the time, because I wasn't even allowed to wear it like that,” he said.
He also denied womens’ claims that he brought cigarettes and other items into the jail for them. Bringing contraband into a jail for the purpose of providing it to detainees is against department policy and, in some cases, illegal.
The Department of Investigation looks into cases of alleged fraud, corruption and other illegal activities by city employees. Fant’s record shows that the department's chief investigator ordered Fant to appear for an inquiry in February 2000.
Records show Fant was ordered in 2000 to appear before the Department of Investigation's inspector general overseeing the city's correction department.
The documents do not detail the nature of the investigation, and the Department of Correction fully redacted more than 70 pages of Fant's employment records. Gothamist is challenging the redactions.
Unlike police officers, unsubstantiated complaints against jail guards are not made public. Diane Struzzi, an investigation department spokesperson, said she would not give details about the inquiry because doing so would be a violation of Fant's privacy.
Fant said he remembered the inquiry, but didn’t know what it was about. He said as part of the investigation he received a call from a woman who had been detained at Rikers on his personal phone, which he viewed as an attempt by investigators to entrap him.
Fant said he was shocked that 24 women had filed lawsuits alleging he’d sexually assaulted them at Rikers, and that he only learned about them through Gothamist’s questions.
When provided with detailed descriptions of the women’s claims, he said he didn’t remember any of the women who identified him and that their accusations were “all conjured up hyperbole.”
Lisa, who said Fant impregnated her, and three other women claim they were assaulted in the recreation area in the 1990s. But Fant said he didn’t begin working as a recreation officer until 2000, making their allegations "impossible," he said. His personnel file does not make clear when he took on that role.
“What did I do to deserve this?” he asked. “It's just not true. I mean, I can't say it any plainer than that. Those things just did not happen.”
Of the 24 lawsuits, 17 provide an approximate time of day when the abuse took place. In seven of those cases, the times do not exactly align with the shift times recorded in Fant’s personnel files, which the retired officer said disproved their allegations.
Jubi Williams, a victim advocate at Levy Konigsberg, a law firm representing some of the women, said it’s difficult for most people, let alone survivors of sexual assault, to recall exact shift times from 20 or 30 years ago.
“Sometimes people don't remember the exact dates or the time frame properly,” Williams said. “But when I talk to victims and survivors, what they do remember is what cologne he used, the way his breath smelled, his gait as he approached their cell, and the patterns of behavior: how he would take them out and pretend they had a job to do and then abuse them.”
A “culture of lawlessness”
Earlier this year, Klines stared at a photo on her phone that Fant posted to social media. It was a recent selfie – one taken nearly two decades after Klines had last seen him.
She recognized him immediately.
In the photo, Fant poses in a car with a fedora on his head. He has a gray beard and is biting his lower lip.
“I never thought I would ever see his face again, it was a memory I wanted to forget,” Klines said. “He still holds his lip the exact same way.”
Overwhelmed, she handed the phone to Carter Beasley. The two met in 2018 while working for the city in homeless shelters, years after they left Rikers for the last time. They became friends, and then a couple. When they met, they had no idea the other knew Champagne. They said they were together for years before they shared their stories of alleged rape inside Rikers with each other.
Carter Beasley examined the photo on her girlfriend’s phone. She also immediately recognized Fant as Champagne.
“It looked like he didn't have a damn thing wrong with him,” she said. “Meanwhile, I couldn't even be in a relationship with a man because I didn't know how to get past that.”
All of the women who spoke to Gothamist said they want Fant to be held responsible for the abuse they said they endured, and their lawsuits accuse the correction department of failing to protect them.
“I believe the Department of Correction had his back like it was a jacket,” Klines said.
The Rose M. Singer Center (middle foreground) serves as the women's jail at Rikers Island.
DougSchneiderPhoto
Sarena Townsend, a former sex crimes prosecutor and former deputy commissioner at the correction department, oversaw investigations into alleged sexual misconduct by officers from 2018 to 2022. She said a "culture of lawlessness" has long pervaded Rikers and would have allowed correction officers to act as sexual predators for decades without being stopped.
Based on her review of the 24 lawsuits that identified “Champagne” or Fant, she said at least nine of the women’s allegations could be prosecuted under first-degree rape or aggravated sexual assault charges, which are not subject to New York’s statute of limitations. However, collecting evidence on decades-old cases would be difficult.
Criminal prosecutions of correction officers for sexual assault at Rikers are rare, and the agencies responsible for investigating the allegations have been slow to act.
Slow to investigate
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark has jurisdiction over Rikers, but her relationship with the jail system is complicated. The correction officer’s union has been one of her biggest financial donors, contributing a total of $27,000 to her campaigns in 2015, 2018 and 2019. The union declined to comment for this story, and it did not contribute to her campaign last year.
After Gothamist’s first stories detailed the astounding number of lawsuits filed against the City of New York, Clark’s office established an email address for former Rikers detainees to contact prosecutors with their allegations. As of July, her office said no one has contacted them.
When asked in June about why Clark’s office hadn’t proactively investigated the allegations, spokesperson Patrice O’Shaughnessy said the district attorney couldn’t proceed because it didn’t have the cooperation of the women’s attorneys. But after multiple requests for clarification, she told Gothamist in July that the office is now “reviewing the lawsuits for evidence and leads.”
Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark has jurisdiction over Rikers Island as a prosecutor.
Lev Radin/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images
The city’s Department of Investigation has the power to open investigations based on allegations in civil lawsuits, but Struzzi, the spokesperson, wouldn’t say whether it has looked into allegations against Fant or other jail staffers identified in the lawsuits.
It appears the mayor has little interest in digging into the sexual assault allegations. When Adams promised an investigation at his press conference in March, he gave the impression that action would be taken.
“Abuse in jails, period, is not something that's new, but when you see it, you must address it and face it. And that is what we're going to do,” he said at the time.
But when his office was asked three months later about the status of that investigation, a spokesperson would only say the city’s Law Department was looking into the allegations. The trouble with that is that it’s the very agency charged with defending the city against the lawsuits.
“He promised the f---ing investigation,” Carter Beasley said of the mayor. “So what happened?”
Reporter Samantha Max contributed to this article. If you have a tip about sexual abuse at Rikers, you can email her at [email protected], by phone at (646) 799-7558 or on Signal at samanthamaxwnyc.93.
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