IN THE MEDIA

Brooklyn-based attorneys Susan Crumiller and Carrie Goldberg recently teamed up and launched the Survivors Law Project as a platform to represent plaintiffs in sexual abuse and harassment cases. Both are survivors themselves—this mission is very personal to them.

National Law Journal

On what would have been the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, our client Nicole Moore, the first and now former multicultural brand engagement director at Planned Parenthood, takes a look at what needs to be done to stop structural racism in the organization.

HuffPost

“It can take decades, or a lifetime, to process sexual trauma — to accept what happened, even to name what happened and recognize what happened — to shed sort of the feelings of guilt and self-blame that many survivors experience,” Crumiller said.

Courthouse News Service

“The more that we change the culture and become educated about the dynamics of sex abuse and the dynamics of consent and we stop shaming victims — I think more and more people will come forward,” Crumiller said.

New York Post

On Thanksgiving Day, the Adult Survivor’s Act takes effect in New York. It creates a one-time, one-year window for adult sexual assault survivors to press charges, regardless of when the crime happened.

PIX11

Lawyer Susan Crumiller plans to counsel people filing abuse lawsuits under the new law. She’s heard from dozens of people since launching a project looking for ASA clients called the Survivors Law Project together with Carrie Goldberg .

New York Daily News

“We’re finally at the point where we’re about to storm the courts with these really important cases,” victims rights lawyer Carrie Goldberg said in the Safe Horizon webinar teaching survivors about the new law. On Monday, Goldberg’s firm announced it would be working with employment lawyer Susan Crumiller to file cases under the new law—an initiative they call the Survivors Law Project.

Mother Jones

Both Crumiller and Goldberg's firms represent plaintiffs in sexual abuse and harassment litigation. Survivors Law Project will help provide joint-representation to plaintiffs in new sex abuse cases brought under New York's Adult Survivors Act.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

"Is Mark Werksman stuck in the 1950s?" Crumiller told Insider in an emailed statement. "Juries are smarter today than to think that women voluntarily have sex with disgusting men to advance their careers or that it's okay to call a sexual assault survivor — or any woman — a 'bimbo.'"

Insider

In a statement to CNN, Moore accuses Planned Parenthood of carrying out a broad pattern of anti-Black racism in which she says her managers diminished her complaints and then punished her.

CNN

A former director at Planned Parenthood is suing the reproductive rights organization alleging she faced months of racial discrimination during her time there.

NPR

A former Planned Parenthood employee is suing the company, alleging racial discrimination and wrongful termination in a sprawling complaint that covers multiple years and more than a dozen employees.

The Daily Beast

The lawsuit also references BuzzFeed News’ 2020 reporting on Black employees' allegations of racism and hypocrisy at reproductive rights organizations, including, prominently, Planned Parenthood. Leadership at Planned Parenthood reacted poorly to the optics of the backlash and not the content of the articles, Moore alleges, and failed to take substantial action.

Buzzfeed News

The complaint is the latest allegation of racism within the organization, which has acknowledged recent frustrations among Black employees, as well as its founder’s difficult legacy on race, and has vowed to make changes.

The New York Times

"Depp v. Heard was devastating to all of us because I think, here in New York we're about to embark on this litigation wonderland where everything's fair game for survivors," said Susan Crumiller, the founding attorney of law firm Crumiller PC, which bills itself as "the feminist litigation firm."

Insider

Susan Crumiller, who also has not represented any Epstein victims but whose practice focuses on feminist litigation, said: “Every time abusers are allowed to participate in public life without opprobrium, we as a society are saying that we value abusers over their victims. The message to survivors everywhere is loud and clear – and it is harmful."

The Guardian

In a Utah work culture that was “a nightmare for women,” scientist Lara Silverman says, she was forced to listen to sexual banter from executives, shamed for her pregnancies and due to her gender, denied the title and pay she deserved.

The Salt Lake Tribune

Equinox can't escape most of a Black former personal trainer's bias claims that she was subjected to racist comments by co-workers and barred from working with white clients, as a New York federal judge ruled the conduct was pervasive enough to be unlawful but that her firing wasn't retaliatory.

Law360

Doe filed her suit under a state law that contains a two-year “lookback window” permitting victims of child sex abuse to sue on claims that would have otherwise been prohibited by the statute of limitations.

Vanity Fair

A woman accusing Horatio Sanz of sexually assaulting her when she was a teen now claims Jimmy Fallon, Tracy Morgan, “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels and NBC all “enabled” the comedian’s alleged misconduct.

Page Six

The plaintiff is now represented by Crumiller PC founder Susan Crumiller, who said her client will bring new claims when New York City’s two-year Gender Motivated Violence Act lookback window opens in March.

New York Law Journal

Identified only as Jane Doe, the woman claims the SNL stars and boss enabled the alleged abuse she says occurred when she was 17 years old.

Entertainment Weekly

According to a statement from Doe’s lawyers, the amended complaint was made possible by changes to New York City’s forthcoming Gender Motivated Violence Act (GMVA). The law — which goes into effect March 1, 2023 — will allow victims to sue both abusers and enablers, and will also include a two-year “loopback window” for expired claims.

Rolling Stone

She filed suit in August 2021 under a state law that opened a two-year “lookback window” allowing victims of child sex abuse to bring claims that otherwise would have been barred by the statute of limitations. More recently, New York City amended its own law to create a two-year lookback window, allowing accusers to sue anyone who enabled such conduct.

Variety

According to Susan Crumiller, founding attorney at Crumiller PC, while it is harder to show that “employers aren’t just acting out of legitimate business concerns,” she sees clients who feel they have been boxed out due to an inability to keep up with company culture. “If you’re at a company with a culture that consists of going out and doing shots every night, there might be an assumption that older adults aren’t interested,” said Crumiller. “That’s a form of discrimination because that has nothing to do with their work performance.”

Adweek

Utah’s tech sector is booming, and it’s bringing conversations about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) right to Salt Lake’s doorstop. We’ve all heard the rumors that tech is riddled with misogyny, but just how bad is it?

City Cast

“Ms. Bartlett has shown an extraordinary amount of courage in coming forward,” said Hilary Orzick, an associate at Crumiller P.C. who represents Bartlett. “USPS completely disregarded her rights as a person with a disability and failed to take any meaningful action when it received her complaints of sexual harassment by multiple supervisors. We look forward to aggressively litigating on Ms. Bartlett’s behalf and holding USPS accountable for the harm she suffered while working there."

Long Island Patch

The former CFO and top scientist of DiscGenics are suing the spinal medtech company for alleged misconduct from top leadership. C-suite leaders, including CEO Flagg Flanagan and COO Bob Wynalek allegedly made crude, sexist comments in multiple incidents, according to a lawsuit filed May 23 by Lara Silverman, PhD, and Jeffrey Poole. Some alleged comments were made toward Dr. Silverman's ability to work while being a mother, and others were inappropriate discussions about Mr. Flanagan's personal life, the lawsuit said. The lawsuit also alleges Dr. Silverman wasn't provided proper lactation space.

Becker's Spine Review

“There was a lot of sexual banter and locker room talk against women against members of the LGBT community,” Silverman said Tuesday in an interview with FOX 13 News. Silverman says she was pregnant twice in her 10 years at the company. “I was asked how I would do my job,” she said. “I was told I needed a transition plan because I would have two kids and I wouldn't be able to work anymore.”

Fox 13 Salt Lake City

Then the highest-ranking scientist at DiscGenics, a Salt Lake City biotech startup, Silverman had disclosed to her employer months before that she was expecting her first child. Now the company’s chief executive, Flagg Flanagan, was suddenly putting her in the spotlight. “How is she going to do her job now?” she recalls Flanagan griping to her colleagues.

The Daily Beast

Advocates for pay equity who joined the hearing for public testimony disputed that point, pointing to studies that suggest that pay transparency in job advertisements does just that. One recent study found that when one job search site, Hired.com, pre-filled the salary ask of a job searcher with the median salary offered for the position they were applying for, it eliminated the gap between how much compensation male and female candidates asked for. Studies from other countries have also shown that increased transparency of salaries reduced gender pay gaps. Julia Elmaleh-Sachs, a plaintiff’s employment discrimination attorney at Crumiller P.C., suggested that the remote work change in the proposed legislation also represented a significant loophole for businesses. “​​An employer could say that their job posting refers to in-person work or remote work, which would allow them to not post a salary range,” she said.

NY1

The attorney for a school principal suing his former employers says her client is unable to find work since he was placed on leave. The suit stems from Timothy Gely defending a Black girl who faced racial bullying at her desk at St. Christopher School in Baldwin, attorney Susan Crumiller said. Gely, 47, told school officials that the behavior couldn't be tolerated, according to the suit. He also recalled his own experiences with being racially profiled as a Latino teenager, although he is not anti-police. "Some of the white parents accused him of politicizing the situation, bringing race into it where it didn't exist," Crumiller told Patch. "They were very offended by the description of his experiences.""

Patch

The day after a Black eighth-grader found hand-written notes in her desk with messages like “monkey,” “go hang yourself” and “this is why cops kill people like you,” Gely, 47, detailed how he was allegedly forced to the ground at gunpoint by NYPD officers as a kid in the Bronx. “I was a victim of racial profiling, and I wanted to empathize with her, let her know I was in her corner and let her know she wasn’t alone,” Gely told the Daily News. “I wanted everyone to know this is not going to be tolerated at St. Christopher.”

Daily News

As a survivor and advocate, her “coercive control” defense—which included exploiting her college rape—offended me to the core.

The Daily Beast

Fordham University students gathered to protest Saturday what they say is a culture of sexual violence and a failure to protect the students at their school. The protesters in Fordham Plaza say they've had enough of the university protecting men who are accused of sexual violence and that the school is systematically failing the people it should be protecting. Organizers tell News 12 that the protest was inspired by two recent cases involving alumni who reported rapes. They claim that the university either covered it up or failed to fully investigate with no resulting punishment.

News 12 The Bronx

Czerynk said she refuses to be a statistic, and refuses to let what happened to her pass without accountability. “I want justice, I want justice for his actions,” she said. “What he did was wrong … he raped me, he took full advantage of my unconscious body. And he needs to be held accountable for that.”

Bronx Times

There are two vital requirements for an effective sexual harassment policy. First, the company must support and believe in it. “The most important thing a company’s sexual harassment policy must include is not within the policy itself, but an actual intention to care about eradicating sexual harassment,” Crumiller says. “A written policy means nothing if it’s not followed.”

Monster.com

Susan Crumiller, a lawyer and founder of Crumiller & Co. in New York, which calls itself “a feminist litigation firm dedicated to fighting harassment, discrimination and abuse,” said that “the boys’ club atmosphere in brokerages is still alive and well.” She added that brokerages “often settle these kinds of cases quietly to keep their reputation intact, so there is no doubt that there are many more cases which have been put to rest with the vast amounts of money available to these companies.”

Financial Planning

A new lawsuit claims that the man who crafted what might be the most famous menorah in the world sexually abused a young girl dozens of times in the 1990s and that a rabbinical court failed to hold him accountable. The survivor of this alleged abuse, now a 36-year-old woman living in Israel, is trying to get possession of her abuser’s brass menorah, which is normally displayed during Hanukkah at the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement in Brooklyn.

JTA News

"The plaintiff, a 36-year-old woman now living in Israel, claims celebrated silversmith Hirschel Pekkar sexually assaulted her more than a dozen times in the 1990s, starting when she was 5 years old. Pekkar died this July, but his menorah—which the lawsuit describes as “one of the most important pieces of Jewish artwork of the 20th century”—lives on, displayed every winter outside the world headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement. The plaintiff hopes to get possession of the 6-foot-tall menorah, her lawyer told The Daily Beast, and melt it to the ground. “Our client has been revictimized every year, watching it light up globally knowing what happened to her,” attorney Susan Crumiller said. “The menorah has become a real symbol to our client, and to us, of justice in this case.”

The Daily Beast

Susan Crumiller, founding attorney of the feminist litigation firm, Crumiller P.C., joins Laverne McGee on “Making the Case” to discuss how important this conviction is for survivors, especially for Black women.

Making the Case with Yodit

Susan Crumiller, a lawyer whose firm represents the women, said Khandker’s alleged victims continue to come forward. Their stories are similar, she said. “He has a little setup where he invites the parents in,” Crumiller said. “There’s a chair for the parent, and he positions himself with his back to the parent, so the parent can’t see what he’s doing with his hands. “And he’ll casually chat throughout the assault,” said the lawyer. “This is something that we’ve seen as a pattern both with the parent and when the parent is not present, that he’ll engage in this sort of casual chatter — which is very disorienting.”

NY Daily News

It’s the respect that doctors get and the assumption that they’re good people, that they’re there to help you. … You’re so vulnerable when you go to the doctor, and you’re taking off your clothes and you’re sharing information about your body. It’s so intimate. It’s so much more outrageous, in my opinion, than abuse in any other relationship. —Susan Crumiller

Ms Magazine

Five Queens women filed a class-action lawsuit against a prominent physician who practices in Jackson Heights, charging he sexually abused patients — including allegedly conducting unwarranted breast exams on girls as young as 14 years old.

THE CITY

"New York Governor Andrew Cuomo could be facing criminal charges, according to the Albany County District Attorney. In the report, New York State Attorney General Letita James found that Cuomo sexually harassed numerous women, including current and former state employees. In response to the news, he released a statement on video denying he ever inappropriately touched anyone. Tricia “CK” Hoffler, CEO of The CK Hoffler Firm, and Susan Crumiller, head of the Feminist Litigation Firm, joins Reed on “Making the Case” to discuss the findings in the report."

Making the Case with Yodit

"G/O continues to battle a Manhattan federal lawsuit filed late last year by laid-off company executive Katherine Pontius Ebel, who claims CEO Spanfeller “took control of creative, successful diverse brands like the Onion and transformed them into a business run exclusively by a clique of his white male friends and colleagues.”... Pontius Ebel says she spent eight years at satirical website the Onion when Univision sold it along with a dozen other sites to G/O Media’s financial backers, private equity company Great Hill Partners, in April 2019. After the sale to Great Hill, Spanfeller offered Pontius Ebel a promotion to chief talent officer of the entire company, the suit claims. But, according to the lawsuit, the promotion was withdrawn after Pontius Ebel objected to Spanfeller’s move to let go of EVP and Gizmodo Media editorial director Susie Banikarim, one of the few female executives and the only woman of color at the company."

NY Post

Equinox Fitness has been sued for racial discrimination. Now a dispute about privilege during a deposition gave rise to an impromptu request for judicial intervention.

Inner City Press

What’s being alleged? What does the DOJ have to prove to make its case? Is this going to the Supreme Court? A former civil rights prosecutor has some answers. Arastu Chaudhury

The Daily Beast

On Wednesday, a mother of two filed a complaint against DaVita Healthcare Partners Inc. and DaVita, Inc. (collectively, DaVita) in the Southern District of New York, alleging that DaVita discriminated against the plaintiff “on the basis of gender, pregnancy status and caregiver status,” in which the plaintiff’s pregnancy and status as a mother allegedly led “to pretextual disciplinary action and her eventual termination.”

Law Street Media

“As a lawyer, it’s inconceivable to me, as it is to the rest of our executive board, that we would share confidential information without our members’ explicit consent and approval thereof,” BYD Executive Vice-President Julia Elmaleh-Sachs wrote in a March email to Bichotte Hermelyn, who is also a state Assembly Member from Flatbush.

Bklyner

Susan Crumiller, an employment discrimination lawyer familiar with Ms. Clark’s work, described her as a seasoned, detail-oriented litigator. “I think she is an excellent choice,” said Ms. Crumiller. “She’s very smart, she’s very thorough.”

NY Times

"Susan Crumiller, a civil rights attorney in Brooklyn, said the state court’s ruling in Newton’s case gave her hope that the New York law would have a chance in other cases where she represented workers who had signed arbitration agreements. These include a sexual harassment case against Best Buy Co., and a pregnancy discrimination case against Baker Bros. Advisors LP."

Bloomberg Law

Being in a bad employment situation is similar to being in a bad relationship or an abusive relationship where it becomes your reality and so you adapt to it as your normal your sense of normal becomes very warped. And so when people come to us, a lot of times we’re helping them to take a step back and say this is not okay you deserve better.

Film Daily

A Bronx prosecutor says an NYPD officer sexually assaulted her and an investigator from the Bronx District Attorney’s office raped her — but both agencies ignored the allegations, according to a new lawsuit. The woman, identified as Jane Doe, claims Officer Edwin Crespo slid his hand up her thigh in her cubicle on Nov. 15, 2016 while they were preparing for trial, according to the federal lawsuit filed in the Southern District of New York on Oct. 8. ..... In another separate incident, the lawsuit accuses Gino Pelaez, a senior accountant investigator in the DA’s office, of rape following a party with colleagues on Aug. 15, 2019. The suit claims Pelaez followed Doe to into her cab where he became “vulgar and aggressive,” trying to kiss the woman and telling her “It’s OK, you want it,” when she tried to fend him off.

NY Post

"Attorney Julia Elmaleh-Sachs said she is preparing to go to Ohio or Pennsylvania with several other lawyer friends, a reprise of a trip she took to the Philadelphia area in 2016. It was easy to find compatriots for such an important election, she said. “People are a little antsy and don’t want to just be doing phone banking anymore,” said Ms. Elmaleh-Sachs, who is also an officer in the Brooklyn Young Democrats."

WSJ

Fitness chain Equinox did nothing to stop a Black trainer from receiving racist and sexist remarks from a client and a co-worker at one of its New York City gyms and later fired her when she complained, the trainer said Tuesday in a lawsuit filed in New York federal court.

Law360

"...to get a job at Best Buy, the company forces employees to forfeit their legal right to sue for sexual harassment—even in New York state, which in the wake of #MeToo passed a law in 2018 banning forced arbitration. But sexual assault survivor Sarah Tremblay and her fierce feminist lawyer Susan Crumiller are fighting back. (Crumiller’s six-attorney law firm has the tagline “The Feminist Litigation Firm.”) Tremblay was a Best Buy “Geek Squad” employee providing repair, installation and setup services on all kinds of tech. She worked at two stores in Long Island, N.Y., until 2018, when she was fired for complaining about a customer who sexually assaulted her, says Tremblay in a lawsuit she filed last month."

Ms Magazine

“The hardest thing for many dancers is that the clubs claim they are independent contractors and not employees,” Susan Crumiller, an attorney who represents various New York strippers, said. “They don’t have a lot of the federal and state protections. And we’ve challenged that, arguing that it’s a misclassification. Courts have uniformly agreed they’re employees.”

Zora

In a lawsuit filed in New York state court Thursday, Tremblay says she was repeatedly harassed by customers. Male customers groped her, kissed her and even stalked her, according to the complaint. A male colleague also made lewd comments. Tremblay repeatedly complained to her store manager, but he did nothing about her complaints.

HuffPost

According to Susan Crumiller—the founder and owner of Crumiller P.C., a feminist litigation firm that focuses on gender and pregnancy discrimination in the workplace—HR reps are indeed “only there to protect the company,” but “protecting the company” can mean different things depending on the organization’s values.

LifeHacker

"One colleague repeatedly singled me out and made me feel uncomfortable with graphic sexual comments, yelling at me about “f — ing” him and bombarding me with comments about “deep-throat blowjobs” and “skull-f — ing”. Best Buy took no action whatsoever in response to my repeated complaints; indeed, management laughed along. Nor did Best Buy take any action when customers would harass and even assault me. One customer grabbed my torso in a sexual manner, and then chased me back to the employees-only area of the store, after I fled there to try to escape him. Another customer grabbed me, grinding his body into mine, and slobbered onto my neck. One man was openly stalking me at the store. Best Buy did nothing, and management actually delivered a “gift” to me that my stalker had left for me on a day I wasn’t at the store."

[Medium]

A third lawsuit was filed against the company by a former employee in the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of New York by Crumiller P.C. The complaint alleges that direct supervisors fired a female employee — the first to be an installations manager at Momentum Solar — shortly after disclosing that she was pregnant.

Solar Power World

Carrie Goldberg , from the victims' rights firm C.A. Goldberg, and Susan Crumiller, from feminist litigation firm Crumiller P.C., led a continuing legal education (CLE) seminar titled, "Nobody's Victim: New York State's Revenge Porn Law" at the Brooklyn Bar Association on Oct. 3.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

"For Susan Crumiller, the owner of a New York City-based feminist law firm, there are only advantages to working with a coach. In her experience, accountability is the most important benefit. “Many things that are hard for most people come super easy to those of us with ADHD, but the opposite is also true,” she says. “I rely on my coach to make sure I am staying on a good sleep schedule and exercising regularly.”"

Healthline

New York State is finally taking sexual harassment in the workplace seriously and has implemented a series of new laws and statutes over the past 18 months. In order to make sense of these new rules, the Brooklyn Bar Association hosted a continuing legal education (CLE) seminar to help local attorneys understand the rights and requirements.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

With 99 percent of the ballot scanners reported as of early Wednesday morning, Cohen won the 6th Municipal District Civil Court judge race, decisively beating her four opponents by earning 43 percent of the vote in a race that drew 14,924 voters. The district includes Park Slope, Crown Heights, Kensington, Flatbush, Midwood, Prospect Heights, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Prospect Park South, and Ditmas Park.

Bklyner

Cohen was raised on Long Island and has lived in Brooklyn for the last 15 years, and in Flatbush for the past 10. She is a civil rights lawyer at Crumiller P.C., where she has worked for two years, a member of the Kings County Democratic Committee, and has been endorsed by Assembly members Walter Mosley and Rodneyse Bichotte, as well as Council Member Brad Lander.

Bklyner

I have a best friend, Susan Crumiller. Our law firms are also sisters. She’s a really big part of my day-to-day life; we are constantly on Signal, talking to each other. We were baby lawyers together, and then she started her law firm two years after mine. She does pregnancy discrimination. Our experiences are really the same: We started law firms that are growing rapidly in cutting-edge areas where we don’t have a lot of peers who are doing this kind of law.

The Cut

"Club owners want the benefits of you being an independent contractor, but they’re treating you like an employee,” says Logan Dee, co-leader of We Are Dancers USA, an organization that advocates for strippers’ rights. “You are getting the crap end of both sticks.” Susan Crumiller, a New York-based attorney who works with #NYCStripperStrike, says that such misclassifications are a way for club owners to save money by cheating dancers and the Internal Revenue Service alike."

Playboy

I think entrepreneurs and biz owners often need work wives that are outside their own companies. Example: Carrie Goldberg and I are work wives as owners of two feminist “sister law firms” across the Brooklyn Bridge from each other. We talk every day about business ownership, our staff, our cases, etc. I owe a ton of my success (and happiness) to the support this relationship provides.

Fortune

Members of the Bay Ridge Lawyers Association got an update on the latest legal updates involving the #MeToo movement when they hosted attorney Caroline H. Piela for a continuing legal education discussion.

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

With the #MeToo movement dominating the national conversation, “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sexual Harassment But Were Afraid to Ask” was a timely topic for last Sunday evening’s meeting of the Princeton Community Democratic Organization (PCDO) at the Suzanne Patterson Center.

Town Topics

"The real barriers [to reporting sexual crimes] are imposed by all of us when we don't believe these women or downplay their concerns," Susan Crumiller, a lawyer with Crumiller PC told me.

Business Insider

When I was a baby lawyer, representing low-income tenants in housing court, my friend Susan Crumiller started just a little ahead of me, I was helping her on a case. She had to do a trial, I was second seating her. It settled and we didn’t have to do it, and I was so relieved! She wasn’t. She said it would have been amazing to try that case. And it was this amazing Eureka moment for me. I realized I needed to push myself more to try new things, to leave my zone. This friend of mine started an employment law firm specializing on family issues in the workplace. And we’re about to start a joint venture focusing on sexual assault in the workplace. I’m nervous. I’m always nervous, but I believe in pushing myself. (I’m not reckless, though!)

Newswhistle