Lorna Beach-Mathura, who has accused Mayor Adams of sexual assault in a civil lawsuit, missed a court-ordered deposition this month because she suffered an anxiety attack in the last-minute that required her to seek medical attention, she wrote in a new court filing late Wednesday.
“The day of my scheduled deposition, I woke up in an extreme state of duress, unable to breathe and hear properly with a hoarse voice, and throat pain. I became very concerned about my health. These symptoms greatly exacerbated my underlying anxiety and depression, and I realized that I needed to seek urgent medical care,” Beach-Mathura wrote in the filing submitted in Manhattan Supreme Court.
“Due to these unfortunate mental and health conditions beyond my control, I was unable to appear at my September 6, 2024, deposition. I apologize to the Court and to everyone who was affected by my inability to appear.”
Beach-Mathura, who worked with Adams in the since-defunct city Transit Police Department, attached an exhibit with her filing showing she was treated at an urgent care in Manhattan on the day of the deposition and diagnosed with acute sinusitis, for which she was prescribed antibiotics and steroids.
Beach-Mathura’s filing attributed her 11th hour health hiccup to “the great emotional distress and anxiety” caused by what she described as a concerted effort by the mayor’s high-powered attorney, Alex Spiro, and Adams allies to portray her as a liar. She specifically pointed to statements disseminated by Adams’ office from Queens Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar and other allies of the mayor who questioned whether she had “ulterior motives” in suing the mayor.
“I was … utterly horrified to learn that the mayor and/or the mayor’s office apparently collected quotes from women leaders saying terrible things about me, even though none of those women ever met me,” she wrote.
Spokespeople for Adams, who has vehemently denied Beach-Mathura’s sexual assault claim, didn’t immediately return a request for comment.
Beach-Mathura also attached multiple exhibits to her filing aimed at pushing back on Spiro’s suggestion that she hasn’t produced corroborating evidence for her claim that Adams sexually assaulted her over three decades ago while they both worked at the Transit Police Department.
One of the exhibits is an email Beach-Mathura sent on June 16, 2021 — a week before Adams won that year’s Democratic mayoral primary — to the New York Post’s tip-line, in which she laid out her assault claim in extensive detail that closely mirrors the allegations from her lawsuit. She sent a similar message to email addresses for the mayoral campaign of Andrew Yang, one of Adams’ opponents in the 2021 race.
“Eric Adams talks proudly about his career and professional accomplishments in the NYPD. Yet I haven’t heard him talk about his sexual harassment of a coworker when he was a detective,” she wrote in the message to The Post.
The Post didn’t ran a story about Beach-Mathura’s claim in 2021. The paper didn’t return a request for comment late Wednesday.
Spiro, who’s known for representing celebrities like Elon Musk and was retained by the city Law Department to defend Adams, asked in court papers this month Beach-Mathura’s suit be dismissed because she failed to appear for the deposition at his Manhattan office. In his filing, Spiro said her failure to appear was “only the latest episode in a months-long pattern” to “willful delay” the proceeding.
Beach-Mathura’s suit, filed in March, claims Adams, then a transit cop, tried to force her to perform oral sex on him in a car in 1993 after she approached him for help with an employment-related issue. When she refused his overture, he ejaculated on her leg and then dropped her off at a subway station, according to the suit, which seeks at least $5 million in damages.
The notice of claim for her suit was filed last November on the eve of the expiration of the Adult Survivors Act, a New York law that gave sexual abuse survivors a one-year window to sue their perpetrators even if the relevant statute of limitations had expired.
