A disgraced city cop accused of trying to have sex with an alleged rape victim in a hotel room near Seattle has been stripped of his shield and gun — and now he and his former boss could be fired.
The accuser says she reported the Seattle sleaze to the Internal Affairs Bureau back in April, but it wasn’t until Friday — the day the Daily News broke the story — that Officer Lukasz Skorzewski and Lt. Adam Lamboy were placed on modified duty, sources said.
Deputy Chief Kim Royster, an NYPD spokeswoman, also said Friday that Lamboy and Skorzewski were slapped with department charges in recent weeks.
The accuser, who has had mixed feelings over what should happen to Skorzewski, told The News on Friday that he should be sent packing.
“I think what he did was bad enough that he shouldn’t be a cop,” the 24-year-old college student said.
The cops have the option of pleading guilty and accepting a penalty — or fighting the charges at a department trial. If they went that route, a trial commissioner would determine whether they’re guilty and recommend a penalty. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton would then have the final say on whether they keep their jobs.
“I am surprised that he is still working,” the woman said of Skorzewski, who is married with two children. “I never really blamed the lieutenant, but he’s partially responsible because he took us out drinking. They paid for everything.”
Skorzewski and Lamboy were assigned to investigate the woman’s claim of an alleged Manhattan rape in 2013. Members of the elite Manhattan Special Victims Division flew to Seattle to interview the woman in July of that year. The cops conducted the interview in an office, but she called them back the next day to ask followup questions. She alleges that Skorzewski eventually kissed her and tried to rip her clothes off in a hotel room.
The woman said the disturbing morning encounter followed a daylong drinking binge where Skorzewski was so drunk that he was refused service at Paddy Coyne’s, an Irish pub in downtown Seattle.
“We actually got kicked out of that one,” she told The News. “Luke’s wife also called him around that time. She was really upset that they were out drinking.”
At one point during the alcohol marathon, she says Skorzewski delivered what has to be one of the creepiest cop lines of all time.
“You’re my favorite victim,” she says he told her.
Neither Skorzewski, 31, nor Lamboy, 44, have commented.
They first crossed paths with the accuser on June 11, 2013, when the woman, who attends college in New York City, reported a rape to Skorzewski. She claimed she was assaulted by a man at his Union Square apartment after a night of drinking. In a bizarre twist, the man she accused is a former writer for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
Skorzewski and Lamboy flew to Seattle and interviewed her July 5. When they met with her again the next day at 3 p.m., she said both cops were in street clothes and Lamboy had a woman on his arm. The accuser said they invited her to join them for a drink and at first she declined. But the cops insisted and Lamboy even assured her that she would be “safe with us.”
Nine hours later, they were a trio after Lamboy got into a fight with his lady friend. And when the accuser said she could not remember where she parked her car, she says they headed to the officers’ rooms at the Embassy Suites hotel in nearby Bellevue, Wash.
Skorzewski, she said, gallantly let her have the bed while he slept on a couch all night. But in the morning, she said, things got weird. The cop asked if he could kiss her, she says. She recalled being outraged that he wanted to take it further.
The cop clearly wasn’t thinking about his wife or his father-in-law, who sources say is an NYPD captain in Brooklyn.
Skorzewski was aggressive, she said. “He really felt me up, tried to get his hands down my pants,” she told The News.
Three months later, she returned to New York City so she could make a controlled phone call to her alleged Union Square rapist — an attempt to get him to confess that ended in failure, she said on Friday.
The woman said she finally sent a letter to the NYPD in April 2014 and poured out her story. She said the Internal Affairs Bureau wrote her back that December and said her claims had been “substantiated.”
“I was surprised that it took so long for anything to happen,” she said.
Sources said Lamboy was transferred from the special victims unit in May. Skorzewski, who was dropped from detective to officer, was bounced from the unit last week, the sources said.
With Nancy Dillon
