CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY administrators threatened retaliation against a whistleblower and failed to notify police after being told that the director of one of its Brooklyn after-school programs was touching children inappropriately, a new lawsuit charges.
Administrators fielded complaints against Nicholas Rodriguez made by a fellow NYCHA worker who said she witnessed him engage in inappropriate conduct with children between 1998 and 2000 — well before Rodriguez was arrested in 2011 for allegedly molesting two young girls during an after-school program, according to the suit.
The suit, filed in Brooklyn Federal Court recently by the mothers of two alleged victims, contends that the employee who reported witnessing perverse behavior on Rodriguez’s part was told by superiors to keep quiet or risk losing her job. The whistleblower, Hope McGuire, told a private investigator, according to a transcript attached to the suit, that she was instructed she had to get “one of the kids to say that this was happening — other than that, I could lose my job for making false accusations.”
“I witnessed it but my word wasn’t good enough,” she said.
The suit, which seeks $15 million in damages, also charges that NYCHA administrators who were aware of McGuire’s complaint against Rodriguez never reported the allegations to the police or to the agency’s inspector general.
McGuire worked with Rodriguez at the Jonathan Williams Plaza Community Center — a NYCHA-run facility in Williamsburg — from 1998 to 2000. She says she once caught Rodriguez inside a closet with a young girl; saw him whispering in the ear of a 6-year-old girl who was sitting on his lap; and spotted him kneeling in front of and touching the leg of a girl who was seated and had her legs spread open, the suit states.
She was also told by several children that Rodriguez allowed the children to rub his hairy chest, which the children described as a “rug,” and that during a game of hide-and-seek children found him in the bathroom with his penis exposed.
Rodriguez allegedly warned children that McGuire was a “spy,” she told the private investigator. Instead of protecting the children by notifying the NYPD, according to the suit, a superior told McGuire to “write everything up in a book.”
Rodriguez, 64, had already retired as the community coordinator of the NYCHA Center by the spring of 2011 when he was arrested after a mother contacted police saying that her young daughter complained Rodriguez had touched her private parts. He was charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse, sexual misconduct, and endangering the welfare of a child, said a spokesman for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. The case is pending. The victims were under the age of 10 when they were allegedly molested while at the NYCHA facility.
The new lawsuit names NYCHA and Rodriguez as defendants, along with tenant president Beverly Russell and NYCHA borough administrators Mary Stark and Olga Gomez.
A NYCHA representative said the agency “declines comment on pending litigation.”
Dale Frederick, a lawyer for Rodriguez, said: “He denies the allegations, and we look forward to a trial before a jury.”
A mother of one of the alleged victims told the Daily News last year that she became suspicious of Rodriguez after her daughter suddenly asked in 2009 to enroll in a different after-school program. The girl had told her mother that Rodrigueztouched her private parts, leading the mother to contact police, leading eventually to his arrest.
jmarzulli@nydailynews.com
