FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
New York, NY — Saturday, May 3, 2025 – In a formal response filed May 2, 2025, The Sanders Firm, P.C., asserts that the New York City Police Department’s demand that former Lieutenant Quathisha Epps repay $231,896.75 in overtime wages is not only baseless—it is retaliatory, discriminatory, and illegal. According to the firm, this clawback demand followed closely on the heels of Epps’s disclosures of rape, sexual coercion, wage fraud, and executive misconduct involving former Chief of Department Jeffrey B. Maddrey and other NYPD senior officials.
“This is not a payroll issue,” said Eric Sanders, Esq., counsel for Ms. Epps. “This is a targeted attack on a Black woman who dared to report sexual abuse by the most powerful uniformed officer in the Department. What the NYPD is doing now is retaliation—plain and simple.”
Protected Disclosures, Retaliatory Suspension, and Public Smear
On December 18, 2024, Epps was suspended without cause. The suspension occurred immediately after she alleged that Maddrey sexually assaulted her inside NYPD Headquarters. The suspension, carried out by former Chief of Internal Affairs Miguel Iglesias, was not accompanied by any investigation into the criminal allegations. Despite her protected disclosures, Police Commissioner Jessica S. Tisch, empowered by the New York City Charter and Administrative Code § 14-115, took no action to investigate or protect her.
Between FY July 2023 and October 2024, Epps internally reported a pattern of high-level misconduct: rape, sodomy, quid pro quo harassment, wage coercion, destruction of evidence, and the abuse of departmental databases to target women. Rather than respond appropriately, the NYPD leaked manipulated overtime records to the New York Post, framing Epps as a financial opportunist.
“The overtime issue is a red herring—manufactured to distract from the real legal and moral crisis inside the NYPD. Under New York labor law, the employer must maintain accurate records, not the employee. The law is clear: administrative gaps or missing slips—especially in a system the Department itself admits is flawed—do not constitute fraud. This is not a wage dispute. It’s a retaliation case cloaked in payroll rhetoric, and the legal precedent overwhelmingly supports Ms. Epps,” says Sanders.
As the retaliation escalated, Epps was forced into retirement in bad standing. Meanwhile, those implicated—including First Deputy Commissioner Tania I. Kinsella, former Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, former Chief of Patrol John Chell, Maddrey, and Iglesias—escaped accountability.
A Legacy of Retaliation Against Black Women Who Report Abuse
Epps’s case is not an anomaly—it is a modern reenactment of a centuries-old pattern in which Black women who report sexual violence are met with disbelief, discrediting, and institutional punishment.
From slavery through Jim Crow to the modern NYPD, the legal system has consistently failed to see Black women as credible victims. The Department’s decision to pursue Epps for repayment—despite no audit, no disciplinary finding, and no evidence of wrongdoing—mirrors this legacy. Had she remained silent, no clawback would have occurred.
Her experience echoes that of Recy Taylor, the Black woman abducted and gang-raped by six white men in 1944, in Alabama. Despite a confession, no charges were brought. The case, investigated by Rosa Parks, became a national symbol of institutional complicity. So too now, Epps faces bureaucratic punishment instead of protection.
Today, silencing Black women takes more insidious forms: retaliatory transfers, unjust disciplinary actions, and character attacks. According to the Center for Employment Equity, 68% of sexual harassment charges include retaliation. Though Black women make up only 7% of the U.S. workforce, they filed 27% of all harassment complaints between 2012 and 2016. Their complaints are the least likely to succeed and the most likely to be punished.
Institutional Retaliation Disguised as Investigation
The NYPD’s campaign against Epps did not begin with a neutral audit—it started with a retaliatory media leak. Before any formal review occurred, confidential overtime records were selectively released to discredit her following disclosures of sexual assault, quid pro quo harassment, and wage coercion involving Maddrey. What followed was not a search for accountability, but a calculated retribution strategy: Epps was recast from victim to suspect. Investigatory bodies, including the Internal Affairs Bureau and Quality Assurance Division, operating under Tisch, launched internal probes anchored on “missing” records that Epps never controlled—records allegedly requested and processed under Maddrey’s authority. These inquiries, initiated only after Epps filed her EEOC Charge and cooperated with federal authorities, reflect a structural weaponization of process, not an impartial pursuit of truth. NYPD leadership allegedly used investigatory channels to preserve institutional reputation and suppress exposure, while ignoring well-established trauma science confirming that delayed reporting, memory inconsistencies, and emotional dysregulation are common and expected responses to sexual violence. Instead, Epps’s trauma responses were twisted into grounds for suspicion. These retaliatory investigations—mirroring prosecutorial misconduct seen in broader law enforcement culture—ignored testimonial credibility, destroyed physical and digital evidence, and relied on procedural pretexts to justify reputational harm and financial clawback. Under New York law, such investigations, when launched in response to protected activity, are not only suspect—they are unlawful. In this case, the Department’s internal machinery was not used to investigate misconduct—it was used to silence a woman who dared to report it.
Destruction of Evidence and Alleged Institutional Spoliation
According to the response, the NYPD’s handling of physical and digital evidence related to Epps’s sexual assault allegations constitutes not mere administrative negligence, but deliberate, unlawful spoliation. After Epps filed an EEOC Charge and began cooperating with federal and local law enforcement, the Department allegedly removed and destroyed critical evidence from the location where she reported being assaulted by Maddrey. This included her department-issued iPad, desktop computer, mobile phone, and an external drive containing confidential materials, such as “contracts” and “grids,” allegedly processed at Maddrey’s direction and inconsistent with NYPD policy. Also destroyed were personal documents, notebooks, red diaries, and the physical workspace itself—flooring, furnishings, wall treatments—erasing the crime scene.
Despite the direct evidentiary relevance of these materials and clear legal obligations under New York law and NYPD policy to preserve them, no imaging, sequestration, or preservation steps were taken. The response asserts this conduct constitutes willful spoliation and that Epps will seek an adverse inference at trial, monetary sanctions, and suppression findings under CPLR § 3126. Supporting precedent includes Pegasus Aviation I, Inc. v. Varig Logistica S.A., 26 N.Y.3d 543 (2015), and VOOM HD Holdings LLC v. EchoStar Satellite L.L.C., 93 A.D.3d 33 (1st Dep’t 2012), both of which affirm that a duty to preserve evidence attaches when litigation is reasonably anticipated—even before it is formally filed.
More broadly, the Department’s actions reflect a pattern of obstruction, not investigation. Under any reasonable probable cause analysis, these allegations should have triggered an immediate arrest and criminal referral. Instead, the Department allegedly moved to eliminate evidence, silence the complainant, and protect executive staff. What occurred, the response concludes, was not a lapse—it was an institutional cover-up carried out at public expense and in direct violation of Ms. Epps’s civil and legal rights.
Contradictory Public Testimony and Selective Enforcement Reveal Retaliatory Motive
The NYPD’s clawback demand against Epps directly conflicts with its sworn public statements and long-standing internal practices, revealing what the response calls a “strategic act of institutional retaliation cloaked in fiscal oversight.” On March 20, 2024, during a City Council budget hearing, Kinsella testified under oath that the NYPD had implemented rigorous biweekly oversight measures to monitor and control overtime expenditures. Seated beside her were then–Police Commissioner Edward A. Caban, Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters Michael Gerber, Maddrey, Chell, and other senior command staff. None of them challenged her testimony. None disclosed that these supposed controls were inconsistently enforced or entirely abandoned.
Yet from July 2023 through October 2024—the same period Kinsella referenced—Ms. Epps’s overtime was logged, approved, and paid without objection through standard NYPD procedures. She was among hundreds of uniformed officers with comparable or higher overtime earnings. No internal inquiry was initiated. No irregularities flagged. No UF-49s issued. The scrutiny only began after she engaged in protected activity: rejecting Maddrey’s coercive advances, reporting sexual and financial misconduct internally, filing an EEOC charge, and cooperating with outside investigators. The Department’s clawback narrative—unsupported by audit findings or contemporaneous documentation—emerged only after Epps named her abuser.
This is not fiscal discipline. It is a retaliatory pretext.
The statistical context further underscores the disparity. Between Fiscal Years 2013 and 2022, New York City’s overtime costs surged by $760 million, from $1.46 billion to $2.22 billion. The NYPD accounted for the largest share. In FY 2022 alone, the department overspent its uniformed overtime budget by 93%, and by FY 2023, the City Comptroller projected NYPD overtime costs would exceed $740 million—nearly double the $374 million allocated. Assuming even a conservative estimate of 400 top overtime earners annually translates to thousands of high-compensation officers over the past decade. Yet there is no record of a single clawback—until Ms. Epps. Her selection is not coincidental. It is retaliatory.
The legal foundation for the demand is equally infirm. Under 12 NYCRR § 142-2.6, employers—including the NYPD—bear the nondelegable duty to maintain accurate payroll records for at least six years. Yet the Department has failed to produce any audit, disciplinary finding, or sworn payroll declaration to justify its $231,896.75 claim. Instead, it references “missing” or “replaced” overtime slips—records known to be inconsistently maintained and frequently corrected across commands. On July 26, 2024, a Departmental Trial involving Lieutenant Joel Ramirez and Sergeant Jose Dume, longtime payroll supervisor Kenya Coger, testified that such discrepancies were routine and corrected retroactively, without adverse consequences.
Ms. Epps’s timekeeping occurred under the same norms. At Maddrey’s direction, she and others in the Chief of Department’s Office were instructed not to use the CityTime system. Overtime was logged manually and submitted through channels that had never before triggered audit scrutiny. That this routine, manager-approved system is now retroactively criminalized—only after Epps disclosed sexual assault and wage coercion—exposes the demand as retaliatory enforcement, not neutral policy.
This weaponized clawback violates well-established labor law. As the Appellate Division held in Matter of Mid Hudson Pam Corp. v. Hartnett, 156 A.D.2d 818 (3d Dep’t 1989), employers who fail to maintain payroll records cannot shift the burden to employees. Courts may rely on testimony and reconstructed evidence in the face of incomplete records, resolving any inaccuracy against the employer who caused it.
The NYPD’s silence toward thousands of similar earners, juxtaposed with its pursuit of Epps, speaks volumes. This is not an attempt to safeguard taxpayer funds. It is an attempt to discredit a Black woman who named her abuser. The demand must be withdrawn as a matter of law, equity, and institutional accountability.
Conclusion and Call to Action
The Department’s clawback demand lacks legal foundation and moral standing. It is a targeted effort to punish a whistleblower for exposing institutional misconduct. It reflects selective enforcement, systemic payroll dysfunction, and entrenched gender and racial bias.
The City of New York and Commissioner Tisch now face a clear choice: protect the power structure or the truth. If the retaliatory demand is not withdrawn and Ms. Epps’s employment record is not corrected, The Sanders Firm, P.C. will initiate litigation. Relief will include compensatory and punitive damages, injunctive relief, spoliation sanctions, and full attorney’s fees under the New York Human Rights Laws, the Gender-Motivated Violence Act, and other applicable law.
“I will not be silenced. This isn’t just my fight—it’s the fight of every woman who dared to speak up and was punished for it,” said Quathisha Epps. “If the Department—or anyone else—believes they can erase what happened by attacking me, they’ve gravely underestimated the power of truth.”
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See DCT Trial Transcript – Ramirez Partial Day 2
See Matter of Mid Hudson Pam Corp v Hartnett