A lady who filed a lawsuit accusing Neil Portnow, the previous head of the Grammy Awards, of drugging and raping her in a New York lodge room has requested a federal choose for her case to be dismissed.
The request by the girl, who filed her go well with anonymously in November, was addressed to Choose Analisa Torres of Federal District Courtroom in Manhattan over the weekend through electronic mail, and it was posted on Monday to the court docket’s web site. Days earlier than, her attorneys had opposed a press release by Mr. Portnow’s attorneys to require the girl to make use of her actual title within the case.
In her letter, the girl made clear that she was involved about her id being revealed. She additionally famous a dispute along with her attorneys. Regardless of their opposition to Mr. Portnow’s request, she wrote that her attorneys’ submitting “didn’t precisely mirror my place.”
Additionally on Monday, her lawyer, Jeffrey R. Anderson, filed a movement to withdraw as her counsel. Mr. Anderson stated she had submitted the letter with out his information, and that “the attorney-client relationship has deteriorated past restore.” Reached by cellphone on Tuesday, Mr. Anderson declined to remark.
The lady’s lawsuit, initially filed in New York State Supreme Courtroom in Manhattan, arrived as a authorized window in New York was drawing to an in depth that had allowed folks to file civil fits alleging sexual assault even when the statute of limitations for his or her instances had expired. The case was eliminated to federal court docket in January.
The lady, who was recognized in her go well with solely as a musician from exterior the USA, stated she met Mr. Portnow, then the chief govt of the Recording Academy, at a Grammy occasion in New York in early 2018. In keeping with her criticism, that June he invited her to a Manhattan lodge room the place he was staying. He gave her wine and she or he misplaced consciousness, based on the go well with, and the girl stated that she awoke to search out him “forcibly” penetrating her.
Mr. Portnow declined to touch upon Tuesday. However when the girl filed her go well with in November, he denied the accusations strongly, saying they have been “the product of the plaintiff’s creativeness.”
In a solution to her criticism final month, Mr. Portnow acknowledged that he met her at his lodge room and supplied her wine, however stated that “always his interactions with Plaintiff have been consensual.”
Legal professionals for Mr. Portnow additionally stated that the girl had despatched him “a trove of emails and texts” after their encounter, proposing marriage and asking his assist in “writing a advice letter for her immigration software.”
Federal courts permit plaintiffs to file instances anonymously in particular circumstances, together with if revealing their id would expose them to a threat of bodily or psychological hurt. In court docket papers, Mr. Portnow’s attorneys argued that the girl’s causes for continuing anonymously, together with that she “seeks to defend their id from the stigma related to sexual assault,” don’t fulfill these necessities.
In response, the girl’s attorneys stated that anonymity “has develop into an accepted apply for sexual assault victims in New York state court docket,” and argued that she shouldn’t be recognized within the federal case. However the girl’s letter included what she stated have been quotations from emails from her attorneys, during which they advised her they believed that Mr. Portnow “will prevail” on a movement to compel her to make use of her actual title, and added that “your title can be made public which is able to trigger hurt to you and your fame.”
Mr. Portnow, 75, turned chief govt of the Recording Academy in 2002. In 2018, on the peak of the #MeToo motion, he got here beneath harsh criticism for saying that ladies in music ought to “step up” to get higher recognition within the business, and he resigned from the group the next yr.
His successor, Deborah Dugan, was fired in early 2020, and in a authorized compliant accused the academy of a spread of abuses, together with voting irregularities, rampant conflicts of curiosity and overlaying up that Mr. Portnow had been accused of rape by the girl who later filed her go well with.
