from www.nydailynews.com – When a Queens cop’s pants accidentally slipped off during an NYPD talent show to reveal a thong, she couldn’t imagine being more embarrassed.
Then she walked into the 103rd Precinct days later to find her boss, Sgt. James Briones, showing a video of the humiliating dance number to 10 fellow cops.
Officer Veronica Schultz left in tears.
Now she’s filed a bombshell sexual harassment suit against the NYPD.
The video is the centerpiece of the suit in Brooklyn Federal Court, but Schultz said the harassment started long before the talent show mishap.
“He asked me out on several occasions and when I told him ‘No,’ he retaliated against me when I wouldn’t give in to him,” Schultz, 34, told the Daily News.
“He looked directly at my breasts when talking to me,” she said. “Almost every day he mentioned my lips, he said he was attracted to my shape and rubbed up against me. I just felt humiliated.”
When Briones heard about the wardrobe malfunction, he hounded her for the video. She’d been performing Ciara’s R&B hit “Promise” with other female cops who called themselves “The Rockaways” at the Patrol Borough Queens South talent show at York College in May 2007.
Briones somehow got a copy of the video, and showed it to other cops on a laptop computer, the suit charges.
“Why are you so upset? You have a nice a–,” Briones said to Schultz, according to the complaint. “Put me in the show. I want to be in your show so I can rub up on you. You look hot and sexy.”
Later, he held up a magazine with a photo of a woman wearing a black thong and said to Schultz: “Does that look familiar?”
Schultz, a single mother with a 13-year-old son, complained to her commanding officer and reported the incident to the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity. The office investigated, but sent her a letter stating it didn’t find evidence to support her claims.
Briones did not return a call. A spokeswoman for the Law Department declined to comment.
Schultz said Briones took out his frustration on the youth programs she ran – even taking away the police van used to transport kids. She was eventually transferred out of the youth officer job, and is on regular patrol in the 103rd Precinct.
“It’s a classic case of sexual harassment in which upper management takes no action to protect the victim, and instead they go about discrediting her,” said Schultz’s lawyer, Eric Sanders, of the firm Jeffrey Goldberg in Lake Success, L.I.
Schultz had been organizing sports programs and field trips for more than 100 kids in Jamaica – a job she considered especially valuable in the wake of the fatal November 2006 police shooting of Sean Bell.
She said she never had the chance to say goodbye properly to the kids in the program.
“He [Briones] threw a party to celebrate my leaving the unit,” Schultz said. “It was very upsetting to me. It was cruel.”