Rolling Stone
By Tatiana Siegel
November 18, 2022
Excerpt:
IN LATE FEBRUARY 2020, Evelyn Yang gathered at Foley Square in Manhattan with a handful of survivors in the hopes of pulling off something unprecedented. Her husband, Andrew Yang, had recently wrapped his presidential campaign, and all of the travel and scheduling demands that went along with that bid had subsided. On that sunny but cold day, she and Weinstein accuser Ambra Gutierrez and a couple of legislators were focused on launching a bill in New York dubbed the Adult Survivors Act. If it passed, New York would become the first state in the nation to offer adult victims of sexual offenses the opportunity to file legal claims that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations. It was a bustling afternoon downtown, and it marked one of the last in-person meetings that she attended before the Covid lockdown.
“The odds were against us,” says Yang. “But we were just relentless, and we were a powerful group. And we were emboldened because we were doing something that was brand new.”
For Yang, sexual abuse was a personal issue. She recently had revealed to CNN that she was assaulted by her former gynecologist Robert A. Hadden, who pleaded guilty in 2016 to sexually abusing 19 women. Still, Yang wasn’t thinking about her own plight that day as the lunchtime crowd in Foley Square began to thin. After all, her case was within the statute of limitations. But there are now more than 200 Hadden accusers, and she was well aware of the fact that the vast majority of their cases fell outside of the statute.
“These women were told, ‘Come through the door. Your voice matters.’ But then the door was slammed in their face, and they were told, ‘Oh, you’re too late, actually,’” Yang explains. “I just couldn’t live with that.”
Fast forward three years, and the Adult Survivors Act has been signed into law by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, with a yearlong window opening on Nov. 24 that allows victims to sue their abusers as well as the institutions that protected sexual predators. In the Hadden case, Columbia University and its affiliated hospitals recently reached a $165 million settlement with 147 patients of the former gynecologist, but Yang says that isn’t nearly enough.
“To this day, Columbia has been refusing to notify former patients to let them know that their former OB-GYN is a convicted sex felon or even that he lost his medical license or something to just signal to these patients that, ‘Wait a second. Maybe that thing I thought he did actually happened to me,’” Yang says.
In an effort to get the word out on this yearlong window, Yang and other high-profile survivors like music executive Drew Dixon have teamed with Safe Horizon, the nation’s leading victim assistance organization, to launch a PSA as well as a massive Times Square billboard.