It was Pride Weekend and Jacob Chen was just another of the thousands of people waiting to get into “Alegria Pride 2023,” where presale tickets had gone for at least $120 each and some went as high as $280. Taking place inside the enormous colosseum-like Brooklyn Mirage in East Williamsburg, it was “the most anticipated NYC outdoor event,” according to the production company’s website. Run by party promoter Ric Sena — described recently as a “legendary circuit party producer” by Paper magazine — it was the event’s third year inside the Mirage, a cavernous former steel fabrication shop that an Austrian EDM promoter named Billy Bildstein has been inspired to make work as a “prehistorical amphitheater” based on a Wu-Tang Clan music video.

But Chen says trouble found him before he even entered the club’s doors. He would later detail these as “unwarranted and intrusive sexual assault by the security guards” that the Mirage had hired for the evening. What the Brooklyn Mirage might not have reckoned with, perhaps, was that Chen, among the estimated 7,500 people filling the enormous club, was a lawyer at a small New York firm called DGW Kramer. He had represented, for instance, the likes of real estate developers, Chinese textiles firms and Chinese construction companies, according to the firm. In the months since June’s Alegria Pride event, Chen has been busy collecting stories and making notable filings in Brooklyn state court. 

“Many attendees were touched repeatedly, sometimes without consent and sometimes despite specifically refusing to consent, in their intimate areas, forced to spread their legs for extensive periods of time, and made to take off their pants and underwear, bare themselves, and show their genitals and buttocks to the security and anyone else nearby,” Chen writes.