Jeffrey Maddrey ran the largest police force in the country. Now he is in Manhattan Supreme Court arguing that you, the New York City taxpayer, should be paying the lawyers defending him against four lawsuits that accuse him of helping cover up sexual harassment. The city’s answer, in writing, is that Maddrey only qualified for that taxpayer-funded defense because he lied to get it.
The suit was first flagged in Hell Gate’s June 4 morning newsletter, which described Timothy Pearson, the man at the center of the underlying cases, as a disgraced former mayoral advisor and Maddrey’s old friend.
Maddrey held the title of Chief of Department, the highest uniformed rank in the NYPD, the position directly below the Police Commissioner. He resigned in December 2024 shortly after a subordinate, Lieutenant Quathisha Epps, accused him of demanding sexual favors in exchange for overtime, per Hell Gate’s accountability tracker on Maddrey. Epps was the NYPD’s highest-paid employee that year, earning $403,515 in fiscal year 2024, including $204,453.48 in overtime on top of a $164,477 base salary, and out-earning Maddrey himself, who made $292,069, according to Yahoo News. The NYPD later demanded roughly $230,000 of that overtime back from her, according to Yahoo News.
That overtime scandal is not what the current fight is about, but it is the reason Maddrey is a former chief and not a sitting one. The four civil lawsuits at issue here were filed in 2024 and accuse Maddrey of retaliation, workplace discrimination, and helping conceal sexual harassment allegations involving Pearson, who served as former Mayor Eric Adams’s powerful public safety advisor at City Hall, according to Patch.
When those suits landed, the city agreed to cover Maddrey’s defense and assigned him outside lawyers, the same arrangement it made for Pearson. New York’s General Municipal Law lets a municipality defend an employee sued over actions taken in the scope of the job. It also lets the city withdraw that defense if the employee violated agency rules or refused to cooperate with an investigation, per Patch. The city is now leaning on that second clause.
The position changed in March 2026 under Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new Corporation Counsel, Steven Banks, whom the City Council confirmed on February 12 by a 42-6 vote, according to amNewYork. In March, Banks notified Maddrey that investigators had obtained evidence showing he violated NYPD rules and provided false information during the interview used to determine whether he was eligible for city-funded representation, per Patch. The city says the screening that got Maddrey his free lawyers was built on his own false statements.
Banks did not stop at Maddrey. In the same March stretch he moved to drop the city’s defense of Pearson and, separately, of Adams in a sexual assault lawsuit, telling the court of the Adams case: “Based on my review of new evidence since the original decision to represent him was made, I have determined that he is not entitled to representation by the City in this matter,” per GV Wire. Mamdani’s law department reread the old Adams-era decisions and started pulling taxpayer money back.
The Law Department could not represent Pearson in-house because it was already representing one of his accusers in an unrelated matter, a conflict of interest, so it hired the outside firm Wilson Elser instead, according to Yahoo News. As of early January 2026, Wilson Elser had been paid $622,931 to represent Pearson alone in four suits brought by current and former NYPD employees, who allege he sexually harassed one of them and retaliated against the others, including by demoting them. The decision to use outside counsel was contentious enough that Adams’s first corporation counsel, Sylvia Hinds-Radix, resigned in summer 2024 partly over it.
Lincoln Restler, the Brooklyn City Council member who chairs the Council’s Governmental Operations Committee, called for exactly the review that followed. “It would be reasonable and appropriate for the Mamdani administration to conduct a review of former Adams administration officials who are receiving taxpayer-funded attorneys,” Restler said, per Yahoo News. At Banks’s February 4 confirmation hearing, council members, including Speaker Julie Menin, grilled him on how he would handle the Law Department’s existing suits, like its defense of Pearson, according to amNewYork.
So Maddrey sued. His attorney filed in Manhattan Supreme Court arguing the city’s decision lacked factual support and violated its own previous determination that he qualified for a defense under state law. He is asking for a court order requiring the city to disclose the evidence against him and to restore his coverage while the four underlying lawsuits play out, per Patch. Maddrey disputes the city’s claims and says officials have failed to produce the evidence behind the cutoff. The Law Department’s response was short. “The Corporation Counsel stands by his decision. We will respond to the filing accordingly,” a department spokesperson said, per Patch.
This is not Maddrey’s first credibility problem with city investigators. Hell Gate’s accountability tracker on Maddrey documents a 2016 lawsuit by officer Tabatha Foster seeking $100 million, in which Internal Affairs found Maddrey lied to investigators, yet leadership dropped the lying charges and penalized him only 45 vacation days, per Hell Gate. A separate civil suit by NYPD Captain Gabrielle Walls sought to add Maddrey as a defendant, alleging he made unwanted advances toward her starting in 2015, according to City & State New York. Maddrey has denied the misconduct allegations against him.
A man who reached the top of the NYPD is asking a court to force the public to fund his defense, and the public’s own lawyer says the only reason he ever got that funding is that he lied during the eligibility check. Whether Maddrey did anything wrong in the underlying suits is for those cases to decide. Who pays for the lawyers is being decided right now, and it is your money on the table.
If you want to track where that money goes, the New York City Law Department that Banks runs makes these representation calls, and the City Council’s Governmental Operations Committee chaired by Restler oversees how the city spends on outside counsel. Both take constituent comment. Watch the Maddrey filing in Manhattan Supreme Court: a ruling for him would reopen the spigot, and a ruling for the city would set the precedent for every other former Adams official still billing the public for a private defense.
Featured image: NYC Mayor’s Office / CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
