VIDEO SHOWS FEMALE NYPD CAPTAIN PUNCHING MALE CAPTAIN INSIDE ELEVATOR AT NYPD HEADQUARTERS. HE BEAT, CHOKED HER 4 MONTHS BEFORE, POLICE DID NOTHING
SEX HARASSMENT AND ABUSE OF NYPD WOMEN SO SEVERE, FREQUENT JURY COULD FIND IT AMOUNTED TO DE FACTO CITY POLICY, JUDGE SAYS
MALONE, NEW YORK Mar. 20, 2026 EXCLUSIVE
Just how bad is the sexual harassment and abuse female NYPD officers face?
It's so bad even female NYPD captains are preyed on and left to defend themselves alone. That's what shocking video obtained by The Free Lance News shows.
The video, from a surveillance camera inside an elevator at NYPD headquarters, captures a female NYPD captain punching fellow NYPD captain Hariton Marachilian in the face then pointing to the camera.
It happened four months after Marachilian beat, choked and stomped on the woman after a night out in New Jersey. Although two people called 9-1-1 to report the assault, and police confirmed her injuries, they let Marachilian go.
They also failed to let the NYPD know one of their captains came close to killing another one of their captains. Marachilian escaped arrest for months—leaving the female captain to fend for herself.
Back in New York, both of them were given precincts to command a month alter, which required them to attend weekly COMPSTAT meetings with all the NYPD's other precinct captains at NYPD headquarters once a week. Three months after that, they met in the elevator outside a cultural event being held there.
The Free Lance News knows the identity of the female captain but is withholding it at her lawyer's request because she has children of Google age.
The New Jersey Attorney General and Passaic County Prosecutor’s office fought for 2 ½ years to keep the video secret and related court records from the case secret. The Free Lance News won release of the video and the records in a precedent-setting appeals court decision in February.
Lately, hardly a week goes by without some kind of sexual harassment or abuse by NYPD officers making headlines.
On Wednesday, former New York City mayor Eric Adams was in the news when the City's Law Department asked a judge to allow it to stop representing Adams against a civil sex assault complaint from when he was an NYPD officer in 1993.
Last Friday, the Law Department dropped former NYPD chief Jeffrey B. Maddrey, who was promoted by then-mayor Adams to Chief-of-Department. Also dropped was former NYPD inspector Timothy Pearson—a close adviser to Adams. Both resigned after being accused of sexual harassment. Maddrey was even accused of sodomizing a woman in his 13th floor office at NYPD headquarters.
Its not just civil cases either. Earlier this month, an NYPD officer was indicted for raping a woman after a party in Brooklyn. In January, two Bronx cops pleaded guilty to felony sexual abuse for raping a drunk woman.
It's so bad attorney John A. Scola compiled a 687-paragraph legal complaint on behalf of NYPD Capt. Gabrielle Walls that reads like a Federal RICO indictment. It details a litany of sexual harassment and abuse inflicted on female NYPD officers by male NYPD officers.
On Mar. 3, State Supreme Court Justice Hasa N. Kingo denied the City's request to dismiss the complaint. Justice Kingo ruled the allegations "serve to establish a broader pattern of discrimination, demonstrating that the City was aware or should have been aware of the systemic issues within the department."
Four months before their encounter at police headquarters, Capt. Marachilian beat, stomped and choked the female NYPD captain after a night out partying with friends in Patterson, New Jersey on Dec. 10, 2022.
Two eyewitnesses saw it and called 9-1-1. Darrin Wilson called first. He drove up behind Marachillian's SUV and saw him lying on top of his fellow NYPD captain on the street beside it.
"The woman was obviously in distress," Wilson told NYPD internal affairs investigator Sgt. Ronnie Couchi eight months later, on Aug. 29, 2023, according to a recording of that conversation obtained by The Free Lance News.
"It looked like he forced her," Wilson told Sgt. Couchi. "He was forcing her."
Wilson said he honked the horn of his car until Marachilian let the woman up.
"She came toward me," Wilson recalled, "She told me to 'Call the police' That's when I called the police."
But the female NYPD captain got back in Marachilian's SUV and they drove away. Wilson followed because that’s how concerned he was about her safety—until the 9-1-1 dispatcher told him to stop.
"I was wondering what happened to her all these months," Wilson told Sgt. Couchi. "Is she still alive?"
Marachilian stopped at the end of a nearby dead-end street. He stopped in front of Alexis Vasquez's mother's house, where Vasquez was spending the night. When Marachilian started beating and choking the female NYPD captain in front of the house, Vasquez called 9-1-1.
"He was beating the shit out of her," Vasquez said, according to a recording of that conversation made by Sgt. Couchi and obtained by The Free Lance News. "He was stomping her out."
"She was screaming her ass off," Vasquez added. "My mom was terrified too."
"She was trying to leave," Vasquez said about the victim. "Every chance she got she was trying to leave."
Marachilian kept pulling her back. That's when Vasquez called 9-1-1 a second time.
"I called the cops again," he told Sgt. Couchi. "I'm like, 'Yo, she's about to get killed you'all need to get up here fast.'"
When police finally arrived, Vasquez said, they did something he thought surprising and strange: "But then they let the guy go."
Photographs of the female NYPD captain brutally attacked by fellow NYPD Capt. Harriton Marachilian on Dec. 10, 2023. Photo credit: unknown, via New Jersey court records.
Patterson police let Marachilian go because he told them "We're both captains" and "you're gonna fucking fuck careers up bro,” body-camera video of the encounter shows, according to a transcript of the recording obtained by The Free Lance News.
Marachilian called what happened a "verbal dispute" over "my half on the tab" at the nightclub they'd been partying at. But then he admitted "She's married. I'm married. We're having an affair."
"It's gonna look bad, man," Marachilian pleaded. "I got, it's gonna look bad."
Police let him go also because the woman declined an ambulance, said "I don't remember" when asked how she was injured and told them her and Marachilian were just "friends."
The female NYPD captain texted a friend later and explained why she stayed silent. Marachilian threatened her life and even stalked her husband, text messages obtained by The Free Lance News show.
"U have no idea the terror I've been thru," the woman texted. "I prayed to god every night to get rid of him."
"Dec. 9-10 New Jersey cops didn't call NYPD," she added. "Against protocol I thought I was saved that night."
Eight months later, when the NYPD finally launched an internal affairs investigation, she signed a statement reporting:
"He said 'Remember the pictures' meaning if I tell who beat me up, he will send the pics to all using the nypd via email and whats app," the female NYPD captain's signed statement says.
She added: "He also always told me if anything happens to him work wise, he will never rest until he destroys me and he will have nothing to lose and nothing but time to get me."
Because of the threats, she explained to NYPD internal affairs investigators, when the Patterson police "asked if he did this to me, I shook my head no, they asked if I wanted an ambulance, I shook my head no. I hoped they weren't going to just accept that."
But they did accept it "and they DIDN'T CALL IAB for me either" she texted—using the initials of the Internal Affairs Bureau.
"I wasn't even taken away from him or given time or anyone to speak to. I couldn't call anyone while I sat either," she added in her statement. "I was just reeling and bloody from the beating."
"I was shocked they didn't do anything," she concluded.
At first, Patterson police were even going to let Marachilian drive away with her. But she got out of his SUV and into a police car. The cops got her mobile phone from the driver's side door of Marachilian's SUV and she called a friend to pick her up.
That night, Marachilian texted her that if anybody asked about her injuries, "Just say car accident last night in New Jersey."
She went to the hospital the next day, where a doctor documented her injuries, medical reports from that visit show.
Later Marachilian gave the woman $15,000 in cash, two signed and notarized confessions and said he'd stop pursuing her.
Text message by female NYPD captain to a friend after she was almost choked to death by NYPD Captain Hariton Marachilian. A month after the attack, both of them were given precincts to command by the NYPD. She says she went to the interview for the command still bearing two black eyes from the attack. Photo credit: unknown, via New Jersey court records.
Days later, she interviewed to be captain of the 50th Precinct in the Bronx. She got the job.
"I. Got pct a week later with black eyes at the interview," she texted a friend.
A native of the West Bank and the Bronx, she was the first Muslim woman to be a precinct captain in NYPD history. She reportedly flew the Palestinian flag at her promotion ceremony—another NYPD first. From the comfort of a university chair, a culture critic even questioned the significance of her accomplishment.
Marachilian was given a precinct too: the 90th in Brooklyn in January 2023.
This even though the Marine veteran of the Iraq War first gained New York Post-level infamy in 2020 for allegedly asking another fellow NYPD captain, Sharon Carolyn Balli, if she and her husband had "great sex." The City settled her suit for $800,000 in December 2021, court records show.
Since Marachilian and the woman were both precinct captains, they both had to attend weekly COMPSTAT meetings on Thursdays in the Jack Maple COMPSTAT Center at NYPD headquarters. They likely encountered each other at one of those meetings before she punched him in the elevator outside the Muslim Officer Society's Ramadan Iftar dinner in the auditorium at NYPD headquarters on Apr. 6, 2023.
Dr. Chitra Raghavan, Director of The Forensic Mental Health Counseling Program and Coordinator of Victimology Studies in Forensic Psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the female NYPD captain's behavior was typical for abused women.
"Victims are so desperate," Dr. Raghavan said. "They do things that on some level feel self-destructive or risky."
"It could be a desperate cry for help," she added. "When people feel cornered they do things that might seem crazy to the outside world."
But if punching Marachilian in front of NYPD security cameras inside NYPD headquarters was a desperate cry for help, no one was listening. No one in the NYPD bothered to ask her, "Why did you punch him and point to our camera?"
It wasn't until another woman, a dancer, secured a restraining order against Marachilian on July 28, 2023 that the NYPD finally opened an internal affairs investigation. That woman alleged Marachilian choked her to the point she almost blacked out during sex, according to the legal paperwork she filed asking a judge to issue the restraining order. At first she thought it was a fetish, but the way he did it made her scared, her legal filing says. She also suspected he drugged her.
Then Marachilian and the female NYPD captain ran into the dancer at a cultural festival where she told the female captain they'd had sex.
Marachilian flipped out when the dancer moved to show the captain the text messages he'd sent her.
"The def became aggressive and became even more angry and went nuts calling pla a whore," the legal filing says.
Using abbreviations for "plaintiff" and "defendant," the filing alleged "The def is mentally unstable, aggressive, angry man who should not be in possession of a gun." Referring to Marachilian's job as a police officer, the dancer wrote she "does not understand how the def could be in his position being so scary and so aggressive. Pla fears for her life."
It was this restraining order that finally caused the NYPD to start investigating Marachilian in August 2023. The NYPD alsorelieved both Marachilian and the female NYPD captain of their precinct commands.
Marachilian was arrested three months later, on Dec. 1, 2023. He was extradited to New Jersey and held without bail after a Dec. 15 hearing. He pleaded guilty to aggravated assault by strangulation on Feb. 18, 2025. He was sentenced to three years in prison. He's eligible for parole in three months—on June 18. His sentence has not been previously reported.
Marachilian did not respond to an emailed invitation to comment.
When contacted for comment on Thursday, all the NYPD's press office would say was "The Captain retired in 2023."
The female NYPD captain remains an NYPD captain, without a command. She declined to comment through her lawyer, Mina Q. Malik, CEO and Executive Partner at The Cochran Firm.
After two NYPD commissioners resigned two months apart in late 2024, and Jessica Tisch was given the top cop spot by then-Mayor Eric Adams, Tisch vowed "we are consciously and decisively turning the page to ensure that we always match the lofty ideals and values that make this department the envy of the world."
Tisch's declaration came days after Maddrey, then the NYPD's Chief-of-Department, resigned in disgrace after Lt. Quathisha Epps accused him of coercing her "into performing unwanted sexual favors."
The three Patterson police officers who let Marachilian go were indicted on felony official misconduct charges in 2024. Juan R. Cruz-Fernandez, Justin D. Schmid and Giuseppe Ciarla each face as long as 10 years in prison if convicted. The charges remain pending.
Charles J. Sciarra, attorney for Schmid, told The Free Lance News “We have learned through discovery about the violent, toxic lengthy relationship between these two Police Captains who brought their escapades to Paterson New Jersey and embroiled my client and other officers in their deceit and subterfuge."
"As more is learned," Sciarra added, "we are hopeful the New Jersey Prosecutor’s Office will abandon the unfortunate charges against my client.”
Ciarla's attorney, Eric V. Kleiner, said his client "made the right call."
"Sergeant Ciarla is 100% innocent and we look forward to vindicating Sergeant Ciarla in this matter and having him back on duty doing his job as soon as possible."
"Experts are lined up to testify for him that not only was his thought process in deciding to arrest or not make an arrest flawlessly analyzed," Kleiner revealed, but "this type of police decision making has never been criminalized as far as we know ever in the history of this country."
An attorney for Cruz-Fernandez did not respond to an invitation to comment. A secretary in her office said it was because she was defending someone all week at a trial.
Dr. Raghavan, John Jay's domestic violence expert, offered some relationship advice to anyone questioning whether they should leave a relationship. Feeling trapped was one sign that relationship is not healthy and should be ended.
Especially if there are even subtle threats or blackmail attempts.
Dr. Raghavan explained that at the start of a relationship, "We all make decisions in the moment that address a want, or a need, or a vulnerability." If that changes over the course of a relationship, it's because we find out more about the other person, or "more about who we are—that doesn't mean we failed."
"You have to be OK to change without shame or blame," Dr. Raghavan advised. "Be really kind with yourself."
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