When Eric Adams was still mayor, the city agreed to pay the lawyers representing senior aide Timothy Pearson in four lawsuits alleging sexual harassment and retaliation.
Soon after Adams left City Hall, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration abruptly reversed course, moving to cut off all city funding of Pearson’s defense. By then, the law firm Wilson Elser had racked up more than $760,000 in bills defending the retired police inspector.
This week Pearson fought back.
On Thursday Peter Brill, a new lawyer representing Pearson, filed legal papers demanding that the city continue paying for his legal representation, claiming that Steven Banks, Mamdani’s corporation counsel, had no legal basis to stop funding Pearson’s defense.
Pearson was one of Adams’ most notorious associates, a longtime pal of the mayor from their days in the NYPD who was ultimately forced to resign in early September 2024.
The resignation came days after the FBI and the city’s Department of Investigation hit him with a search warrant and confiscated his phone in an ongoing probe of corruption in the top levels of the Adams administration. That same morning law enforcement agents also seized the phones of several other senior Adams aides, including the city’s first deputy mayor, schools chancellor, deputy mayor for public safety and police commissioner.
By then Pearson was facing multiple accusations, starting with a DOI probe of an accusation that he’d slapped a security guard while attempting to inspect a migrant shelter in Manhattan in October 2023. The guard claimed Pearson became irate and ultimately violent after he was asked to present his identification. (DOI would later determine he’d abused his authority).
Timothy Pearson, center, traveled with then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams to Turkey in 2015. Credit: Via Freedom of Information Request
Then, in March 2024, attorney John Scola filed the first of four lawsuits against Pearson and the city, accusing him of sexually harassing a female subordinate in his position at the city Economic Development Corp., where Adams had tasked him with monitoring the rollout of city-funded shelters to house the wave of migrants arriving in New York City.
The lawsuits charged that Pearson made inappropriate statements, then retaliated against the woman after she complained to her supervisors. Some of the supervisors then alleged Pearson — using his clout with the mayor — engineered demotions and undesirable transfers after they backed up her claims.
Under Adams, the Corporation Counsel immediately agreed to pay his legal bills in the lawsuits, funding that is only allowed if the city determines that the employee was “acting within the scope of his or her employment” and that the allegations were “not in violation of city rules and regulations.”
In March, after Council Speaker Julie Menin questioned that funding during Banks’ confirmation hearing, the newly appointed corporation counsel notified Pearson the city would no longer pay his legal bills. Banks declared that Pearson’s actions as described in the lawsuits “violated the rules and regulations” of the agency for which he worked, and that he was “not forthcoming or truthful” during an interview with the corporation counsel when he first requested taxpayer backing.
Soon after, Wilson Elser asked the court for permission to withdraw as his counsel.
On Thursday Pearson’s new lawyer, Brill, demanded that the judge deny Wilson Elser’s withdrawal motion and require the city to continue funding his representation. Brill contended that Banks had not provided any specific examples of how Pearson had violated city rules and has to date revealed no evidence that he’d lied to city lawyers.
In papers filed with the court, Pearson denied the allegations spelled out in the lawsuits and said, “I have cooperated fully with my attorneys in contesting those allegations” and “did not withhold any information during the interview” with the Law Department in 2024.
Pearson contended that “to strip that representation from me based on a termination letter that identifies no specific wrongdoing, no specific evidence, no specific change in circumstances… would cause me immediate and irreparable financial and legal harm.”
The city is also a defendant in the Pearson lawsuits.
“We notified Wilson Elser on March 13th that we would no longer pay for Pearson’s representation,” Law Department spokesperson Nicholas Paolucci said in a statement. “No payments have been made to the firm since that letter was sent. However, Wilson Elser continues to represent the City of New York which is also a defendant in these matters.”
Pearson’s lawyer, Brill, did not return THE CITY’s call seeking comment.
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