New York
Mariano Rivera Denies Covering Up a Report of Sex Abuse
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll look at a lawsuit that accuses Mariano Rivera, the Yankees Hall of Famer, and his wife of covering up the sexual abuse of a minor.
Mariano Rivera, a 17-season closer for the Yankees, and his wife, Clara, were accused in a lawsuit of failing to protect a young girl by reporting sexual abuse that she had endured and that they knew about. The lawsuit was filed in Westchester County, N.Y., on behalf of the girl and her mother, whose identities were concealed for their privacy.
Joseph A. Ruta, the Riveras’ lawyer, strongly denied the allegations in a statement on Thursday.
“Mariano and Clara Rivera do not tolerate child abuse of any kind, and allegations that they knew about or failed to act on reports of child abuse are completely false,” the statement said.
The suit says that the girl was an active member of the Refuge for Hope Church in New Rochelle, N.Y., which the Riveras helped found and where Clara Rivera was a pastor.
In 2018, Clara Rivera advised the girl’s mother that she should send her daughter to a summer internship program operated by a sister church in Gainesville, Fla., called the Ignite Life Center, according to the suit. The Ignite Life Center and Refuge of Hope churches are part of the broader Assemblies of God denomination and organization.
Refuge of Hope paid for the girl to attend the program, and she stayed in a dorm with other children, without parental supervision, the complaint says. The girl, who was about 11 years old at the time, was repeatedly sexually assaulted by an older female camper while she was in the Florida program, the complaint adds.
The girl’s mother became worried for her daughter’s safety after speaking with her and brought her concern to Ms. Rivera, who said she would investigate the matter and respond accordingly, court records say.
According to the complaint, the Riveras flew down to Florida and received information that suggested the girl was being abused but did not report it and “intimidated” the girl into silence to “avoid the potential scandal of child sexual abuse” in the Refuge of Hope programs.
The complaint says the girl was assaulted again later that summer by the same camper during a barbecue for church youths at the Riveras’ home in Rye, N.Y. She was also sexually assaulted several times and forced to engage in explicit communications by another church employee about three years later, the complaint adds.
The suit alleges that neither the church, its employees nor the Riveras did anything to report the abuse or properly investigate it. In December, Assemblies of God affiliates in Florida settled three lawsuits in connection with allegations of sexual assaults of minors, and a former Ignite Life Center staffer also took a plea agreement in a case linked to sexual abuse charges.
Ruta said the Riveras had not learned about the accusations until 2022, when a lawyer in New York sent them a letter requesting a financial settlement, nearly four years after the abuse reportedly occurred. He said the couple had received another letter a year later from a law firm in Florida, again requesting a financial settlement.
“The lawsuit, which seeks financial damages for the Riveras’ alleged failure to act on alleged incidents that were never reported to them, is full of inaccurate and misleading statements which we have no doubt will not hold up in a court of law,” Ruta said.
Weather
Prepare for a sunny sky with a breeze and a high near 32. Tonight will remain breezy with a mostly clear sky and a low near 19.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).
The latest New York news
METROPOLITAN diary
Familiar Feeling
Dear Diary:
I started traveling to New York City from my hometown, Toronto, in the early 2000s. I would visit once or twice a year, usually with my children. As they have gotten older, I’ve been making my annual trip solo.
On my most recent trip, in November 2024, I stayed near Lincoln Center. When it was time to leave, the hotel doorman hailed me a taxi to take me to the airport.
After I got into the cab, the driver and I began chatting about the delicious smelling rice and oxtail stew his wife had just dropped off for him. He told me we had spoken previously about Indian and Senegalese food. I must have looked confused because he then claimed that he knew me.
I said that my son’s girlfriend was from India and that she had made us a feast for Diwali the year before. The driver nodded and said I had told him that before.
I had not been to New York in a year and was incredulous that this man could possibly have remembered a random conversation with a passenger from 12 months ago.
Then, suddenly, I remembered him, too. He had told me the last time we spoke that he was sending one of his teenage children to live with his parents for a while so they could get to know one another.
He explained this time that the child was back home and that all had gone well.
After getting out of the cab at the airport, I turned back to him.
“Thank you,” I said. “See you next year!”
— Patricia O’Connell
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
New York
An Anne Frank Exhibition in New York
Good morning. It’s Monday. We’ll look at a new Anne Frank exhibition opening in the city today, which is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A new Anne Frank exhibition will open at the Center for Jewish History in New York today, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and will remain there for three months before moving on to other cities.
“Anne Frank the Exhibition” is a full-scale re-creation of the annex where Anne and her family hid from the Nazis from July 1942 to August 1944 in Amsterdam, and where she wrote her diary. The show has more than 100 original artifacts and examines Anne’s life and death. This is the first time the annex has been completely reconstructed outside Amsterdam, my colleague Laurel Graeber reported.
The exhibition aims to show “how this history, how this memory will go into the 21st century,” Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, said in an interview with Laurel. It comes to New York as antisemitism is rising in the United States and abroad.
The reconstructed annex has five rooms. Each room has the exact details and dimensions as its counterpart at the Anne Frank House, which more than 1.2 million people visit each year. Unlike the original space, which has been intentionally left empty, each room in the exhibition is filled with furniture and possessions, including books and a board game. It also has a facsimile of the diary; the original is in Amsterdam.
The presence of furniture and other possessions in the exhibition could stir controversy. Agnes Mueller, a professor and fellow in Jewish Studies at the University of South Carolina and a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, said her instinct told her that when Otto Frank, Anne’s father, decided to keep the original annex empty, he was worried about commercialization and universalization of her persona.
“He actually emphasized absence as a way to represent that which is not representable,” Mueller told Laurel. The sight of an annex room filled with possessions, she said, “might induce us to feel way too good about things that we should not feel good about.”
Anne was 13 when she went into hiding, and the installation follows a chronological path, tracing her family’s life in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1920s through their flight to Amsterdam. One of its introductory rooms uses a montage of film and photos to recreate the atmosphere of Amsterdam in the early 1940s. After that, visitors enter the annex.
“We all know that the diary is about the two years in hiding,” said Tom Brink, the head of collections and presentations at the Amsterdam house and the traveling exhibition’s curator. “But of course, the story is much bigger than that. It starts earlier, it ends later, and that entire story and entire journey deserves to be told.”
The exhibition also chronicles Anne’s father’s return from Auschwitz. He was the sole survivor of the eight Jews who hid in the annex, and pursued the publication of Anne’s diary. In the New York installation, 79 editions of it in different languages are on display, along with memorabilia from theatrical and film adaptations.
Leopold said the immersive elements of the show were meant to take people, especially youths, back in time. The Center for Jewish History has already booked more than 250 school tours of the show, and weekday tickets for visitors under 18 years old are available for $16. The exhibition, a nonprofit venture whose revenues support the missions of its two presenting partners, also provides curriculum materials to classes and free admission to students attending as part of New York City public-school field trips and to those from schools nationwide receiving federal education funding.
There will be programming for adults as well. Tomorrow evening, the author Ruth Franklin (“The Many Lives of Anne Frank”) will be interviewed at the center. On Feb. 9, the novelist Alice Hoffman (“When We Flew Away”) will appear there, and the center will also host a film series. (An extension of the show in New York is under consideration; more venues will be announced in the spring.)
Leopold said that he hoped the show would inspire engagement as well as reflection.
“If this exhibition is doing anything, it’s not just teaching history,” he said. “It is also teaching about ourselves.”
Weather
Expect sunny skies with a high near 39; the wind will make it feel colder. Tonight, there will be high winds with a cloudy sky and a low near 32.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Tuesday (Lunar New Year’s Eve).
The latest New York news
Dear Diary:
Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.He’s got best sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’ —
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.— Lou Craft
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. James Barron is back tomorrow. L.F.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
New York
‘ I Heard a Man Behind Me Explaining the Work to His Group’
Artful
Dear Diary:
My trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art typically include a stop to see Seurat’s Study for “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte,” a precursor to his much larger “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”
That painting, almost certainly the artist’s best known, has been viewed by countless visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago, and by many others who have seen a certain popular 1980s movie in which the piece has a small, but meaningful, role.
On my most recent visit to the Met, I heard a man behind me explaining the work to his group: And there’s another one at the Art Institute of Chicago that’s three times as big as this one, he said.
I turned around.
“You really know your stuff,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “I saw ‘Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.’”
— James Devitt
Bathtub in the Kitchen
Dear Diary:
Now he’s sleeping the sleep of a dead man,
In a flat on the Lower East Side.
Oh, we tussled and wrestled,
Then we spooned and we nestled.
He’s a master of love, and I’m satisfied.
But I’m leavin’ that boy on 10th Street,
There is something that I cannot ignore.
Much too glaring and numbing,
Has to do with the plumbing.
Turns out it’s an undeniable flaw.
He’s got best-sellers and electronic toys,
He likes clean fun and connubial joys.
Now I don’t care he’s not rich an’—
Still it breaks my heart.
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(I have to wash my back with a roasting rack.)
What a daunting dilemma,
After scarfing up the lamb vindaloo.
It just isn’t nice ’cause when I scrape off the rice,
Gotta move all the sponges and the Prell shampoo.
Yeah, we like our sushi and our bagels and lox,
Our steaming pizza fresh right outta the box.
All of our dinners are quite bewitchin’
But it tears me up —
He’s got a bathtub in the kitchen.
(Gotta wash my toes with a rinsing hose.)
It doesn’t matter that he’s great in the sack,
I know for sure that I won’t ever be back.
He’s intelligent and kind, but I still have my gripes,
Don’t want bathroom water in the kitchen pipes.
Now, I’m no stranger to heartache,
Trouble has knocked at my door.
But I’ll go it alone and I won’t answer the phone,
Leave his gritty Ajax and his strange décor.
Adios my man, keep your fryin’ pan.
Later for you bachelor and your ladle and your spatula.
You’ve got a bathtub in the kitchen.
— Lou Craft
Sounds of the ’60s
Dear Diary:
I was taking an uptown express to the Upper West Side. A trim, older man with a well-worn accordion got on at 34th Street.
He immediately jumped into a set of ’60s rock classics. Man, he rocked. Among the highlights was his version of the 1966 Rolling Stones hit “Paint It Black.”
As we both prepared to get off at 96th Street, I gave him a nod of approval and put some money in his cup.
He grinned and rushed toward the uptown local that was waiting across the platform.
He said, “96th Street, ‘96 Tears.’”
— Chris Parnagian
Northbound Traffic
Dear Diary:
It was about 10 years ago. I was in the passenger seat of our Toyota, my husband was at the wheel and we were stuck in northbound traffic on the West Side Highway.
It was warm out, and we had the windows down. I had a copy of “Life of Pi,” with its distinctive blue dust jacket and orange spine, on my lap.
I heard a man’s voice that sounded like it was next to me but much higher up. It turned out it was coming from the open window of a cab on a tractor-trailer that was idling next to us.
“Great book,” the voice said.
I looked up and saw the truck’s driver looking down at me. His elbow was resting on the edge of the open window. Beneath it was a copy of “Life of Pi,” open so I could see the dust jacket.
“Great book!” I said.
Slowly, traffic began to move.
— Connie Beckley
What Will You Have?
Dear Diary:
It was lunchtime in Midtown, and the deli counter line snaked its way along a refrigerated unit filled with cheeses, salamis and tomatoes.
It was all new to me, a recent arrival from Ireland. Finally, it was my turn to order.
“Yeah?” the counterman said.
“Do you have whole wheat?” I asked.
The counterman furrowed his brow and nodded.
“Do you have Cheddar?”
“Yes.”
“Do you … ”
I felt a tap on my shoulder.
Turning around, I saw a short, older man wearing a pork pie hat and a bow tie and peering at me though his glasses.
“Stop asking questions,” he said. “Tell him what you want.”
— Tommy Weir
Read all recent entries and our submissions guidelines. Reach us via email diary@nytimes.com or follow @NYTMetro on Twitter.
Illustrations by Agnes Lee
New York
N.Y. Migrants Fear Expulsion After Trump Expands Deportation Targets
Marlon Luna said he and his girlfriend came into the United States three months ago after fleeing death threats in Venezuela. They waited in Mexico for four long months to secure a Border Patrol appointment instead of crossing illegally. Then they wound up in a New York migrant shelter.
Now, they fear that New York — and America — may be over for them.
On Thursday, the Trump administration issued a memo that widened the scope of people it would seek to deport, including those who, like Mr. Luna, used CBP One, a mobile app, to enter the country.
The Biden administration had used the app to manage the movement of 900,000 migrants through legal ports of entry. Mr. Luna, 23, said he had assumed that if he followed the rules he would have a fair shake. Now, he fears, deportation could happen at any time.
“Some people crossed illegally, but some people wanted to enter in the way that one should,” he said in Spanish outside a Randall’s Island shelter on Friday. “What we are hearing here, and really what everyone is saying, is that at any moment something could happen.”
For nearly three years, thousands of migrants have come to New York City under Biden-era programs that allowed migrants from Venezuela, Haiti and elsewhere to legally enter the United States and temporarily remain for as long as two years. Now the Homeland Security Department has empowered Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to expel those with a temporary legal status known as parole, which also allows migrants to work here.
The new directive could have an outsize impact in New York City, where more than 225,000 migrants have arrived since early 2022, many under parole. It raised the possibility that the city’s 187 migrant shelters, where more than 49,000 people still reside, would be prime targets if ICE aggressively pursues migrants allowed in under the Biden administration.
The action in Washington came as officials in New York City, a liberal stronghold with an additional 400,000-some immigrants with temporary or no legal status, have been bracing for an immigration crackdown.
The city has so-called sanctuary laws, which limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. City agencies have been racing to issue guidance to schools, shelters and social services offices on how to respond if ICE officers show up.
In a message to agency heads last month, Camille Joseph Varlack, who is chief of staff to Mayor Eric Adams, said that leaders would “stand firmly by the values that have made New York City a thriving city of immigrants, regardless of immigration status.”
However, Mr. Adams’s public messaging and remarks have done little to reassure people who work with immigrants and his fellow Democrats, instead creating a sense of dissonance and discombobulation.
Mr. Adams has denigrated aspects of the sanctuary laws and expressed support for modifying them to allow the city to work with ICE to deport people charged with crimes — all while declining to publicly criticize Mr. Trump. The mayor faces a trial on federal corruption charges in April and has moved to stay in the good graces of Mr. Trump, who could pardon him.
On Thursday evening, when Mr. Adams was asked about a newly issued Justice Department memo that threatens prosecution for local officials who fail to comply with the president’s immigration initiatives, the mayor signaled that he was inclined to cooperate.
“If the federal government is stating that you cannot interfere with the actions, we can’t do anything that is going to jeopardize city employees,” Mr. Adams said, adding, “We need to read through these executive orders and fully understand what they’re saying, what our authorizations may be and what they are not.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Adams said in a statement Friday that the mayor believes that “federal immigration enforcement should be focused on the small number of people who are entering our localities and committing violent crimes.”
She added, “While the mayor and president will not always agree on everything, Mayor Adams is focused on how we can work together to do what is best for New York City.”
The measured tone from City Hall was in contrast with that of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat. She, along with 10 other attorneys general, responded to the Justice Department memo with a fiery statement: “These vague threats are just that: empty words on paper,” the statement said. “But rest assured, our states will not hesitate to respond if these words become illegal actions.”
Under current city guidelines, federal immigration authorities can only be allowed into a shelter if they have judicial warrants for specific people. Some immigration lawyers said that they had not heard of ICE showing up at New York City shelters since the migrant crisis began almost three years ago.
But they speculated whether that would change soon if Mr. Trump decides to go after migrants who entered using CBP One or under the program that allows certain migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti to legally stay for as long as two years. Mr. Trump and his allies have long criticized the programs as tactics abused by the Biden administration to allow illegal immigration under the guise of legal migration, and have moved quickly to end them.
“They’re intending to cast as wide a net as possible to really try to remove as many people who were admitted in the last two years,” said Jodi Ziesemer, the co-director of the Immigrant Protection Unit at the New York Legal Assistance Group. “We’re talking about tens of thousands of people, mostly families, who could be rounded up and deported. They’re very vulnerable.”
Accomplishing the directives in the Homeland Security memo would be a significant escalation of arrests and deportations, and would present a daunting logistical challenge. Some of the immigrants might have other legal shields, such as asylum or Temporary Protected Status, lawyers said. It might also prove hard for the United States to deport people to Venezuela, given the severely strained diplomatic relations between the countries.
Migrants in city shelters, many of whom speak scant English, were left to parse Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive orders and directives this week. Many wondered whether the asylum claims they have filed in immigration court would offer them a level of protection. Rumors of ICE officers showing up at shelters have swirled in conversations and text messages. Some migrants said they were limiting their time outside the shelters, while others were urgently trying to leave the system altogether, fearful that they could be easy targets.
Pedro Cumana, a Venezuelan living in a small tent outside the Randall’s Island shelter, said in an interview in Spanish that when helicopters have flown over or sirens have gone off at night this week, he has poked his head outside, wondering whether it’s immigration officials or a routine police run.
“I haven’t been able to sleep well,” said Mr. Cumana, who has a hearing related to his asylum claim this month. “I feel uncertain. I’m not sure how to feel, because what if at my own court hearing they arrest me? It’s not easy. You don’t know what to expect.”
Immigration lawyers and activists expressed outrage at the memo’s suggestion that immigration officials could retroactively strip migrants of parole status and seek to move them from formal deportation proceedings to a sped-up exit.
“The barrage of things that have happened this past week is very intentional, obviously,” said Deborah Lee, the lawyer in charge of the immigration law unit at The Legal Aid Society. “But it’s also intended to be so overwhelming that people cannot fight back and make legal challenges because of the full volume of everything.”
Still, other migrants, like Ramon Cortez, 43, also from Venezuela, refused to panic about what was brewing in the news and on social media. Mr. Cortez, who arrived in New York two months ago after using the CBP One app to enter the country, said in an interview in Spanish that he would not fret until he received official notice that he was at risk of deportation.
“If I receive a formal document, a court or something that tells me, ‘This is going to happen there,’ I’m going to start to believe what they’re saying,” he said.
Wesley Parnell, Olivia Bensimon and Dana Rubinstein contributed reporting.
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