Alleged attacker: She’s lying
LAWYERS FOR the city’s welfare agency have turned the tables on an employee who is suing the department for sexual assault.
They got her alleged attacker to say she is lying.
The Human Resources Administration considered Margaret Tarulli a hero a decade ago when the security officer performed CPR on a teenage girl who had collapsed onto subway tracks in Brooklyn.
But years after she accused a co-worker of sexual assault, officials at the department said she falsified the story — and got her alleged attacker to back them up.
City lawyers recently filed an affidavit from Tarulli’s alleged attacker, Fernando Figueroa, in which he says that the 2005 encounter in a windowless room in a lower Manhattan child support services building was consensual.
Tarulli, 52, said she struggled over what to do at the time, but reported the attack to a supervisor the next day.
She said she was terrified of what she could face if authorities took his side and viewed her as a troublemaker.
The Staten Island mom, who had previously worked as a medical assistant, was a probationary hire and her job was not guaranteed.
She said she wanted to leave the room but he yanked her head down by the hair and forced her to perform oral sex.
She said she was in no position to fight him off, having problems with her neck because of a childhood bout with cancer. In 2011, she was also diagnosed with breast cancer.
“If this is consensual, why are my clothes ripped? The office was a wreck. I knocked the phone off the desk, I was trying to make noise,” Tarulli said Thursday.
The quick-thinking security cop saved what she says is evidence, including her ripped shirt and semen she had collected on a napkin while cleaning herself.
She said in a lawsuit filed in 2009 against the HRA that the agency failed to investigate, even though she told her supervisor the next day. Th*e harassment at work only continued, according to Tarulli, though Figueroa was stationed at 250 Church St., their headquarters, and not 151 West Broadway, the site of the alleged attack.
“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” Figueroa allegedly asked her on the phone during work hours.
He also insisted she meet him again, but she resisted, according to court documents.
Figueroa, now a Customs and Border Patrol Agent in Arizona, was named in the lawsuit along with the city, the agency’s former commissioner and other supervisors.
But he could not be located by Tarulli’s legal team to be served and it is now too late to sue him.
Instead, he has stepped up to help the city defend itself against the claims.
“The allegation is completely false,” Figueroa said in an affidavit. “Ms. Tarulli did perform oral sex on me … but it was a fully consensual act.”
He claims that Tarulli came on to him the second he walked in the door and asked him to exert his “dominance.”
That couldn’t be further from the truth, said Tarulli, who is still employed by HRA but is on leave for an injury.
“I think it’s more depressing than anything,” she said. “I sit here and tell myself, what did I do wrong?”
She says that “as a woman,” she anticipated the consent argument and being blamed in some way.
Tarulli’s lawsuit also claims a pattern of retaliation by the agency and its members following her report. She said she has been transferred repeatedly, most recently to a post in Harlem that is hours from her home.
She was passed over for a promotion and wrongly accused of misbehaving on the job, according to the suit.
A Law Department spokesman said the allegations were not substantiated.Figueroa could not be reached for comment.