NYC settles suit by abused foster kids for $9.7M
New York City will pay $9.7 million to settle a lawsuit by 10 disabled people who were fraudulently adopted by a woman and claimed they were repeatedly abused, starved and imprisoned in a “house of horrors,” city officials announced Thursday.
The lawsuit was filed in 2009 in Brooklyn federal court on behalf of the children whom Judith Leekin, 67, adopted over an eight-year period ending in 1996.
The suit charged that Leekin was able to carry out a scam in which she fraudulently collected $1.68 million in adoption subsidies because the city’s Administration for Children’s Services didn’t do its job.