It has long been this publication's editorial position that professional awards are odious, the province of careerists and clubby self-congratulationists…unless one of us wins one, in which case professional awards are the judicious and rightful recognition of heroic achievement, and are, consequently, awesome.
You can imagine, then, the Hell Gate newsroom's reaction on Monday afternoon, when it was announced that the work of the newest member of our editorial team had been named as a finalist for a goddamned Pulitzer Prize.
Jessy Edwards came to Hell Gate from WNYC and Gothamist, where she wrote about, among other topics, chronic sexual violence against women locked up on Rikers Island. One of those stories, about a single correction officer accused of sexually assaulting two dozen incarcerated women, was the basis for a podcast episode that was announced yesterday as a finalist for the 2025 Pulitzer in audio reporting.
Because we love her and we believe in celebrating our colleagues, we decided to engage in some light meta-journalism and devote this morning's Spew to a Q&A with Jessy about the story, how she got it, and what it's like to be blindsided by the Pulitzer committee on a Monday afternoon.
Hell Gate: Holy shit, Jessy! Pulitzer finalist! How did you learn about this award?
Jessy Edwards: I was actually on a call for a story that I'm doing for Hell Gate that I'm really excited about. And in the middle of it, I got a call from Samantha Max, one of my former colleagues at Gothamist, who I worked on the story with last year. I saw the transcript of the voicemail pop up saying, "Jessy, we were finalists for the fucking something, something." I was like, "Hmm, what's this now?" And then, a minute later, I got another call from another former colleague, and then another call from my former editor, Christopher Werth, who also worked on the project, and then suddenly, my phone was blowing up. Mind you, I'm still on this call, paying careful attention to the conversation at hand, obviously, being a professional.
And then I got off the call, and all I could see in my message inbox was Pulitzer, Pulitzer, Pulitzer. And yeah: It turns out that we were named as a finalist for the Pulitzer for audio reporting. I didn't know it had been nominated. I'm in complete shock—jaw on the floor, hands shaking.
Can you talk about how this reporting came together?
When I was first hired at Gothamist/WNYC as the incarceration reporter, my colleague Jared Marcelle had an idea for a story about the new Adult Survivors Act, this law that New York passed that opened a one-year window where adult survivors of sexual assault could file a lawsuit outside of the statute of limitations. Jared had this interesting nugget, which was that many of the lawsuits that were being filed were claims from formerly incarcerated people who said that they were sexually assaulted while they were behind bars, either in state prisons or in county jails or City jails like Rikers Island. Christopher, Sam, Jared and I got together with audio producer Ave Carillo and editor Ann Givens and we came up with a plan.
Once the window had closed and all the lawsuits had been filed under the Adult Survivors Act, we reached out to the state and got a list of every claim number of every lawsuit that had been filed. That's when our reporting really started in earnest. We basically went through every single lawsuit that was filed in New York City's supreme courts. There were about 1,200, and as we started digging into the data, we realized that more than 700 of those lawsuits were claims that came from Rikers Island.
So we zeroed in on those, and read every single lawsuit that was filed with a claim from Rikers Island. Myself and Samantha Max, we would just sit on our laptops on weekends and nights, reading all of these lawsuits and logging them in a spreadsheet that we created. That allowed us to get a big picture of all of the claims that had been filed, and it gave a view of what we now know as systemic sexual assault of women held at the Rikers Island women's jail over a period of about 50 years, perpetuated by jail staff. The earliest claim dates were from the mid '70s, and the most recently filed claim was from 2023.
As we were going through these cases, we were logging the names of every correction officer who was named in the lawsuits. There were names that would come up like 10 times, five times, 12 times, but there was one name that came up two dozen times, and that was Correction Officer Champagne. The name stood out to me the first time I saw it. It's such an odd name. I reached out to the City Office of Payroll Administration, and they told me that there was no one in the system for the Department of Correction with the name "Champagne." So it was really mysterious that so many women who were detained at different times would allege they were assaulted by a Correction Officer Champagne, who, according to the City, didn't exist.
That set me on this other path, tracking down Officer Champagne, and by speaking with a number of the claimants, I was able to get a lead on who this person might be. One of the women, while she was locked up on Rikers, had worked in the correction officers' kitchen, and so she heard other correction officers referring to Officer Champagne by his real name.
A key part of your reporting was talking to the women about what they had experienced. Those must have been very difficult conversations.
The women who filed these claims are mostly women of color. They've obviously all been to jail. Many of them had been sexually assaulted as children. Many had suffered from substance abuse issues, or told me that they had suffered from mental health issues. They're a group that had not been believed before when they tried to report sexual assault, and they were really distrustful of authority.