Rolling Stone: She Got Justice After Her Sexual Assault. She’s Using the Money to Run for Congress

New York’s Adult Survivors Act helped Effie Phillips-Staley get justice. Now, she’s trying to unseat Republican Rep. Mike Lawler

By Tessa Stuart

JANUARY 12, 2026

Fifteen years ago, Effie Phillips-Staleygave birth to a beautiful daughter at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. It was a routine C-section — performed by the attending physician because her own obstetrician wasn’t on duty — but as Phillips-Staley was leaving the hospital, her stitches opened up. She sent her husband and their new baby home with the couple’s toddler, while she returned to have the incision closed.

She was waiting in an exam room when the man who delivered her baby swept in, Phillips-Staley says, “acting like a hero. He tells the nurse to leave, and then ends up giving me an exam that was sexual assault.” What she needed in that moment was simple: her stitches closed. Instead, the doctor proceeded to give Phillips a vaginal exam — and an exam of her entire body — offering a medical justification for each seemingly inexplicable decision he made.

“I was so vulnerable,” Phillips-Staley recalls. “I just had a baby, and my body was splayed open. I have to depend on this person. I need someone to treat this.”

The doctor was Robert Hadden, the notorious gynecologist and, now, convicted sex offender accused of assaulting hundreds of patients during his more than two-decade career at Columbia’s New York-Presbyterian-affiliated hospital. Hadden was sentenced in 2023 to more than 20 years in prison. In May, Columbia agreed to pay more than $750 million dollars to settle the claims of 576 former patients who say Hadden assaulted them. 

That settlement — like Cassie’s lawsuit against Sean “Diddy” Combs, E. Jean Carroll’s against Donald Trump, as well as claims brought against Bill Cosby, Rudy Giuliani, and Andrew Cuomo — was made possible by the New York Adult Survivors Act, signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022. The legislation allowed survivors of sex crimes to file civil lawsuits over incidents for which the statute of limitations had already lapsed.

Now, that law may help Democrats recapture control of the House of Representatives. Phillips-Staley is funding her campaign to defeat Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) — one of the Congress’ most vulnerable Republicans — with money received from her own suit brought under the legislation. 

This campaign could only happen because of the New York Adult Survivors Act, in truth, because we all know how brutally expensive it is to run a campaign in the era of Citizens United,” Phillips-Staley says. (Campaign finance records indicate that Phillips-Staley, who previously worked in the nonprofit space, has loaned her campaign $165,000 to date.) 

As she was going through the process of filing and defending her claim, Phillips-Staley watched Trump reclaim the nation’s highest office — after he was found liable for sexual abuse — then go on to install, in similarly lofty positions, a string of men credibly accused of sex crimes.  “The Me Too movement and the Adult Survivors Act — these are advances to enable justice that are actively being dismantled [by the Trump administration and its allies],” she says. 

Watching that dismantling lit a fire under her, one that was matched only by her frustration watching the Democratic Party fail to meaningfully engage with and activate the tens of thousands of Hispanic voters in her district.

Phillips-Staley is the daughter of a Salvadoran immigrant, and she previously worked as vice president for strategic advancement at the Hispanic Federation. “There’s a reason, I think, Hispanics pivoted to Trump and Lawler last time: [Republicans] were better at communicating to needs and I don’t know what we [as Democrats] were doing,” she says. Democrats lost both of the last two House elections in this swing district badly. “We can’t keep following the same formula in terms of what it takes to win.”

Her plan to win back the district centers around bringing Hispanic voters, whom she says the Democratic Party here has long dismissed, back into the fold. “There are 30,000 registered Hispanic Democrats in New York’s 17th. Five thousand [of them] vote, and then they’re defined as ‘low-propensity’ voters, so there’s no outreach. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Phillips-Staley says.

Before she can take on Lawler, Phillips-Staley, who currently holds local office as trustee of the village of Tarrytown, will have to battle it out among the many others who want to bring Lawler down. It’s a crowded field: Phillips-Staley is one of seven Democratic candidates who have declared their intention to run. They include Cait Conley, a Biden administration National Security official, Rockland County official Beth Davidson, and Briarcliff Manor’s deputy mayor, Peter Chatzky, a tech entrepreneur who announced earlier this week he was putting $5 million of his own money into his campaign. 

The Republican Party currently holds a slim five-seat majority in the chamber — one that is expected to narrow even further after a runoff election in Texas later this month, where the Democrat is favored to win. New York’s 17th district, meanwhile, is one of three districts nationwide currently represented by a Republican in Congress that former Vice President Kamala Harris carried in 2024.