A Guy Jerked Off To Me In The Subway, And NYPD Didn't Do A Thing
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This weekend, something pretty disgusting and criminal happened to me, but the police didn’t seem to care. After a friend’s shabbos party, I swiped into the turnstile and paid the Metropolitan Transit Authority the $2.25 they’ve decided it costs to transport me safely home. It was late, and when I got down the stairs I could tell from the signal lights that a train had just departed; I was alone on the platform.
I walked to the western end of the station, which was Broadway-Lafayette Street in SoHo, because part of my mental map of the New York City subway system is my carefully cultivated knowledge of which train car will get you closest to which exit staircase at which station, and part of my OCD is taking this information and placing myself in the trains that I ride accordingly. And I knew I needed to be in car one — near the second or third set of doors if possible. So I found myself at the isolated far end of an empty subway platform in an empty station. It was 3 a.m. I started playing solitaire on my phone.
But the station was not empty enough, it turns out. About five minutes later, I noticed a man on the opposite platform, the downtown platform, standing in the same isolated western end as I was. I couldn’t tell if he’d been there all along, perhaps behind a tiled bulkhead, or if he’d followed me. I could see that he was doing something with his hands at around waist level; I figured he was a drunk who’d wandered to the end of the platform to take a piss. In an attempt to give him some privacy, I turned away, still engrossed in my game.
Five minutes after that, I noticed there was some kind of a sound happening behind me. There was a series of grunts, followed by a lip-smacking. I turned, and without raising my head from my screen, I glimpsed the same man, still standing in the same spot on the platform, masturbating. Vigorously. Brazenly. With his genitals completely out of his pants. Facing me square on. He smacked his lips and grunted again. I played it like I’d turned around for no reason, like I hadn’t even maybe seen what was beneath my notice, and just walked straight back to the middle of the uptown platform, where by now a couple other people were awaiting the next train. Over on the downtown platform, the masturbator took a few steps as if to follow me, facing me, his audience, the whole time. He continued to masturbate.
When by 3:19 a.m. he had not taken the hint that I was prepared to actually ignore his criminal behavior, provided he stop, I thought: Fuck it. My night is over. I have nowhere to be tomorrow morning. I don’t care how long it takes or what happens, but I am going to make an official complaint to the MTA. I have seen my share of anti-social behavior on the subway — groping, loud arguments, pushing, shoving, sexual harassment, panhandlers with anger issues, one time a really out-of-sorts bum even tried half-heartedly to steal my purse — but I had never, until Friday night, seen a man masturbate openly on an isolated subway platform for ten minutes straight. I thought if I were going to complain, it might help to have proof. So I turned on my phone’s video camera, and I walked slowly, deliberately down the platform, back towards where the man was still masturbating. It’s strange; as little as I wanted to look at him, as hard as I was trying not to look at the man who was standing there showing me his penis and balls, seeing him as a figure made of pixels on a screen didn’t turn my stomach. It hardly felt like looking at him at all. I took about 58 seconds of video and snapped five still photos at 3:20 a.m.
I walked up the stairs to find the station agent, and told him there was a man who’d been masturbating on the western end of the downtown B/D/F/M platform for the past ten minutes. The station agent asked what he looked like; I told him I had been trying not to really look at the offender, but that he was middle-aged, and black, and wearing a yellow button-down shirt and khaki pants. The station agent made a call, presumably to the police. I didn’t know what to do, so I stood there for a minute, and then I asked if he would let me through the gate so I could get back to the platform without having to pay another fare. He waved me on. (It only occurred to me much later that by leaving the station agent and going back to the platform, I was entering a potentially dangerous situation. What was to stop the masturbator, now that he knew I’d documented his behavior and probably exited the platform to call for help, from crossing from his platform to mine? It wasn’t until the next day that I even thought about how easy it would have been for him to get between me and the only exit. The station agent did not suggest that I wait with him on the mezzanine for the cops.)
Back on the platform, the man was still masturbating. I don’t know what I imagined would happen. I’m not naïve; I know that, to a vulnerable woman late at night, the New York City police hold as much potential for threat as they do protection. I didn’t exactly expect a crack team of specially trained agents from the NYPD Masturbation Team to rappel down from the mezzanine, fire a butterfly net over my masturbator, and drag him into the back of a paddy wagon as he protested, “But my wife is going to kill me!” And then for those agents to shake hands with me, the brave citizen who did her public duty, and ask if there was anything else they could do.
But I also didn’t expect that nothing would happen. I did not expect that for the next twelve minutes I would stand on a lonely subway platform mere yards away from a public masturbator, thinking each time I heard a train arrive or a set of footsteps on the stairs that it could be a police officer, and each time being disappointed. For another twelve minutes — I know this because of the time-stamps of the two sets of pictures of the masturbator that I took on my phone — this man continued to stand there, masturbating. He even edged slowly closer to my part of the platform. When a garbage train pulled in to the uptown platform and unloaded a few transit workers, he hid. But as soon as they were gone, the masturbator came back into full view. He turned to face me again, squarely, and waved. He actually waved at me. Without stopping what he was doing, of course.
I think it is the right of any citizen to feel safe on public transit, and a 12-minute-plus police response time is not exactly the definition of “safe.”