A bodybuilding cop is pursuing sexual harassment charges against his former boss

According to police reports and an interview in the NY Post, an NYPD officer-bodybuilder is pursuing charges against his supervisor for grabbing his crotch.

On October 13, NYPD Officer Risel Martinez, a 5-year NYPD veteran, filed a formal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint against his supervisor Sgt. Laverne Wilson-Valis. He claims that she touched him inappropriately and subjected to comments about his appearance during his assignment at the department’s gun range ballistic vest unit in January.

Martinez filed a second report with the NYPD’s Equal Employment Opportunity office on Feb. 7. claiming he wasn’t transferred out of Wilson-Valis’s supervision until almost a month after he made the complaint.

According to Martinez, things “started to get a little weird” early on with his supervisor,

“So we’d be there and then she’d make comments like, ‘Wow, Martinez, you’re getting bigger, you’re getting stronger,’ and ‘I’d be like, OK, thank you.’”

In his filing and interview, Martinez relates that he was moving bulletproof vests around a trailer when Wilson-Valis entered.

She walked up to him and looked at a bodybuilding magazine that happened to be in the trailer, asking if it was his,

“Now she puts her hand on my groin area, and then she places her hand right above my butt,” said Martinez. She pushes me back, looks at my penis — like, directly at my penis — and then pushes me forward and looks at my butt.”

When another police officer walked into the trailer and saw what happened, “she just steps back, puts her hands up and giggles. I was just so confused. I felt extremely humiliated. It was incredibly demeaning and dehumanizing.”

The NYPD declined to comment on the complaint and Wilson-Valis declined to be interviewed for the story.

An NYPD Equal Employment Opportunity letter from August states:

“The allegation that Sergeant SA Wilson-Valis subjected you to sexually harassing conduct and that she lacked professionalism and respect in her daily interactions with members of service assigned to the Vest Unit was deemed SUBSTANTIATED.”

Martinez said he’s now taking his complaint to the EEOC because Wilson-Valis was only ordered to go to a professionalism seminar following the EEO investigation. He has now resumed full duty in the 73rd Precinct in Brooklyn.

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