Miriam Yarimi, the wig-making influencer charged with manslaughter for a hgih-speed Brooklyn crash that killed a mother and two of her small children, was the victim of sexual assault for years at the hands of an NYPD cop who busted her for shoplifting when she was just 14, according to an explosive lawsuit against the city.
Her rape claim centers around former NYPD officer George Mastrokostas, who worked at the 70th Precinct but later left the force amid accusations of harassment from a different woman. The lawsuit paints a picture of a predator who moved quickly to take advantage of the teen and continued to do so for years, sometimes bringing her to a seedy now-shuttered motel for sex.
Yarimi won $2 million in a settlement from the city just three months before the crash, boasting on Instagram in March about buying a custom-built Porsche with the windfall. “A year ago I was completely broke, today I built my first Porsche 718 Box[st]er X” the post read as video showed Yarimi climbing into one of the pricey rides in a showroom.
But Yarimi had a suspended license for letting her insurance lapse when she got behind the wheel of her Audi on the afternoon of March 29, police said. She was speeding when she blew threw a red light at and struck the family, prosecutors say. She told first responders she was possessed when she crashed.
Her lawyer, Andrew Laufer said he feels badly about the fatal crash but — at the same time – doesn’t want the victimization Yarimi has faced to be ignored.
“I don’t want to take away from the victims here [last] weekend but at the same time we need some context on who my client was. She was just damaged from her childhood,” said Laufer, who is not representing Yarimi in the criminal case against her. “I just don’t want my client’s tragedy — her lifelong tragedy, her decades of tragedy — to get lost in this. I don’t want her rights to be lost in this while going through the system.”
A shoplifting bust
Yarimi was arrested in Midwood by Mastrokostas in July 2006 after he suspected her of shoplifting from a 7-Eleven, according to notes from an Internal Affairs Bureau interview with Yarimi obtained by the Daily News.
The next month, while on duty, he told her to get in his patrol car, drove her to another spot and kissed her, according to the civil suit filed in Brooklyn Supreme Court in 2023.
From there, the abuse quickly accelerated, the suit claims. About a week later, Mastrokostas contacted Yarimi via phone and told her to meet him outside, the suit alleges.
“He picked her up in his patrol car, while on duty, and drove her to an empty parking lot at East 2nd and Lawrence Ave. in Brooklyn next to the 70th Precinct,” the suit says. “He then proceeded to engage in intercourse with the claimant…raping her.”
For the next four years, according to the suit, Mastrokostas would regularly pick up Yarimi in his patrol car while on duty, drive her to the same location and assault her. In an interview with Internal Affairs, Yarimi also states Mastrokostas would take her to the now-shuttered Golden Gate Motor Inn in Sheepshead Bay to engage in sexual activity, according to court papers.
After reporting the allegations to the Internal Affairs Bureau in August 2010, when she was about to turn 18, Yarimi says Mastrokostas and other officers from the 70th Precinct began to harass her and her mother, including pulling them over for a traffic stop and “handcuffing, searching and threatening them,” her lawsuit alleges.
According to an Internal Affairs Bureau interview with Mastrokostas, the officer said he only became sexually involved with Yarimi in May 2010, when she was 17 and she was old enough to legally consent to sex. The relationship only lasted two or three months and was conducted while he was off duty, he told investigators.
In July 2014, according to documents obtained by The News, the Internal Affairs Bureau determined the complaints against Mastrokostas were unsubstantiated, meaning they couldn’t be proven or disproven. The report noted that Yarimi had become uncooperative with the investigation and stopped responding to phone calls.
“The Bureau has determined that there is insufficient evidence to clearly prove or disprove the complaint,” an NYPD Internal Affairs inspector wrote to Yarimi in 2014. “Such evidence is necessary if disciplinary procedures are to be instituted.”
Nine years later, Yarimi filed the civil suit in June 2023 and Yarimi was awarded the $2 million payout from the city in December.
Now she is facing a slew of charges including manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide for crashing into Natasha Saada, 35, and Saada’s three young children in the crosswalk at Ocean Parkway and Quentin Road.
Saada and her two daughters, Deborah, 5, and Diana, 8, were rushed to Maimonides Medical Center but they couldn’t be saved, dying within 20 minutes of each other, according to police. Saada’s 4-year-old son remains in critical condition.
On Thursday, Yarimi, after being treated for her own injuries in the crash and ordered to undergo a psychiatric exam, was ordered held without bail during her arraignment in Brooklyn Criminal Court.
Another woman levels accusations
While Internal Affiarrs found Yarimi’s accusations against Mastrokostas unsubstantiated, he was fired from the NYPD in January 2022 over accusations from another woman in an unrelated case.
A bank teller accused him of stalking her for months, using a police database to look up her and her family, threatening her outside her home and writing her cellphone number on the wall of an adult video store.
The woman claimed in an NYPD departmental trial that Mastrokostas fixated on her after coming into the TD Bank branch where she worked in 2018 to take out $90,000 cash. He used the money to buy a boat but told her it was for his daughter’s Sweet 16 party.
Over the next several months he kept showing up at the bank and calling her, becoming more and more aggressive when she refused his advances, eventually causing her to lose her job when he claimed she mishandled his account, she told investigators. It all came to a head in July 2019 when Mastrokostas parked his truck outside her house and stayed there for hours until she called 911.
When she asked Mastrokostas how he knew where she lived he told her, “You forget that I’m a cop. I can do whatever the f–k I want,” she testified at his departmental trial.
When she threatened to call the police, she testified that he told her, “They are not going to help you. I’m a cop, they will drive right by. Go for it, if that’s what you choose to do.”
He then threatened to ram the house of her boyfriend, a probationary NYPD officer who lived across the street, she said.
Mastrokostas left the scene before police showed up.
Mastrokostas testified that the two were actually dating but the relationship fell apart when he realized she was in a long-term relationship with soemone else..
Paul Gamble, the NYPD assistant deputy commissioner of trials, wrote that he couldn’t parse which of the two was lying — Mastrokostas’s children both testified they had met the woman and understood them to be in a relationship but Gamble said they could have lied to keep their father from losing his job.
Gamble did determine Mastrokostas was guilty of several disciplinary offenses, including making false statements during a department interview, engaging in unwanted contact with the woman, posting her info in a public place and failing to remain on the scene of a domestic incident when she called the cops on him.
“Respondent’s conduct toward [the woman] was vile and contemptible,” Gamble wrote in his ruling. Then-NYPD Commissioner Keechant Sewell signed off on Mastrokostas’ dismissal, but he retired before it took effect. “Regardless of what their relationship truly was, no human being deserves to be treated in that manner.”
Phone messages left for Mastrokostas were not immediately returned this week.
In January, Yarimi filed a notice of claim announcing her intention to again sue the city, along with Coney Island Hospital, for $5 million for an involuntary stay in the pscyh ward there last October. She posed a video to Instragram showing NYPD cops pulling her out of her bed to commit her after someone reported she was threatening to harm herself. She plans to sue for false imprisonment, medical malpractice, negligence and deprivation of civil rights.
