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New Lawsuit Seeks Records on CIA’s Response to Sexual Misconduct

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On Nov. 18, the Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) clinic at Yale Law School filed a lawsuit against the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) for failing to produce documents concerning workplace sexual misconduct at the agency. The MFIA clinic is representing Eli Scher-Zagier ’25, a third-year law student in the clinic. 

The lawsuit follows significant public, congressional, and agency attention to sexual misconduct at the CIA, including a House Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s mishandling of sexual assault allegations. 

In September, a Virginia court convicted a veteran CIA officer of assault and battery for reaching up a contractor’s skirt and forcibly kissing her. Last year, the Associated Press recounted that “at least two-dozen women have come forward in recent months with their own complaints of abusive treatment within the CIA.” 

In November 2023, Scher-Zagier submitted a FOIA request for the CIA’s annual report on sexual harassment, CIA regulations defining sexual assault, internal blog discussions on sexual misconduct at the agency, and new guidance that the CIA pledged to issue in May 2023 on how to report sexual misconduct. Today, more than a year later, the CIA has not produced a single page of the requested records, according the clinic.

Scher-Zagier intends to use records obtained from the CIA via the lawsuit in connection with his ongoing research on sexual misconduct in the federal government, including a forthcoming law review article on how secrecy hides sexual misconduct in national security workplaces.

“The CIA has pledged to victims, Congress, and the American people that it is taking sexual misconduct seriously,” said Scher-Zagier. “At the same time, it has failed to provide researchers and journalists public records about its response that they are entitled to receive under federal law. The CIA should welcome the opportunity to demonstrate it is acting properly, and it should release these records.”

MFIA students Rick Da ’26 and Fonda Shen ’26 are working on the case under the supervision of Visiting Clinical Lecturer in Law Tobin Raju and Floyd Abrams Lecturer in Law David Schulz ’78, the director of the MFIA clinic.

The Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School is a law school clinic dedicated to increasing government transparency, defending the essential work of news gatherers, and protecting freedom of expression by providing pro bono legal services, pursuing impact litigation, and developing policy initiatives. The clinic is a program of the Abrams Institute for Freedom of Expression and the Information Society Project.