The president of the union local that represents MTA bus and subway workers is accused in a lawsuit of assaulting a bus operator with whom he was romantically involved, the Daily News has learned.
Richard Davis, president of Transport Workers Union Local 100, was named in the Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit filed Thursday that accuses him of assaults in 2015 in 2016.
Davis responded Friday by saying he will “defend my name and my character in court.”
“Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a violent person,” Davis said — while noting that he has not been served with court papers yet.
In the lawsuit, the ex-girlfriend alleges she met Davis on the job, and started dating him in 2011. They eventually moved in together, according to the court papers.
In 2015, the woman claimed she found out Davis was having “an inappropriate relationship with another female bus operator.” While in a car together on June 5 of that year after a union-related event, she confronted Davis about the matter, according to the suit.
“In response to this inquiry … Mr. Davis proceeded to punch her in the face and head repeatedly,” the suit charges. “He then held her in a tight headlock while [she] was trying to escape the vehicle.”
The woman alleges she managed to escape the vehicle without her shoes on and “scrambled” into the car of another union official who was leaving the event at the same time. She said the alleged assault left her with “a busted lip, and swollen and bruised face.”
In the summer of 2016, the woman says, Davis again beat her after she told him she thought he wasn’t contributing enough financially in their relationship.
“This time, he grabbed her hair and attempted to drag her down to the floor by it, and then grabbed [her] tightly by her arm and dug his nails into her skin,” court papers say.
The alleged assault occurred at a grocery store across the street from Transport Workers Union offices, according to the suit. After the assault, the woman said she “immediately went upstairs to her office located on the 4th floor,” where a colleague noticed she was bleeding from her arm.
After the incident, Davis, who was elected president of TWU Local 100 last year, “wrote an apology letter to [the plaintiff], acknowledging his behavior and actions,” the suit says.
“Out of fear of losing her job and position, facing any issues if she had to return to MTA, or worse, further violence, [she] did not report this incident due to the history of TWU to rescue and sanitize their members who commit wrongs as opposed to rightfully subjecting them to the disciplinary process,” the suit goes on.
The woman broke up with Davis in 2016 after the alleged supermarket incident.
She alleges she still has to interact with him at work. Her lawsuit accuses him of acting in a misogynistic way in the work place to this day.
Recalling a meeting from this past January, the suit alleged Davis “while at a work meeting with multiple other employees present, referred to another female employee, stating that ‘she’s smart, can type 100 words per minute, and I like the way my penis feels inside her vagina.’”
The alleged assaults occurred outside the statute of limitations under state criminal law. However, the woman’s civil case was brought under the 2022 Victims of Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Law, which allows individuals to sue their abusers even if the statute of limitations on their claims has expired.