TRICKY TABLET THIEF
An employee of a production company on Park Avenue was busy putting up a banner outside his storefront on Sunday when he decided to go up to his office and see how it looked. While there, he finished his lunch and noticed that the office’s iPad was missing. After canvassing the building, he found some security footage of an unknown man exiting the elevator, looking around and carrying a white plastic bag. A security guard said he asked the man what he had been doing there, and he replied that he was using the bathroom. The possible thief then used his cellphone and left the building in an unknown direction.

THWARTED ROBBERY
A 48-year-old man was arrested around 2:30 a.m. on Sunday after two witnesses called police. The perp had broken the glass door on a clothing store on Third Avenue and scooped up dozens of pricy items before attempting to escape with the loot. Officers found him, and the witnesses positively identified the man. He had in his possession numerous articles of clothing, worth a total of $3,650, with the tags still on from the store, including five pairs of J brand jeans, a $550 purse, sweaters and shirts. The perp also had a crack pipe in his front pocket when he was arrested.

A JEALOUS RAGE
A 43-year-old man was hanging out at a pizza place on Second Avenue, talking to a woman he didn’t know. This apparently angered a man who did know her. He yelled at the victim and then hurled a glass salt shaker at him, causing a small laceration on his upper lip, before running from the restaurant with the unknown woman in tow.

CELLPHONE GRAB-BY
A woman was perched on a ledge outside a building on East 88th Street on Sunday, looking at her iPhone, when an unknown teenager ran up, grabbed the phone from her hands, and dashed off down the street toward Second Avenue.

INHOSPITABLE HOSPITAL
A local woman was checked into an area hospital on an overnight stay. She was sleeping in her room, with her iPad and Galaxy phone placed near her on a tray. When she awoke, she discovered both electronic items missing. The tablet and phone together are worth $1,100. There were no witnesses or surveillance video available, and the hospital could not say what happened.

Alexandra Levin.

Many people afflicted with a chronic disease have plenty of obstacles to surmount in their lives without adding more. For Upper West Side resident Alexandra Levin, being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) at a young age did nothing to thwart her desire to tackle some of the biggest natural obstacles in the world: mountains.

Levin, 30, was diagnosed with MS, a condition that attacks the body’s nervous system, in 2005. She’s only had a few episodes and has been able to recover after each, continuing to ascend peaks all over the world on breaks from her high-powered banking job. She recently got back from a three-week summit of Mount Denali in Alaska, the highest peak in North America at 20,320 feet, a feat she accomplished while carrying and administering her medication and hauling a 125-pound backpack.

She became obsessed with mountain climbing after a solo trip to Africa six years ago, not long after her first MS episode, when she climbed Kilimanjaro at the suggestion of her travel agent. Despite working with a guide who spoke no English and getting altitude sickness, Levin remembers it as a transformative experience.

“Being on the side of the mountain and working so hard to get there, when the sun comes up, it took what little breath I had away,” Levin said. “I remember thinking, If I had extra air right now, I’d cry.”

When her plane zoomed past the mountain peak she had ascended on her flight home and she realized how high—19,300 feet—she had climbed, she was hooked. Since then, she has also summitted Elbrus in Russia (18,500 feet), Baker in Washington State via two different routes (10,800 feet), Cayambe in Ecuador (19,000 feet) and Aconcagua in Argentina (22,840 feet).

Levin was a competitive figure skater as a child and never imagined herself in a rugged, tough sport like mountain climbing. She grew up in Riverdale and went to the Horace Mann School before heading to Harvard to study philosophy and Russian. After graduation, she took an analyst position at Citigroup, trading distressed municipal bonds there.

“I worked with great people, I had great bosses, we had a ton of fun,” said Levin, who later moved to a different department. “It was sort of similar to philosophy in that it was highly analytical. At the same time, it had this element of creativity because we were dealing with very broken-down projects and part of the analysis was, how does the thing improve and what’s necessary to turn it around?”
She was working at Citigroup at 23 when she had her first episode of what turned out to be MS.

“I basically woke up one morning and felt like I couldn’t really walk,” Levin said. “It was very sudden. I had had a work event the night before and I was out late and just assumed that I was tired.”

After walking to work at a glacial pace, she moved slowly throughout the day and later noticed that the right side of her face had gone numb. The next day, she got checked out at the medical clinic at her office building, and a nurse suspected that she might have MS.

“That set off a whole chain reaction of MRIs and spinal taps and blood work and vision tests,” said Levin. “It’s sort of a process of elimination.”

She was officially diagnosed with Clinically Isolated Syndrome, a precursor to MS, though she immediately assumed that she had MS and began taking medication for it. Her feelings were confirmed with a second episode in 2008.

That year, she also switched to a new position at Citigroup, in the community development investing division. She credits her company and co-workers with being incredibly supportive after her diagnosis. Now, between planning her mountain climbing excursions, she works closely with the MS Society to help with fundraising efforts.

“There are still so many questions and there is no cure—the only way to get answers is to fund medical research,” Levin said. “The way that I saw that I could contribute and drive our collective push for a cure was by raising money.”

She’s also, of course, already planning her next climb.

Checked Out
A man reported to police that he had been ripped off five times over the course of several months, a fact he only recently discovered. The victim found out from his bank that an unknown person had written five unauthorized checks from his account and cashed them, to the tune of $32,221.77. The man said that three of the checks were real and had been stolen from him and two others were forged based on his real checks.

Ex-Employee Ambush
A 24-year-old man, a former employee of a diner on Columbus Avenue, staked out his old workplace last Friday. He knew that another employee would be in the lobby of the building with cash around 5 p.m., and he waited until that time, then knocked the employee to the floor, stealing four envelopes with $2,400 cash in them as well as blank business checks. The man was arrested attempting to flee on the subway.

Music School Mayhem
A teacher at a local music academy returned to her office from a weekend away to find the place in disarray. Drawers and cabinets were left open, books were moved or missing, and all the computers were unplugged. Whoever scrambled the office made off with a USB drive and about $500 in cash. The victim found that a side door that leads to a room with unlocked windows next to scaffolding had been tampered with. It was an unfortunate case of déjà vue for the victim, as her very same office had been burglarized three years before.

A Hefty Bonus
A disgruntled ex-employee of a local building management company took his revenge on his former employer in the form of stolen cash. The victim reported to police that he had recently fired the suspect after he repeatedly demanded a cash bonus from his boss. When he was let go, the suspect said, “I will find a way to take the money.” It turns out that he did. He had been previously given access to the company’s business checking accounts in order to help pay bills. After he was fired, he went to the bank and withdrew $200,000 from the accounts, which the bank verified, before his access could be changed.

Basement Burglary
A 19-year-old woman came to a party in a friend’s basement on West 77th Street late Saturday night. She brought her Dooney & Bourke bag and placed it on the floor in a corner, with a t-shirt and jeans draped over it. After a few hours of basement-party fun, she noticed the bag was missing. The partygoers searched for it, but only found her clothes deposited in another spot. The pricey designer bag also contained some makeup, ID, cigarettes—and $7,000 in cash.

Michael Gostigian and Sharon Monplaisir. Photo by Andrew Schwartz.

For Michael Gostigian and Sharon Monplaisir, the Olympics have always been a beacon of strength, perseverance, competition—and true love. The married Upper West Siders are both former Olympians, and they credit the Games for bringing them together almost 20 years ago.

Gostigian competed in the pentathlon, an Olympic event in its 100th year this summer that includes swimming, cross-country running, pistol shooting, fencing and show jumping. He had trained as a swimmer as a teenager in the Philadelphia area and caught the eye of millionaire John Dupont, who was putting together a pentathon team. He learned to shoot and run on Dupont’s estate, then trained with an 80-year-old Hungarian fencing master. Gostigian competed in fencing tournaments while training for the pentathlon, which is how he first encountered the woman he would marry.

“We would cross paths at various fencing tournaments around the world,” Gostigian, 49, remembers. “In the ’92 Olympics, we were there together. She came and watched me compete all the time. One of her teammates had a crush on one of my teammates; she was dragging her to all the events.”

Monplaisir had risen through the ranks of women’s fencing after taking up the sport in high school. Raised in New York City, she looked to fencing as a way to guarantee a college education and a better way of life for herself.

“I tried all the sports,” said Monplaisir, 51. “I couldn’t swim, I couldn’t jump hurdles; they didn’t have baseball for girls back then. Fencing was the last one to try and I ended up being good at it.”

She practiced every chance she got and joined the New York Fencers Club, which gave her a scholarship. By 1984, she had made the Olympic team and competed in Los Angeles. She went on to compete in 1988 and 1992, the year she first really noticed Gostigian.

“He and I were always on a ‘hi, bye’ basis,” Monplaisir said. “And one night I realized how cute he really was!”

They began writing to each other after the Olympics and had their second date a year later. They called each other every day, racking up phone bills higher than their rents, Monplaisir said, as they each flew around the world for competitions. After three and a half years of sporadic visits, Gostigian proposed on a Hawaiian beach and the couple settled happily on the Upper West Side.

“In honor of the Olympic calendar, we got married on a leap year [on Feb. 29], so every four years, we celebrate our anniversary,” Gostigian said. (His wife asserts that he still buys her anniversary gifts every year.) By then, he had also competed in the Olympics three times.

The couple has 9-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and Gostigian works as a private fitness trainer; he helped train a young Upper West Side fencer who is competing in foil fencing in this year’s Games. He also tried out for the Olympic pentathlon team himself this year, just for fun, he said, after qualifying for the trials.

“My kids got to watch me compete this year,” he said. “That’s a thrill, to be connected to the Olympics. We do watch a lot of the events, because we still know a lot of people at the Olympic levels, especially with fencing and pentathlon.”

Monplaisir doesn’t fence much anymore, but said she may get involved in a senior league eventually.

“Fencing has given me so much in my life,” she said. “Meeting the most amazing people in the world, great friends, a wonderful husband—what more can you ask for?”

Read More About the Summer Olympics!

• Greg Louganis Q&A 
• What to Watch: Olympics 2012
• Olympic Sprinters Trained in Central Park

The church where 583 Park holds events. Photo by Jonathan Springer.

Last week, nearly 200 people from the Upper East Side showed up at a Community Board street life committee meeting to debate the fate of a church/event space on Park Avenue. The embattled 583 Park operates as an upscale event space out of the Third Church of Christ Scientist on Park Avenue and East 63rd Street. The Rose Group, which operates 583 Park, has been leasing the space since 2006, hosting lavish weddings, large charity events and functions like fashion shows for designer Oscar de la Renta. Over the years, it has become a favored spot for many event planners and a sore spot for many neighbors.

Some local residents complain that the noise, traffic, lights and crowds generated by events at 583 Park—about 100 a year—are too much for their quiet neighborhood. The Rose Group counters that without their 20-year lease, which requires $250,000 in annual rent plus 10 percent of the revenue from their events, the church would not be financially able to remain in their landmarked building.

The battle has worked its way through several court cases and has come to rest most recently on the approval of a beer and wine license for 583 Park, the subject of which caused intense debate at the meeting.

Residents spoke of double-parked cars and the clatter of loading and unloading for major events at the space. Employees of the Rose Group and 583 Park summoned letters of support from their high-profile clients and from neighbors who don’t have any qualms with the events.
After several complicated court battles, the SLA will no longer grant individual single-event licenses to caterers at 583 Park, which is how they’ve been operating for the past few years. Now they’re hoping for a beer and wine license, which they say will still limit their business, but without which they would potentially have to close.

That would be good news to several board members who expressed their disapproval of 583 Park.

“This is definitely an invasion of our neighborhood and the use of our sidewalk streets in a residential neighborhood,” said board member Michelle Birnbaum.

Other board members cited the long history of complaints from the community as reason enough to deny the application. Many characterized the operation as out of character with the neighborhood, but some said that the bustle of activity is to be expected anywhere in Manhattan.

“There are huge disruptions in this community, this direct area, outside of this church,” said board member Jonathan Horn, citing the multiple film shoots that go on every year as well as the summer street closures and maintenance of the Park Avenue malls.

“We live in New York City; even in a residential area, there are disruptions,” Horn said. He cited the fact that 311 complaints are way down, which the Rose Group touted as an improvement and opponents said was not a clear indication of their ire, as they had simply given up on calling, as proof that the situation has gotten better over the years.

“I find that very indicative of the fact that the Rose Group, whatever the problems at the beginning, that they’ve acknowledged—and I would say that I personally saw, initially, issues where they were taking over the streets, the sidewalks—they have done their best to fit in and accommodate,” he said.

The criteria for a beer and wine license is much less stringent than for a full liquor license. According to the State Liquor Authority, “Community opposition alone is not sufficient to disapprove an application” that isn’t subject to the 500-foot rule (which this application is not). The SLA may take the community board’s objections, if the full board votes down the application, into consideration, but they aren’t bound to follow it.

“If we say no, they walk out of here and they go to the SLA and they take their chances,” said board member Barry Schneider. “However, if here the community board uses its wisdom to say, ‘Let’s say yes but with conditions, with stipulations that they will have to adhere to,’ if they get their beer and wine license, then they will be held to a higher authority than the community board; they will be held to the SLA.”

The committee voted against the approval of the license for 583 Park, though not unanimously. The issue will reach a final full board vote on Wednesday, July 18.

Last Thursday evening, a 24-yearold woman entered a barbecue joint on West 72nd Street and ordered a meal  with drinks, totaling $79.20. When the bill was presented, however, instead of paying up, the customer decided to walk out. A restaurant employee chased the check-skipper and caught up with her at the corner of West 72nd and Columbus. When he confronted her, she whacked him over the head with her umbrella and then bit him in the chest hard enough to cause injury. The good news is that this attack happened in full view of police officers, who were able to apprehend the nasty diner and arrest her for felonious assault.

Criminal Cinderella

A police officer responding to a call of a larceny in progress last Sunday ran straight into the perpetrator as he was fleeing the Game Stop location on Broadway that had called in the crime. The suspect flailed his arms and tried to escape but was ultimately arrested—but not before running around the neighborhood and leaving a trail in his wake. Three witnesses said that they saw the man as he ran straight into their group, knocking one woman to the ground and then removing a black iPad-like device from his jacket and tossing it to the ground. The girl’s boyfriend chased the man to another street, where he hid underneath a parked van and was spotted by a nearby food vendor. The suspect then dashed out, leaving one of his blue sneakers behind, and eventually was caught. The store employee identified the man (without the aid of his missing shoe) as someone who had been fidgeting with the device, which was tethered to a stand inside the store, before making some loud noises and tearing it off. The tablet was a specially configured store demo worth $10,887, according to the employee.

Arranged Assault

A plan to attack and steal an electronic tablet device was thwarted by a pair of cautious friends last week. A man attempting to sell his tablet had heard from a prospective buyer and arranged to meet him in the lobby of his building on West 61st Street. The seller brought a pal along with him, which was good thinking—when he arrived, the supposed purchaser assaulted him, beating him and snatching the tablet. The friend grabbed the suspect and the two were able to hold him until police arrived and made an arrest.

Closet Thieves

A 68-year-old woman came to police to report what she suspects to be gradual theft by several home health aides from her wardrobe. The woman said that over the course of several months, many items have gone missing, including several hooded jackets, designer sweaters worth $1,200, expensive Lord & Taylor nightgowns, a bottle of Dior perfume and some household supplies.

Vehicle Thefts Abound

While grand larceny auto isn’t usually a frequent crime on the Upper West Side, there was a slight uptick last week in reported stolen vehicles. Victims reported, in separate incidents, three cars, two pricey scooters and one motorcycle missing from neighborhood streets recently.

Nail Polish Plot

A 50-year-old man whom employees recognized was acting suspiciously at a local Duane Reade last week. He had a white plastic shopping bag and began sweeping five displays of Sally Hansen nail polish into it. When employees confronted the man, he left without paying for the polish, which was worth a grand total of $1,486, according to the store.

When he presented his case to fellow board members before the vote,
Viest emphasized that the reputation of the board is reflected in how
they run their meetings and vowed to improve the public perception of
CB8, a message that obviously resonated with most of the board. Viest
won 34-8 and will replace Jackie Ludorf in January. Ludorf, who ran up
against term limits, will remain on the board.

– To learn more about your new local leader, head to Our Town…

"Coming anecdotally from some of the planners, there’s a lot of excitement surrounding the event and the new law," said Anja Winikka, site editor of online wedding behemoth TheKnot.com. "We know that the household income of samesex couples in New York is a bit higher compared to heterosexual couples."

A 2008 report by UCLA Law School, based on 2000 census data, found that the average household income of samesex couples in New York City is $116,540, while the average for heterosexual married couples is $79,230. Even if the numbers have shifted slightly since then, most vendors rely on the assumption that the average gay couple has more disposable income to spend on a wedding.

"Mayor Bloomberg’s big ‘I Do’ campaign is exciting for the destination wedding angle, rolling out these ad campaigns, convincing people to come from out of state," Winikka said. The city’s official tourism agency, NYC & Co., has launched a big push to attract visitors wishing to marry and attend weddings. In 2007, then-comptroller Bill Thompson released a report estimating that the legalization of same-sex marriage would bring an additional $142 million in revenue to the state, mainly to the travel and tourism industries; similar figures were touted by gay marriage advocates in the push to get the additional votes necessary in the state Senate to pass the recent legislation.

"A lot of reception states and hotel chains have sort of jumped on board and come up with their own packages to get couples excited, to bring them in and have their weddings at their specific places," Winikka said.

For example, the Millennium Broadway Hotel on West 44th Street is offering a PRIDE wedding package for same-sex couples—for the low-low starting price of $19,500. Many other luxury hotels in Manhattan are following suit, and in most cases, they’re simply offering a few perks added on to existing wedding packages.

Martine Leventer, owner and president of Martine’s Chocolates on the Upper East Side, has been making her popular chocolate bride and groom cake toppers for years. When she started to get requests for "a dark chocolate groom and a white chocolate bride," for example, Leventer said she created separate molds for each spouse, and also developed a more sleek, modern-looking bride. When marriage equality passed, Martine’s posted its gay wedding toppers—pairs of the regular brides or grooms—on its Facebook page.

"The way we work is we don’t especially advertise, we work a lot with word of mouth," Leventer said. "We already had requests, quite immediately after the law went into effect, not only for the [gay] cake toppers but also special favors."

Some wedding vendors see the new influx of business as an extension of what they’ve already been doing for years. City Cakes, a bakery in Chelsea, had already been baking custom cakes for same-sex couples in their neighborhood. They got their first order for a New York gay wedding cake the day the law passed. They decided to help sponsor the Pop- Up Chapel, a project created—and still in progress—by a group of friends to give free mini-weddings in Central Park to same-sex couples.

"They said that they would be doing these weddings and that they would be providing cupcakes for their guests," Jazz Sahota, an assistant manager at City Cakes, said. "It’s the kind of thing that we love to get involved in; we were over the moon at the legislation being passed."

Other vendors are hoping to gain new business from same-sex couples, but are counting on the slow-and-steady method of reputation-building to eventually bring it in.

"Honestly I would love to be doing more [gay weddings]. I have done a couple," said Andy Marcus, who co-owns Fred Marcus Photography on West 72nd Street with his son.

"I just shot an engagement party for two guys who were written up in the New York Times."

Marcus said that he’s advertised on the Rainbow Network in the past, but he’s going to keep up his usual marketing and hope that same-sex couples like his work.

Jacqueline Weppner is the owner and creative director of Merci New York, a company that runs a blog for the city bride and also offers event planning and styling. She definitely considers her services LGBT-friendly, but isn’t rushing into marketing to gay couples.

"Right when the law was passed, a lot of businesses tried to promote specials and incentives to get that demographic in the door," Weppner explained. "We’re excited about it, but we’re not looking to exploit it. As bloggers, we’ve seen a lot of promotions come our way. I think that hopefully we will get couples, whether they’re heterosexual or homosexual, interested in us because of what we provide and not because we’re trying to target them because of legislation passing."

Vendors and websites don’t necessarily have to make a big push to see an uptick in business. The Knot’s samesex marriage site, Gay.Weddings.com, has seen a 166 percent increase since marriage equality passed, according to Winikka. They’re putting together online features about same-sex wedding etiquette and LGBT-friendly destination wedding locations to capitalize on the new influx of traffic, which brings more advertising dollars as well.

Winikka doesn’t think that the wedding industry is exploiting same-sex couples. "I would actually venture to say the opposite," she said. "It’s exciting to see hotel chains, national hotel chains, big resources finally giving it the attention it deserves. Any couple can see through a deal that isn’t the real deal."

"There’s nothing to me really different," said Marcus. "A wedding is a wedding. What makes it interesting is that there are people in the wedding." 

How do you prepare to marry couples?

There is no difference between a same-sex couple and a heterosexual couple, as far as my process is concerned. I sit down with them and I get a good feel for who they are, and what they mean to one another, and because I’m also a writer, I’m able to custom-craft a ceremony for them. People think that I’ve known the couple for a very long time, and really by the time they do get married we do know each other, and they do feel like they’re being married by a friend.

Does it feel like something political to you, growing up with your family’s history?

Because I was on board for so long, I’m now getting so many couples that are wanting to make it legal, and they’re sitting in my office and we end up crying. Think about it: You’re together with somebody for 25 years, all you want to do is marry that person, and you’re told you cannot. Am I a politician, or political? Absolutely not, I’m a minister. But to me it’s very important that people have the right to be with the person they love, legally and spiritually.

Tell us more about this ‘Marrython.’ The fact is that through the years, I’ve been performing the same-sex commitment ceremonies, and now these people can finally stand up, and they can finally, in the eyes of the law, be married: this is a celebration. So it’s not a publicity stunt.

We’re having individual ceremonies, with a choice of spiritual or civil, in the Belvedere Castle area. I want to try to make it as beautiful as possible. I wanted it overlooking Turtle Pond Bay; I do a lot of weddings there for people from the U.K. and Australia. We’ll have flowers, there’s a photographer who’s going be there who’s documenting it for his book.

I just want it to be mellow. I’m not doing four or five ceremonies at a time. A lot of people are doing that—and that’s fine—but that’s not me.

Do you think that we’re going to see a big commercialization of a whole separate gay marriage cottage industry?

What I’m hoping is that we don’t say gay marriage anymore; we don’t say samesex marriage—because it’s legal. So now, it’s just marriage. I think that this is very good for the wedding industry, because it just brings so many more people, their target audience has just grown. It’s going to help the economy a huge deal, because you’ll have people booking venues that wouldn’t have done it a year ago. I don’t think you’re going to see a commercialization: It’s going to be like the regular wedding industry. The more people that get on board, the better it is for everyone.  

Interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Jackson, who lives and works on the Upper West Side, met Linda Fairstein, then the head of the unit, in the mid 1990s and began following her cases.

“It just became an obsession of mine to try to do a film about the unit,” Jackson says. “The fact that it was the first unit in the country; it really is the gold standard. I thought, rape is so chronically underreported that if you showed a portrait of the prosecutors who do take on these crimes that maybe survivors would be more likely to come forward.”

The film highlights the day-to-day work of the prosecutors and follows two cases in particular—a 16-year-old cold case and another recent rape—both brutal crimes. Jackson interviewed the victim of the older case, Natasha Alexenko, and told the story of how her rapist was finally found using DNA evidence.

“I had pretty much closed that chapter in my life,” Alexenko explains in a recent interview. “I had healed and moved on. It was certainly a shock” when they found the perpetrator. She decided to come forward for the film because she wanted to help the prosecutors who had guided her so compassionately through the difficult process of the trial. “I had actually really been inspired by the men and woman that work in the sex crimes unit,” Alexenko says. “I told them I would do anything I could do to help them.”

Jackson spent about a year getting to know Alexenko before she even filmed the interviews with her. She also followed four or five cases simultaneously but could only use footage from trials that had ended by the time the film aired. She shot many scenes from the trial of Kenneth Moreno and Franklin Mata, the NYPD officers recently acquitted of rape, but wasn’t able to include it.

“I don’t know if it would have changed the film” to include that case, Jackson says. “It would have shown how incredibly difficult their job is, often—in a case like that where there was no hard evidence, there were no eyewitnesses.”

The film also illustrates how cases like that would never have made it to trial before New York State reformed its laws in the 1970s. Jackson interviewed former District Attorney Robert Morganthau about his role in changing the way rape was prosecuted. “I went to him and said, everybody’s talking about your legacy— white collar crime, all this stuff—but nobody’s really talking about the jewel in your crown: his incredible mentoring of women and his championing this unit,” Jackson says. “He’s justifiably proud of that unit.”

Jackson also deliberately included snippets of the prosecutors debating the merits of Derek Jeter and swapping stories about their personal lives.

“A film about sexual violence isn’t depressing. It’s full of humor, it’s full of real humanity,” Jackson says. “They may be really driving, obsessed, laser-focused lawyers, but at the same time, they have obsessions with movie stars, they’re huge Yankees fans, they sweat college loans, they worry about their weight.”

They also work extremely hard at a decidedly unglamorous job. Based on popular TV legal dramas, “we have this perception that they’re all sitting in mahogany-lined offices wearing Prada,” Alexenko says. “And that’s very very far from the truth.”

Both Jackson and Alexenko hope that the film will help victims of sexual assault understand what happens when they come forward to report the crimes against them. Alexenko quit her job last year to work fulltime on her foundation, Natasha’s Justice Project, which works closely with the Joyful Heart Foundation, founded by Law & Order: SVU star Mariska Hargitay, to end the national backlog of untested rape kits.

“With my case, the closure I had, I just felt it’s my karmic duty to take the tools, to take my story and help others,” Alexenko says. “There are 180,000 untested rape kits sitting on shelves. We have the means to find these criminals through databases.”

Jackson hopes that viewers will come away with an understanding of how far the legal system has progressed toward helping sexual assault victims, and how hard the sex crimes unit works for justice.

“It’s either happened to one of us, or we know someone it’s happened to,” Jackson says, citing the statistic that one in six women will be the victim of a sexual assault. “I hope that the film brings a new way of looking at the crime itself, and hopefully motivates more women to come forward, more attorneys to dedicate themselves to this kind of law, and really makes the point of the importance of units like this.”