Accused of Rape, a Previously High-Decibel Lawyer Goes Silent

After an 18-year-old boy in Harlem was struck by a police officer’s Taser four times during a barbecue in 2007, his father, himself a retired officer, decided to sue the city. He did not waste time shopping around for a lawyer.

It was as if he had done that research already, subconsciously, over years of watching television commercials and reading newspaper articles about plaintiffs who prevailed. Abner Louima, $8.7 million. The fiancée of Sean Bell, $7 million. The family of Ousmane Zongo, $3 million.

When it rains, you pick up an umbrella; when your tooth aches, you see a dentist. When your father is run over by a police car in a crosswalk, or a city bus kills your mother, or an officer scars your son with a Taser, you call Sanford A. Rubenstein. Within hours, he will be at your side, most likely with an array of news cameras trained at his every word.

“As a layperson, I know Rubenstein gets results,” said the father, Alexander Lombard Jr., 55.

Now, it is Mr. Rubenstein who finds himself the subject of a police investigation, into a woman’s allegations that he raped her in his Upper East Side penthouse apartment on Wednesday night following a 60th birthday party for the Rev. Al Sharpton, a longtime Rubenstein ally.

While that relationship has previously been reciprocal, it has now become complicated, since the woman is also a friend of Mr. Sharpton’s. On Monday, Mr. Sharpton said that he met with the family of Eric Garner, who died in a confrontation with the police in July, to brief them on the allegations against Mr. Rubenstein, one of the lawyers representing the family. Those in the meeting said no decision was reached on Monday as to whether to continue working with Mr. Rubenstein, and that the matter would be raised again on Saturday.

On a broader bandwidth, the case has put the man, whom many New Yorkers have grown up seeing on the evening news, uncharacteristically out of sight. His law firm, Rubenstein & Rynecki, declined to comment, referring calls to Benjamin Brafman, a well-known criminal defense lawyer who has been retained by Mr. Rubenstein. Through Mr. Brafman, Mr. Rubenstein has denied any criminal conduct.

Mr. Rubenstein may be unaccustomed to standing as the accused, but he has long been the accuser.

“Being called ‘The Outrageous Rubenstein,’ “ Mr. Rubenstein wrote in his memoir of that title, quoting a critical newspaper editorial, “is, to me, a compliment of the highest order.”

His pursuit of high-profile police brutality and civil rights cases, often at the side of Mr. Sharpton, has won his clients tens of millions of dollars and has kept his name next to those of his now famous victims.

The day before the party that preceded the incident under investigation, Mr. Rubenstein was meeting with prosecutors and a pregnant woman who has accused a police officer of tackling her.

In some law-enforcement circles, there was speculation as to whether Mr. Rubenstein’s career-building focus on representing people accusing the police of brutality would color the investigation. When that issue was raised on Monday with Mayor Bill de Blasio, he said Mr. Rubenstein would be treated like anyone else.

“I think the allegations are very serious and obviously troubling,” Mr. de Blasio said. “But let’s be clear. There’s an investigation going on. To the best of my understanding, there are not formal charges yet. We have to treat everyone equally. We first have to see where the justice system goes with this, and then there will, of course, be due process.”

Credit...Ramin Talaie for The New York Times

Keith White, a lawyer representing the woman who has accused Mr. Rubenstein of rape, said on Monday that “there’s a lot of information that’s going to be presented that will be devastating to Mr. Rubenstein.” He declined to go into detail.

Michael Hardy, a lawyer who has worked with Mr. Rubenstein on many cases, including the lawsuit brought by the fiancée of Mr. Bell, who was shot to death in a hail of police bullets in 2006, urged against a rush to judgment.

“While his current troubles probably sadden many, you have to hope that the best gets worked out for everyone,” Mr. Hardy said. “As Sandy would say in any of the cases he works on, you have to let the facts determine the truth as best you can.”

But before Mr. Rubenstein would have said anything of the sort, he very likely would have laid out his case in a news conference, arranged in a remarkably short time.

Mr. Lombard, the retired lieutenant who sued over the Taser incident, recalled calling Mr. Rubenstein and being summoned to his offices on workaday Court Street in Downtown Brooklyn, where he explained his case to a paralegal, never even meeting Mr. Rubenstein.

On a later visit, he spotted the lawyer in the lobby. He was hard to miss.

“You’ve seen Rubenstein a thousand times,” he said. “Very flashy, very flamboyant, very colorful.” Mr. Rubenstein took interest in the case and invited him upstairs. Mr. Lombard was surprised to see the walls covered in headlines blaring about lawsuits and victories.

If the client was expecting “a grass-roots guy trying to get results,” he was somewhat surprised by Mr. Rubenstein’s chilly, businesslike demeanor.

“I found that he wasn’t as personable as I thought he’d be,” Mr. Lombard said.

Then came time for the news conference.

“When the cameras went on, it became ‘Me with the family,’ “ Mr. Lombard said. “When the cameras go back off it’s not like he’s talking to us, ‘I feel your pain’ kind of thing.”

Mr. Lombard was not complaining; he didn’t hire Mr. Rubenstein to hold his hand, and he said he was satisfied with the settlement.

Another lawyer, Ronald P. Fischetti, who represented a police officer who pleaded guilty to perjury in the Louima case, criticized his opponent’s outsized persona.

“The way he dresses, the way he talks,” Mr. Fischetti said, “it’s a caricature of what everybody who hates lawyers thinks they look like, in my opinion.”

But he stated what is obvious to every New Yorker with access to local news.

“Every major police brutality case, he gets,” he said. “Why did they all wind up with him? I’d be shocked, if there’s a teenager who is shot or a guy who is choked, you don’t see Sanford on TV.”