A federal judge said she is “very, very troubled” by a pattern of errors and foot-dragging by city lawyers in a class-action lawsuit over in vitro fertilization benefits for gay men covered by the city’s health plan.
The suit, filed in May 2024, alleges the city is violating the rights of gay male employees and their partners by denying them the same in vitro fertilization benefits it provides to men and women in straight relationships, women in same-sex relationships, and single women.
Employees qualify for these benefits – which cost tens of thousands of dollars without insurance – by being deemed “infertile,” the suit says, making it impossible for male employees in same-sex relationships to qualify.
“Over 2,000 gay male city employees and their spouses have been unlawfully denied an equal opportunity to receive IVF benefits in the City’s health insurance plans due to their sexual orientation,” attorney Peter Romer-Friedman said in a statement.
Gay men have only one realistic way to have a biological child, which is through in vitro fertilization of a surrogate mother.
Corey Briskin worked as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan from 2017 until 2022. He and his husband, Nicholas Maggipinto, sued after they were denied IVF benefits.
“The City of New York and its leaders have long known that they have an obligation not to discriminate against gay men under federal, state, and local law, but they have disregarded that obligation when it comes to offering IVF benefits to City employees,” the suit says.
In the nearly two years since it was filed, lawyers for the city have declined to share information and evidence with Briskin’s attorneys — and made so many legal missteps that U.S. District Judge Jeannette Vargas encouraged the plaintiffs to seek sanctions, according to transcripts.
In court papers, Romer-Friedman laid out the multiple blocks the city’s lawyers have put up.
“Defendants cannot simply wish away their multiple serious violations of clear Court orders,” he wrote, noting the city’s “complete failure to refute any of these facts.”
A spokesperson for the law department, Nicholas Paolucci, said in a statement that Corporation Counsel Steve Banks is “committed to reviewing all pending cases at the Law Department, which we are doing.”
“We take our discovery obligations seriously and are working diligently to meet the court’s deadlines,” he said.
Paolucci did not respond when asked if a shortage of lawyers at the department played a role in the throttled case.
Former Mayor Eric Adams worked to fill vacancies at the Law Department with lawyers doing pro bono work when he first got into office in 2022.
During his confirmation hearing at the City Council, Banks acknowledged “staffing needs,” but didn’t say exactly how many lawyers and staff he planned to hire.
Maggipinto and Briskin declined to comment, but previously spoke about the hardship they faced trying to have a biological family.
“It’s mind blowing that in 2022 we’re still having this conversation about a policy that so clearly excludes gay men because of horribly antiquated views of homosexuality,” Briskin told the New York Times in 2022. “We got the ability to get married and the rest would have been kind of smooth sailing, but we were sorely mistaken.”
Blown deadlines and AI tools
Transcripts from hearings over multiple months showed how unprepared the city’s lawyers were in updating Judge Vargas on the laborious process of looking for relevant documents across multiple city agencies, known as discovery.
Lawyers for the couple first requested documents in September 2024. More than a year later, they hadn’t received much, according to transcripts from an Oct. 27, 2025 hearing.
Vargas said she was “very concerned” and a lawyer from the city Corporation Counsel’s office assured her that all of the documents would be produced by January.
The lawyer noted that with a “new administration coming in, we are incentivized to move it along. So we don’t anticipate it going right to the end at all.”
But during a Feb. 2 hearing, the city revealed it had blown the January deadline and revealed that lawyers were using artificial intelligence in the document search.
Judge Vargas questioned if the city’s lawyer even knew what the AI tool, known as Technology-Assisted Review, or TAR, was.
“You’re looking at me. I don’t even know if you know what TAR means,” she said.
Back to basics?
The judge implored the parties “to go back to basics, because it’s so appalling to me that there’s been so little communication between the parties as to how this is going to proceed, what the protocols are in place, that the plaintiffs have not had a say in what those protocols are.”
During the same hearing, Romer-Friedman said he had “never seen this in my 17 years as a class-action and civil rights lawyer, this kind of problem being so persistent.”
Although the city changed lawyers, things did not significantly improve – and Briskin’s attorneys are still pushing for sanctions, which could make it harder for the city to defend itself in the case by limiting what documents it could introduce for the case.
Romer-Friedman said in a statement that “it is troubling that the city has unilaterally delayed this case for two years by repeatedly disregarding the Court’s deadlines and orders.”
“We hope the city’s new leadership will sit down with us to discuss how to resolve this case in a way that makes the city a model progressive employer on IVF benefits and offers fair compensation to the gay men who were denied IVF benefits.”
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post Judge Slams City in Gay Couple’s IVF Discrimination Case appeared first on THE CITY – NYC News.
