The president and CEO of The Associated Press said Sunday that the government's seizure of AP journalists' phone records was "unconstitutional" and already has had a chilling effect on newsgathering.

Gary Pruitt says the Justice Department's secret subpoena of reporters' phone records has made sources less willing to talk to AP journalists.

The Justice Department disclosed the seizure of two months of phone records in a letter the AP received May 10. The letter did not state a reason, but prosecutors had said they were conducting a leaks investigation into how the AP learned about an al-Qaeda bomb plot in Yemen before it was made public last year. Pruitt said the AP story contradicted the government's claim at the time there was no terrorist plot.

Pruitt spoke on CBS' "Face the Nation."

Gun violence in America has fallen dramatically over the past two decades, and the number of murders committed with a firearm is down too, though guns are still by far the leading type of crime weapon, according to a new report from the Justice Department.

As for where crime guns came from, the study notes that less than two percent of convicted inmates reported buying their weapons at gun shows or flea markets. The highest number, 40 percent, said the guns came from a family member or a friend. About 37 percent said the weapons were stolen or obtained from an illegal source. The rest say the guns were bought at a retail store or pawn shop.

Murders committed with a gun dropped 39 percent to 11,101 in 2011, from a high of 18,253 in 1993, according to the report. 

Other crimes committed with guns were down even more sharply — from 1.53 million in 1993 to 467,300 in 2011, a drop of 70 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Around 70 percent of murders were committed with a firearm, and of those, the vast majority involved a handgun -- fluctuating between 70-80 percent.

The report is strictly factual and offers no analysis about the reasons for the decline in gun violence.

New York Senate via Reuters

New York state Senator and former Minority Leader John Sampson is shown in this undated photo provided by the New York Senate.

New York State Sen. John Sampson, a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn, New York City, was indicted Monday on federal charges of embezzlement, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI, officials said.

Sampson was a court-appointed referee to watch over escrow accounts for sales of foreclosed properties in Brooklyn. It's alleged he embezzled $440,000 between 1998 and 2008.

He's also accused of funneling funds into his failed campaign for Brooklyn DA.

The charges against Sampson come less than a week after prosecutors revealed that former Sen. Shirley Huntley made numerous secret recordings of other elected officials in a bid for leniency in her own corruption case.

Sampson, who represents the 19th senatorial district encompassing Canarsie, East New York, Mill Basin, Marine Park and Sheepshead Bay, was elected to the Senate in 1996. 

He is a member and past chairman of the New York Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Read more on NBCNewYork.com

Senate Democratic Conference Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins said Sampson has been stripped of his ranking positions and committee assignments.

FBI Assistant Director George Venizelos said in a statement Monday that "incumbent and defendant cannot be accepted as interchangeable."

"Elected officials are referred to as public servants, and that should not be confused with self-serving," he said.

Messages left with Sampson's district office and his attorney were not immediately returned.

U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch said Sampson allegedly abused public trust "for years" and stole from New Yorkers whose homes were in foreclosure.

“But the former Senate ethics leader didn’t stop there," Lynch said in a statement. "Senator Sampson allegedly stole that money to fund his own ambition to become Brooklyn’s top state prosecutor, then engaged in an elaborate obstruction scheme to hide his illegal conduct, going so far as to counsel lies and the hiding of evidence.”

The allegations against Sampson follow last month's arrests of State Sen. Malcolm Smith, New York City Councilman Daniel Halloran and two New York City GOP leaders on federal bribery charges.

According to court documents, Smith, a Democrat, allegedly schemed with Halloran, a Republican, to bribe Bronx and Queens Republican county chairs for a GOP line on this year's mayoral ballot. All four pleaded not guilty to various corruption charges in late April.

Separately, New York State Assemblyman Eric Stevenson was also arrested in April, charged with accepting bribes in exchange for official acts. He denies the allegations.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced several anti-corruption proposals in the wake of the bribery scandal. 

Updated 2:56 p.m. -- President Barack Obama unveiled sweeping new policies Wednesday aimed at limiting gun violence, teeing up a political showdown that will pit the broad public popularity for many gun control measures against Congress’s tepid appetite for approving the most stringent restrictions on gun ownership.  

"While there is no law or set of laws that can prevent every senseless act of violence completely, no piece of legislation that will prevent every tragedy, every act of evil," Obama said at a mid-day announcement at the White House, "if there's even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there's even one life that can be saved, then we've got an obligation to try it."

Acknowledging the difficulty of the Congressional fight ahead, Obama appealed for public support, slamming - as he did in a press conference earlier this week - conservative commentators and the most vocal pro-gun activists for "ginning up" opposition to gun reforms for political reasons. 

"I will put everything I've got into this and so will Joe [Biden], but I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it," he said. 

Some of the main legislative proposals backed by Obama and Vice President Joe Biden are:

• requiring criminal background checks on all gun sales, including private sales    
• banning "military-style" assault weapons    
• limiting ammunition magazines to 10 rounds      
• strengthening penalties for gun trafficking 

"The most important changes we can make depend on Congressional action," Obama said. "They need to bring these proposals up for a vote and the American people need to make sure that they do."

Related Information: Gun Violence Fact Sheet | Gun Violence Executive Summary | Gun Violence Reduction Executive Actions 

The president also signed a series of 23 executive actions - free from a Congressional blockade -- intended to strengthen existing laws, augment mental health measures and promote federal research on gun crime through the Centers for Disease Control. 

The executive actions announced included stricter prosecution of would-be gun buyers who fail background checks as well as new requirements for federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations. 
 

The president's recommendations also direct administration officials to "clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes" and to "release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities." 

Obama and Biden were joined at the White House event by families of the Newtown school shooting victims as well as by four children who wrote the president after the tragedy that left 20 young students dead. 

"This is our first task as a society: keeping our children safe," Obama said at the beginning of his remarks. "This is how we will be judged, and their voices should compel us to change."

Biden, who led the presidential task-force on gun safety in the wake of the Newtown shootings, praised the activists who met with his staff over the last week to help build the list of recommendations. 

"The world has changed and it's demanding action," Biden said. 

While some of Obama's long-expected proposals - like universal background checks - garner overwhelming public support, the outlawing of certain types of weapons may be less of a slam dunk for lawmakers eager to appease constituents. 

A recent poll from the Pew Research Center showed that a majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- back a ban on "assault-style weapons," with 40 percent saying they don't approve of a ban. But a partisan breakdown shows that only about four in ten Republicans support such restrictions, compared to a broad majority of Democrats. 

Democrats in Congress have already voiced doubts about the feasibility of the president's most ambitious proposals. 

"We're not going to get an outright ban" on assault weapons, Democrat Rep. Carolyn McCarthy of New York bluntly said yesterday.

 "[Senate Majority Leader] Reid has said he doesn't know whether he has the votes (for an assault weapons ban)," she added. "There's heavy lifting, so are we going to waste time on heavy lifting? Or are we going to try to work on doing something that could actually get passed?"

Related: Obama's gun plans spark little enthusiasm with key lawmakers

Supporters are more optimistic about background checks and magazine restrictions. 

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy announced Wednesday that his panel will hold its first hearing on issues relating to gun violence on Jan. 30.

In his remarks Wednesday, Obama anticipated opponents' reactions to his proposals. 

"This will be difficult," he said. "There will be pundits and politicians and special interest lobbyists publicly warning of a tyrannical all-out assault on liberty. Not because that's true, but because they want to gin up fear or higher ratings or revenue for themselves, and behind the scenes they will do everything they can to block any commonsense reform and make sure nothing changes whatsoever."

The National Rifle Association, the country's most powerful gun lobby, released a statement Wednesday afternoon in response to the president's remarks.

"We look forward to working with Congress on a bi-partisan basis to find real solutions to protecting America's most valuable asset - our children. Attacking firearms and ignoring children is not a solution to the crisis we face as a nation," the NRA wrote. "Only honest, law-abiding gun owners will be affected and our children will remain vulnerable to the inevitability of more tragedy."

That statement was relatively muted in comparison to the group's controversial ad released Tuesday night, which criticized Obama's dismissal of the gun lobby's proposal to increase armed security in schools. 

"Are the president's kids more important than yours?" a narrator asks in the short ad. "Then why is he skeptical about putting armed security in our schools when his kids are protected by armed guards at their schools? Mr. Obama demands the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes, but he's just another elitist hypocrite when it comes to a fair share of security."

Related: White House calls NRA 'repugnant,' 'cowardly' for invoking president's children in ad

The ad prompted outcry from observers who said the First Family should be off limits for such advertisements, while NRA backers say their focus is on school safety rather than on the president's daughters themselves. 

"Whoever thinks the ad is about President Obama's daughters are missing the point completely or they're trying to change the subject," said spokesman Andrew Arulanandam. "This ad is about keeping our children safe. And the president said he was skeptical about the NRA proposal to put policemen in all schools in this country. Yet he and his family are beneficiaries of multiple law enforcement officers surrounding them 24 hours a day." 

White House spokesman Jay Carney shot back that the ad is "cowardly." 

"Most Americans agree that a president's children should not be used as pawns in a political fight," he said. "But to go so far as to make the safety of the President's children the subject of an attack ad  is repugnant and cowardly."

NBC's Mark Murray, Frank Thorp, Ali Weinberg and Kelly O'Donnell contributed to this report.

Published 2:05 p.m. ET: A Justice Department paper concluding that the United States can order the killing of American citizens believed to be al-Qaida leaders shed at least some light on a legal rationale that lawmakers, journalists and civil libertarians have asked about for months.

But it leaves a swarm of questions unanswered.

The document says that the government can use lethal force against its citizens under three conditions: The citizen must pose “an imminent threat of violent attack” against the country, capturing the citizen must not be feasible, and it all has to be done within “law of war principles.”

The paper, first obtained by NBC News, is expected to figure prominently in the Senate confirmation hearing Thursday for John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s pick to lead the CIA. Brennan was an architect of the administration’s controversial escalation of drone strikes to take out suspected militants.

Here are four key questions about the Justice Department paper:

1. What’s in the original Justice Department memos?

What was obtained and made public Monday by NBC News was a Justice Department white paper. It summarizes classified memos on targeted killings produced by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which provides legal advice to the president.

Those original memos have not been released.

The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Justice Department in 2011 and 2012, seeking the administration’s legal justification for the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen believed by the government to have directed the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

In January, a federal judge refused to require the government to disclose the justification, but she expressed frustration.

“The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me,” wrote the judge, Colleen McMahon of Manhattan federal court. “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.”

2. What is an imminent threat?

The paper, in requiring that the U.S. citizen must pose an imminent threat, refers to a “broader concept of imminence.” It goes on to say what an imminent threat is not: Meeting the condition “does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” 

“Everyone agrees that if the country is about to be attacked, the country has a right to defend itself,” Stephen Saltzburg, a constitutional scholar and law professor at George Washington University, said Wednesday on MSNBC. But the Justice Department paper “defines imminent threat as being nothing that’s imminent at all.”

Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he was satisfied with the definitions.

The paper says that al-Qaida is continually plotting against the United States and says that the government may determine that a citizen has been “recently” involved in “activities” posing a threat of violent attack, without defining either term. The government may also determine simply that “there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities.”

3. Who pulls the trigger?

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told CBS News last year that the president makes the call when an American citizen is targeted for killing, without court oversight, when the government believes that that citizen wants to attack the country.

“The president obviously reviews these cases and reviews the legal justification and in the end says go or no-go,” Panetta said. “In the end, when it comes to, you know, going after someone like that, the president of the United States has to sign off. And he should.”

The Justice Department paper suggests that a wider circle of people could make that call, however. It permits targeted killing when an “informed, high-level official of the U.S. government” has determined that the target is an imminent threat. The memo does not say who in the government might qualify.

“It’s completely on faith,” said Naureen Shah, a lecturer at Columbia Law School and associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at the school’s Human Rights Institute.

“That might be something we’re willing to trust President Obama with,” she added, “but are we willing to trust the junior-level people who are actually running the show? Who are we trusting here?”

4. Could the justification apply in the United States?

The Justice Department paper explicitly refers to killing an American citizen in a foreign country. But legal experts and some lawmakers, concerned that the rationale violates the right to due process afforded Americans by the Constitution, see no reason why it couldn’t apply inside the United States.

“That should be the question on everyone’s mind. Probably the first question,” said Mary Ellen O’Connell, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and an authority on international law and the use of force.

“If the president can make up law,” she said, “I don’t see why he would think he is stopped from making up law to apply inside the United States.”

The question was among those submitted by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, to Brennan in January when Brennan was nominated for the CIA post. Among the other details Wyden sought was clarification on when the capture of such a citizen is “infeasible,” another standard laid out by the Justice Department white paper.

“Every American has the right to know when their government believes it is allowed to kill them,” Wyden said Tuesday.

The senator sits on the Intelligence Committee and will question Brennan directly at his confirmation hearing.

Related:

 Legal experts fear implications of White House drone memo

Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

Anticipating domestic boom, colleges rev up drone piloting programs

As the 40^th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision takes place on Tuesday, a majority of Americans – for the first time – believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

What’s more, seven in 10 respondents oppose Roe v. Wade being overturned, which is the highest percentage on this question since 1989.

“These are profound changes,” says Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted this survey with Democratic pollster Peter D. Hart and his colleagues.

Related: Poll shows public lowers expectations heading into Obama's 2nd term

McInturff adds that the abortion-related events and rhetoric over the past year – which included controversial remarks on abortion and rape by two Republican Senate candidates, as well as a highly charged debate over contraception – helped shaped these changing poll numbers.

“The dialogue we have had in the last year has contributed … to inform and shift attitudes.”

View the poll results here

The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, at least in the first three months of pregnancy.

According to the poll, 54 percent of adults say that abortion should be legal either always or most of the time, while a combined 44 percent said it should be illegal – either with or without exceptions. 

Recommended: Obama takes ceremonial oath, tells nation 'our journey is not complete'

That’s the first time since this poll question was first asked in 2003 that a majority maintained that abortion should be legal. Previously (with just one exception in 2008), majorities said abortion should be illegal.

In addition, a whopping 70 percent of Americans oppose the Roe v. Wade decision being overturned, including 57 percent who feel strongly about this.

That’s up from the 58 percent who said the decision shouldn’t be overturned in 1989; the 60 percent who said this in 2002; and the 66 percent who said this in 2005.

By comparison, just 24 percent now want the Roe v. Wade decision overturned, including 21 percent who feel strongly about this position.

Much of this change, the NBC/WSJ pollsters say, is coming from African Americans, Latinos and women without college degrees -- all of whom increasingly oppose the Supreme Court decision being overturned.

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted Jan. 12-15 of 1,000 adults (including 300 cellphone-only respondents), and it has a margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points. 

Related: 40 years after landmark decision, restrictions on abortion grow

The U.S. Supreme Court term that begins Monday promises to be one of the most important for civil rights in decades, with the potential for blockbuster decisions on issues from race in classrooms and the voting booth to legal recognition for same-sex marriage.

Related: Conservatives warily ponder prospect of an 'Obama court'

Less than a decade after ruling that the nation's colleges and universities can consider the race of student applicants to achieve more racially diverse campuses, a practice now widely used by the nation's selective schools, the court has agreed to take a fresh look.

The new challenge comes from Abigail Fisher, a white student denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin. The school admits the top 10 percent of academic performers from all Texas high schools, then considers the race of applicants as one factor in admitting the remainder of an incoming freshman class.

Evan Vucci / AP

People who waited in line overnight to hear the Supreme Court on a landmark case on health care hold their belongings as they make their way into the court in Washington, Thursday, June 28, 2012.

Fisher did not finish in the top 10 percent at her high school and claims that the consideration of race in reviewing applications cost her a spot at the university. 

"There were people in my class with lower grades, who weren't in all the activities I was in, who were accepted into UT. And the only difference between us was the color of our skin," she said. 

The university, backed by civil rights groups, contends that while the top 10 percent plan achieves some campus diversity, many of its classes would have only a few, if any, black and Hispanic students without additional considerations of race. 

Making it harder to achieve the diversity colleges need, argues Gregory Garre, a Washington, D.C. lawyer representing the University of Texas, "would jeopardize the nation's paramount interest in educating its future leaders in an environment that best prepares them for the society and workforce they will encounter." 

The Supreme Court that will hear the case Oct. 10 is different from the one that upheld a race-conscious admissions program at the University of Michigan law school in 2003. 

"Sandra Day O'Connor was on the court then, and she's been replaced by Samuel Alito, who has much less tolerance for affirmative action," says Tom Goldstein, a Washington, D.C. lawyer who specializes in Supreme Court cases. 

O'Connor, who wrote the decision in the Michigan case, retired from the court in 2006. 

As a result, says Pamela Harris, a former Obama administration official in the Justice Department, "I don't think anyone thinks affirmative action is long for this world." 

Justice Elena Kagan, considered one of the court's liberals, will sit this one out. She was the Obama administration's solicitor general when the Justice Department became involved in the case in the lower courts. 

The Supreme Court will take up another racially charged issue this term if, as seems likely, it agrees to consider efforts to scale back the landmark Voting Rights Act. 

Passed by Congress in 1965 and renewed four times since then, most recently in 2006, a key provision requires states with a history of discrimination at the polls to get federal permission before making any changes to election procedures -- from redrawing congressional district boundaries to changing the locations of polling places. 

Three years ago, the Supreme Court brushed off a challenge to that requirement but strongly suggested that several justices had doubts about its constitutionality, given recent electoral reforms. 

"Things have changed in the South," the court said in 2009. "Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare." 

Pending cases ask the court to strike down the pre-clearance requirement entirely or throw out the list of areas, consisting of nine entire states, and of 12 cities and 57 counties elsewhere, that must get permission to modify their election procedures. 

The current map, says Bert Rein, a Washington, D.C. lawyer representing Shelby County, Ala., includes some localities that have made substantial reforms while missing other parts of the country that have failed to root out discrimination at the polls. 

As a result, Rein says, the system is unfair. "Florida has been forced into pre-clearance litigation to prove that reducing early voting from 14 days to 8 is not discriminatory, when states such as Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania have no early voting at all." 

But Debo Adegbile of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund says the current map is a close enough fit to cover the areas of greatest concern. 

"Congress is not a surgeon with a scalpel when it acts to legislate across the 50 states. But it can reasonably attack discrimination where it finds it," he says. 

The court is almost certain to take up a host of challenges to the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996. 

It defines marriage, for the purposes of federal law, as "only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife." As a result, same-sex couples who get married in the states where such marriages are legal are accorded state and local benefits but miss out on more than 1,100 federal ones. 

After at first defending the law, the Obama administration notified federal courts early last year that it concluded the law was unconstitutional. House Republicans then took up the law's defense. 

A Supreme Court ruling striking down DOMA as discriminatory would not force states to permit same-sex marriage. But it would require the federal government to recognize those marriages where they are legal. 

The court could address the issue of same-sex marriage more directly if it takes up the legal challenge to California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in the state.  

Legal experts differ on whether the court is prepared to go that far, rather than deciding the DOMA issue now and coming back to the constitutionality of gay marriage in a later term. 

"We're not at the point where the Supreme Court will require the state of Mississippi to allow same-sex marriage," says Louis Michael Seidman of the Georgetown University Law Center. 

Among other questions the justices will confront: 

- Must police get a search warrant before taking a blood sample from a suspected drunk driver? 

- How far can police go in using drug-sniffing dogs outside someone's house? 

- Can a 1789 law, the Alien Tort Statute, be used to bring lawsuits in US courts for violations of international law that occur in other countries? 

- And, in an issue of growing interest to U.S. businesses, should more limits be placed on the ability to bring class-action lawsuits?

Alabama Dept. of Corrections

Julia Tutwiler Prison for Women in Alabama is facing complaints of sexual misconduct by guards.

Sexual misconduct by male correctional staff toward inmates at Alabama's Tutwiler Prison for Women is "commonplace" and has resulted in numerous women becoming pregnant while incarcerated, a complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Justice alleges.

Equal Justice Initiative, a private nonprofit organization, filed the complaint about the all-female prison in Wetumpka, Ala., Tuesday after receiving dozens of claims of sexual misconduct involving male staff between 2004 and 2011.

In interviews with more than 50 women incarcerated at the prison, EJI said it discovered "frequent and severe officer-on-inmate sexual violence," ranging from women being coerced into performing sexual favors in exchange for contraband goods to rape by a male correctional staff member while another male officer served as a lookout.

Even in instances in which abuse was confirmed, perpetrators received little more than a slap on the wrist, EJI Executive Director Bryan Stevenson told msnbc.com.

"In the last two years, the person who received the harshest sentence was a man who got six months in jail," Stevenson said. "This was for a woman who was raped and became pregnant. The baby was born, and DNA confirmed it was his."

Had the rape occurred outside prison confines, the sentence could have been 50 years to life in prison, he said.

"It actually makes you think you can do this with impunity," he said.

Instead of punishing the staff committing the offenses, Tutwiler punished the women when they tried to report the incidents, Stevenson said. Anyone who reported sexual abuse at Tutwiler was called a liar by the warden and routinely placed in segregated cells with privileges revoked.

Tutwiler Prison Warden Frank Albright did not return a phone call from msnbc.com on Wednesday, but the Alabama Department of Corrections said it has a zero-tolerance policy for sexual offenses.

“This is a matter of grave concern to me,” Alabama Corrections Commissioner Kim Thomas said in a press release. “From the beginning of my watch, I have made it very clear to my staff that custodial sexual misconduct will not be tolerated and is an especially egregious offense to me. We take every action possible to prevent it from happening and if it does, we undertake prompt corrective employee discipline and pursue criminal prosecution where applicable.”

But according to EJI's investigation, the Alabama Department of Corrections has been under-reporting data on sexual misconduct. None has been provided since September 2010, despite at least four Tutwiler employees being indicted on charges of abuse during 2011, according to court records.

Report: Nearly 10 percent of inmates suffer sexual abuse

The Department of Justice did not respond to msnbc.com's questions about how they are handling the complaint.

It's not clear from the EJI's investigation how many claims of sexual harrassment the group has received from the prison, which has a capacity of 956 inmates.

Just last week, the Justice Department published a report on sexual abuse in state prisons, local jails, and post-release treatment facilities across the country. Nearly one in 10 prisoners suffers sexual abuse while incarcerated, the report said.

In 2007, a Justice Department report ranked Tutwiler as the women's prison with the most sexual assaults, and 11th among all the prisons studied.

Even after the 2007 federal report, Tutwiler policies on sexual miscconduct continued to be lax, Stevenson alleged.

"Male guards shouldn't be going into the showers and exploiting the vulnerability of women when they're naked and exposed," Stevenson said. "Many states have regulations that restrict these kind of breaches. They haven't done that at Tutwiler." 

In fact, Stephenson thinks sexual assault is even more widespread at the prison than his group has found.

"We think there are a lot more people who have information that they want to share that didn't feel comfortable doing that," he said. "I'm hoping the public exposure and scrutiny will make people feel comfortable to step forward."

Since filing the complaint, EJI has heard from many women who alleged abuse.

"We've gotten some calls this morning from women who seemed so grateful and relieved that finally, some light has been shed on this."

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