A second point, when a woman withdraw charges under "suspicious" circumstances I wonder just how many of those "false" accusations are just strong arm tactics used to beat the victim down even more. A signal to other women perhaps?
In August 2008, the victim, identified only as D.M., was in transitional housing after being in foster homes. She was 18 at the time.
A stranger, later known to be O’Leary, entered her Lynnwood apartment, “threatened plaintiff D.M. with a butcher knife, bound her wrists with a shoe string he had removed from her shoes, stuffed a pair of underwear in her mouth as a gag, blindfolded her, and took photographs of her,” according to the lawsuit she filed.
“The detectives took pictures of the binding marks. They themselves took those pictures. The detectives saw the scene,” said Yvonne Ward, one of the victim’s attorneys.
D.M. was also taken to the emergency room at Providence Hospital in Everett, where a doctor made notes of rape trauma.
Yet, after conversations with the victim’s stepmother, her friend, and anonymous caller, police began to have doubts.
A police narrative from Detective Jerry Rittgarn states, “I talked with Sgt. (Jeff) Mason concerning his follow-up case. He told me that based on subsequent interviews and inconsistencies with D.M., her foster mother, and her friend…who [sic] she had talked with on the phone prior to the report, he believed and others believed that D.M. had made up the story.”
D.M. confessed to making up the incident, which her attorneys said was a result of a police interrogation. She was charged with filing a false report and went through court-ordered counseling for lying to police.
City of Lynnwood to pay $150,000 to rape victim | www.kirotv.com
See also:
Lynnwood to pay rape victim $150,000 in false-claim suit
It turned out the woman, identified in court documents by the initials D.M., was one of several victims of serial rapist Marc O’Leary, a former Washington man who admitted the 2008 crime and is serving a 327-year prison sentence in Colorado for raping three women there.
O’Leary, in addition to assaulting D.M., also admitted he raped a 63-year-old Kirkland woman.
D.M. also reached a settlement with Cocoon House, a private, nonprofit at-risk-youth program where she was living when the assault occurred. Records show the woman — who was 18 at the time of the attack — was threatened with eviction unless she underwent counseling and stood in front of other program participants to say she had lied about being raped, according to court documents.
[,,,]
However, when the lawsuit was filed in June, the program’s CEO, Cassie Franklin, issued a statement saying “Our hearts go out to D.M. and her family. ... We strongly believe that Cocoon House and its employees acted appropriately on behalf of the client.”
No comments:
Post a Comment