Let’s remember when the Lynnwood Police bullied a young woman into retracting her (true) report of being raped, on this day in 2008 (August 14)
If anyone is at all (still) curious as to why so many sexual assaults go unreported, this should be exhibit A. I have watched videos of police officers planting evidence on innocent people that are less infuriating. This case is where I went full-on ACAB. I wrote about it last year here.
Here’s how ProPublica’s T. Christian Miller and the Marshall Project’s Ken Armstrong wrote about this fateful day in their Pulitzer-winning article:
In Sgt. (Jeffrey) Mason’s experience, when someone asked if they were in trouble, almost always, they were.
When Mason, accompanied by Detective (Jerry) Rittgarn, went to pick up Marie at about 3:30 p.m., they found her outside her apartment, sitting on the grass. The three went to the Lynnwood police station, where the detectives escorted Marie to a conference room.
From what Mason wrote up later, he wasted little time confronting Marie, telling her there were inconsistencies between her statements and accounts from other witnesses. Marie said she didn’t know of any discrepancies. But she went through the story again — only this time, saying she believed the rape had happened instead of saying it for certain. Tearfully, she described her past — all the foster parents, being raped when she was 7, getting her own place and feeling alone. Rittgarn told Marie that her story and the evidence didn’t match. He said he believed she had made the story up — a spur-of-the-moment thing, not something planned out. He asked if there was really a rapist running around the neighborhood that the police should be looking for. “No,” Marie told him, her voice soft, her eyes down.
“Based on her answers and body language it was apparent that [Marie] was lying about the rape,” Rittgarn later wrote.
Without reading Marie her rights — you have the right to an attorney, you have the right to remain silent — the detectives asked Marie to write out the true story, admitting she had lied, admitting, in effect, that she had committed a crime. She agreed, so they left her alone for a few minutes. On the form she filled in her name, address and Social Security number, and then she wrote, in part:
I was talking to Jordan on the phone that night about his day and just about anything. After I got off the phone with him, I started thinking about all things I was stressed out and I also was scared living on my own. When I went to sleep I dreamed that someone broke in and raped me.
When the detectives returned, they saw that Marie’s new statement described the rape as a dream, not a lie.
Why didn’t you write that you made the story up? Rittgarn asked.
Marie, crying, said she believed the rape really happened. She pounded the table and said she was “pretty positive.”
Pretty positive or actually positive? Rittgarn asked.
Maybe the rape happened and I blacked it out, Marie said.
What do you think should happen to someone who would lie about something like this? Rittgarn asked Marie.
If you haven’t read it yet, I recommend reading the whole thing soon.
The Seattle Times reported when the victim sued the Lynnwood PD (which was ultimately settled for $150,000):
In August 2008, a stranger broke into the apartment of an 18-year-old Lynnwood woman, gagged her, bound her hands with a shoelace and raped her.
When the woman reported the attack to Lynnwood police, she says detectives Jerry Rittgarn and Sgt. Jeff Mason didn’t believe her. Claiming police coerced her into recanting her story, the woman was charged with false reporting and fined $500 when she later tried to insist the rape did happen.
It wasn’t until 2½ years later, when former Washington state resident Marc O’Leary was arrested for several rapes in Colorado, that Lynnwood police reopened their investigation. Among the items Colorado detectives found in O’Leary’s possession were photographs of the woman and her ID card.
O’Leary was convicted of three rapes in Colorado and two in Washington, including the Lynnwood attack and the rape of a 63-year-old Kirkland woman, and is serving a 327-year sentence in a Colorado prison.
The victim of the Lynnwood attack last week filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against the city of Lynnwood, claiming detectives disregarded evidence of the assault, bullied her into saying it didn’t happen and then threatened to have her thrown out of her apartment when she insisted it did. Also named in the suit are Rittgarn, Mason and Lynnwood Police Chief Steven J. Jensen.
The woman, identified in the lawsuit by the initials D.M., says she was forced to undergo counseling when Lynnwood police told managers of the at-risk youth program where she was living in 2008 that they didn’t believe she’d been raped, according to court documents.
The lawsuit alleges that the woman was required to stand up in front of other program participants and say that she had lied about being raped or risk being evicted, according to the lawsuit.
“Professionalism, vigilance, community,” my ass.
