A Santa Rosa woman charged with filing a false report after she claimed she was drugged and raped by a police officer and others is fighting the allegation in court.
Danielle Charter, 24, faces up to six months in jail if prosecutors can prove she knowingly lied about the litany of assaults she said she suffered after being arrested for public drunkenness by Santa Rosa officers.
The rare criminal charge was filed after an investigation by the Sonoma County Sheriff’s Office concluded that her claims, laid out in a graphic detail in a 23-page statement, were baseless.
“Any time someone makes false allegations, it’s doing a disservice to all true victims out there,” said Capt. Matt McCaffrey, a sheriff’s office spokesman.
Her attorney, Santa Rosa women’s rights activist Tanya Brannan, said Charter stands by the story and will appeal any conviction to a higher court. She accused prosecutors of bringing the charges to intimidate Charter.
“This is retaliatory prosecution, pure and simple,” Brannan said in a court hearing last week.
Prosecutors and law enforcement said they chose to file against Charter because they believe her claims are bogus and undermine laws intended to protect women.
The case stems from Charter’s Nov. 30, 2009, arrest after midnight near her apartment on Occidental Circle in west Santa Rosa.
In her statement, she admitted to being drunk and fighting with her boyfriend, whom she had misled into believing that she had swallowed 20 over-the-counter sleeping pills.
After she cut her boyfriend’s hand with scissors and fell down stairs, he called the police and she fled into the cold night on foot, dressed in a tank-top and drawstring pants, she said.
Moments later, she was stopped by two officers who confirmed her identity and detained her. A third officer handcuffed Charter and placed her in the back of his patrol car, she said.
Charter said she lapsed in and out of consciousness, but described being driven somewhere by the officer, injected with drugs and raped by a number of men who paid the officer to have sex with her.
At some point, the men turned on the officer and took back their money, she wrote in the statement.
Charter wrote that near the end of the ordeal, she was beaten, told she had been infected with AIDS and photographed naked, and was visited by one of the two original officers, who also raped her. Charter was then driven to the Main Adult Detention Center and booked.
Two weeks after her arrest she reported her account to authorities.
The Press Democrat is not using the officers names because they are not charged with, or being investigated for, a potential criminal offense.
A key issue is the amount of time that passed between when Charter was arrested and jailed.
Her lawyer said she was booked into the county jail more than two hours after police arrived at Occidental Circle and that police are unable to account for their whereabouts at certain times.
The investigation by Sgt. Cecile Focha, a detective in the sheriff’s sexual assault unit, concluded that Charter was admitted to the jail seven minutes after officers left the scene at Occidental Court.
A GPS device in the officer’s car indicated the trip occurred from 12:58 a.m. to 1:05 a.m. and followed a direct route from Charter’s home to the jail, the investigation found.
“There are only so many things that can take place in that period of time,” McCaffrey said. The criminal charge was recommended because of the seriousness of the claims that “we could show were completely manufactured,” he said.
“We do not want to deter anyone from reporting criminal misconduct,” District Attorney Jill Ravitch said. “On other hand, you need to hold people accountable if they are indeed misrepresenting the truth.”
Charter contends she is being punished for speaking out. This week, her lawyer sought GPS records, any video recordings of the incident and personnel files of the officers. Judge Shelly Averill denied the last request and set the next hearing for April 19.
Brannan said she’s prepared to argue Charter’s story is true. If nothing else, she said, Charter was drugged and lacked the state of mind to deliberately falsify a report.
“We’re going to take this as far as it needs to be taken until there are no charges against Danielle Charter,” Brannan said.
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6 comments:
Good to see that the officers are not being named.
It's obvious that she was trying to get out of her assault charge by claiming she was raped. It's like in college of charges of underage drinking being dropped due to rape. No different.
And good for the judge to decline the requests for the personel files. Those have nothing to do with this case.
Dehbashi - ”And good for the judge to decline the requests for the personel files. Those have nothing to do with this case.”
Of course they weren’t germane, that women’s rights activist defense attorney was just looking to try to smear the officers, hoping to find something in their records that she might be able to twist into a lack of proper concern for female victims.
Any complaint by a woman about an officer (for any reason) could be spun into evidence of police misogyny.
If and when we do start seeing more women facing charges for false accusation, I expect that requesting the “jackets” of any officers involved will become part of the routine – a naked attempt at intimidating police and/or punishing them for pressing charges against women.
Somethings are little changed from when Kanin did his ground-breaking studies, including his observations that (what has come to be known as) the SGI view police as being adversarial to their goals. Even though we’ve witnessed a significant portion of law enforcement bend-over backwards to try to appease the demands of the SGI. Even as the pendulum swung ridiculously too far in favor of women, the SGI still had little more than blanket criticisms for LE. Just imagine how they’ll respond should that pendulum ever start to swing back [as it may well have already begun to do].
I’d venture that police officers personnel records won’t be the only thing the SGI will be going after. Don’t be surprised if they start to send their “investigators” to start “asking questions” (a.k.a., dig up dirt on) about the family members of police officers, and perhaps even the families of prosecutors and judges as par t of a campaign to intimidate and punish.
The SGI has never “fought fair”, even when they were getting their way. Don’t expect anything to be “off-limits” to their efforts to prevent consequences to women who make FRA’s.
Great points slwerner.
I'm like you. Sure I don't like certain things law enforcement does but half of what they do wrong is not because they want to but pressurized in doing so. That's a good chunk of the reason why they don't charge a false rape accuser. The SGI would do anything they can to destroy their lives if they even dare to do so.
I hope as a start we will have a charge such as perverting the course of justice as the UK does in the US. But they can't be from LE. That has to be the jobs of us citizens to get that passed by our government here in the USA. Just like FRS and FIRE are doing to prevent the SAVE Act.
Rape, kidnapping, and using a drug to subdue you victim will get you a life sentence in California.
If we were to turn this around and tell this woman that she would be facing 18 years to life in prison, this would end False Rape Accusations in general. Instilling the fear of god in these FRA is the only way to do away with this crime.
But that’s the problem women are allowed to use the rape lie as a weapon of choice against men. When will women be held accountable for their fraud, in the Crystal Magnum case it went on and on until an innocent man was murdered.
Using a rape lie to subdue your victim is the new weapon of choice for many women.
Instilling the fear of god in these FRA is the only way to do away with this crime.
When all is said an done,God knows the truth about it all.and someday,whoever is lying,will be sentenced.even those who help to up-hold the lie.
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