A federal lawsuit alleges that police took thousands of dollars from a businessman in a Tennessee town in exchange for obstructing efforts to investigate allegations that he assaulted multiple women over the years. The police department has denied wrongdoing.
Extortion claims involving several Johnson City police officers appear in court filings of a federal lawsuit accusing building contractor Sean Williams — who is currently in custody on state and federal criminal charges — of drugging and raping women in an East Tennessee community from 2018 to 2021. .the police did little to investigate him.
There was an “implied or explicit agreement” that the officers would protect Williams, “allowing him to continue his criminal activities of abuse and human trafficking with impunity,” said lawyers for the nine women, listed as Jane Does 1-9, who are suing. city.
The plaintiff raised the extortion claim several months ago, but a May 14 filing made the claim clearer by stating that bank documents backed up the claim. The same attorney also announced, in April, that he had provided hundreds of pages of information to the federal public corruption investigation of the police department.
Williams is awaiting trial on state charges including child rape, aggravated sexual battery and especially aggravated sexual exploitation, and federal charges including three counts of production of child sexual abuse material and one count of distribution of cocaine. He was also charged with escape, after authorities said he kicked out the window of a federal transport van and was captured in Florida more than a month later.
The law firm representing Williams did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment by The Associated Press.
Erick Herrin, the attorney for the city and several of the officials charged, said all of the defendants deny the allegations, but court rules limit what they can say. In a statement, the city said it would welcome the investigation.
“No evidence has been presented to support allegations of corruption by the Johnson City Police Department, and we welcome an investigation that may dispel these claims,” ​​the city said.
The charges were written
The May 14 filing alleges Williams’ business partner, referred to as Female 4, ran a shell company posing as a subcontractor and transferring thousands of dollars from Williams’ business, Glass and Concrete Contracting LLC. The money was laundered so he could get a “draw owner” to pay $2,000 a week to several Johnson City Police officers who also seized money from Williams’ safe, the documents state.
The plaintiffs showed bank records, saying that, for example, in two weeks in June 2022, Woman 4 withdrew almost $30,000 in cash from the company’s account. He said that the woman withdraws no more than $10,000 per day, “the possibility of avoiding the obligation to (report) suspicious activities.”
In a filing in March, prosecutors said Williams himself described the extortion in a message from jail in September 2023. He said he used a contraband cellphone to send the message to a coconspirator who then posted it on Facebook. One mentioned weekly payments of $2,000 to officials using fraudulent 1099 tax documents and “false owner draws.”
In a court filing in response, Female 4’s attorney said communication with Williams has been rare since their personal relationship ended in 2017. The filing said the Facebook post was made by “someone using the name Sean Williams” and said they had no relevance. was aware of the allegations and did not have the relevant documents.
Lawyers for Female 4 did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
The local district attorney, who is prosecuting the Tennessee charges against Williams, declined to comment on the extortion charges, citing an ongoing investigation, and did not specify whether they were looking into extortion charges.
One of the alleged victims fell from a fifth floor window
The lawsuit alleges that Williams’ crimes continued even after Jane Doe 1 escaped from a fifth-floor apartment window in September 2020. Officers investigating that fall found numerous evidence of sexual assault in her apartment, including a list of names labeled “Rape.” Although the woman was publicly, Williams’ identity was protected as “Robert Voe.”
Kateri Lynne Dahl, a former special prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in East Tennessee, was brought in as a liaison to city officials. He also filed a federal lawsuit against the city. They said they gathered enough evidence that Williams had been drugged and believed to be accused of sexually assaulting and raping multiple women, but police refused to investigate further and failed in their efforts to arrest him on federal ammunition charges in April 2021. he fled.
The city disputed Dahl’s claims in a statement referring to the prosecution’s delay.
Williams was not arrested until April 2023, when campus police officers in North Carolina found him sleeping in his car and learned of a federal warrant. The affidavit said a search of the car found — along with drugs and $100,000 in cash — a digital storage device with more than 5,000 images of child sexual abuse as well as photos and videos of 52 female victims sexually assaulted by Williams in Johnson City. apartment when they were in a “clear state of unconsciousness.”
Many of the videos were kept in labeled folders, and at least a half-dozen names in those folders were consistent with the first name on the “Raised” list found in her apartment two and a half years earlier, the affidavit said.
Meanwhile, public outcry over police responses to complaints from many women prompted the city in the summer of 2022 to order an outside investigation into how officers handled sexual assault investigations. And in November 2022, the US Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a federal sex trafficking investigation.
Findings from the city’s third-party audit, released in 2023, include police conducting inconsistent, ineffective and incomplete investigations; relying on inadequate records management; lacks adequate training and policies, and sometimes presents issues of stereotypes and gender-based bias.
The city said it began to improve the performance of the department while waiting for the findings of the audit, including following the district attorney’s new sexual investigation protocol; review investigative policies and procedures; create “comfortable spaces” for victim interviews and increase funding for officer training and a new records management system.
