MONTGOMERY, Ala. — A former FBI agent was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for assaulting an 11-year-old girl while serving as an Alabama state trooper.
Alabama state police hired Christopher Bauer even though he was fired from the FBI amid earlier claims he raped a co-worker at knifepoint.
An Associated Press investigation showed Bauer, 45, moved from one law enforcement job to another with the help of fake letters that made it appear he was “eligible for rehire.”
The forgery sparked an FBI investigation but federal authorities declined to charge Bauer while state proceedings were pending.
A jury convicted Bauer in June of first-degree sodomy and sexual abuse of a child at 12 after a weeklong trial in which the defense attorney said the girl made up the allegations.
Shackled and wearing an orange jail uniform, Bauer told Montgomery Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool that he never imagined he would end up on the inmate’s side of a jail cell. He said the jury isn’t always right.
“It seems that no matter what I say, no one wants to believe that I’m innocent,” he told the judge. “All it takes is an accusation to break it all.”
The girl’s mother stood with prosecutors, who asked for the maximum sentence. Daryl D. Bailey, the Montgomery County district attorney, called Bauer a “sexual victim” after the conviction, saying he should be “taken off the streets forever.”
“He’s a monster,” the girl’s mother told the judge. Bauer, he added, uses the badge to project “the image of a good person.”
“He had everyone fooled,” he said.
Pool told Bauer when he handed down the life sentence that he “believed every word” of the victim’s testimony.
Bauer’s defense attorney argued that the lawless attorney should be freed after abusing minors in orphanages and orphanages. He was removed from his parents at the age of 5 and later diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder.
“Several incidents remain out for Mr. Bauer, including once when he was pushed out of the third floor of the building and another when he was left in a burning apartment,” the lawyer wrote in a court filing.
Bauer, who was arrested in 2021, faces similar child sex abuse charges outside New Orleans. Louisiana State Police said they plan to extradite him after the Alabama case.
During the Alabama trial, the boy – now a teenager – tearfully testified that he had been repeatedly abused by Bauer for years, too afraid to speak up or tell anyone what had happened.
Jurors saw a tape of an interview with a child abuse investigator in which he described similar abuse. Law enforcement became involved after the girl finally told a friend and the friend’s parents alerted the school.
Bauer took the stand in his own defense during the trial, answering “no, never” when asked if he had abused or sodomized his children. “If he says I did something to him, that’s a lie.”
Bauer’s time at the FBI was not discussed in detail at the hearing. A judge granted a defense request to suppress statements about allegations by a co-worker in Louisiana that she had been raped at knife point.
The FBI said Bauer drafted a letter that cleared the record and helped clear the way for Alabama state police to hire in 2019. The document, obtained by the AP, confirmed a decade of “creditable service” and deemed him “eligible for rehire,” but the FBI told the AP that the letter was “illegal.”
Alabama authorities have refused to explain how Bauer’s previous misconduct went unnoticed. An AP investigation found he was not cleared by the FBI because of applications to the state police, including that he had been suspended without pay and removed from security clearance in 2018 amid sexual misconduct allegations he faced while working at the FBI’s New Orleans office. .
Many allegations played out in Louisiana court filings that have been public for years when Bauer was hired in Alabama. The woman who accused him of rape, a co-worker at the FBI, wrote in the application that Bauer had choked her and made her “fear for my life.”
Bauer disputed the claim, telling colleagues that the act was consensual. But the woman previously told the AP that Bauer assaulted her so often that her hair began to fall out.
“It was a year of torture,” he said. “He would literally keep me for days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, and in six months I went from 150 pounds to 92 pounds. I died physically from what he did to me.
The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Bauer’s sentencing. The agency declined to release records from an internal investigation into Bauer’s hiring, with a spokesman saying only that “no disciplinary action was taken as a result of the review.”
___
Mustian reported from Miami.
___ Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/
