NASHVILLE, Tenn. (KeynoteUSA) — A federal lawsuit alleges that police officers took thousands of dollars from a businessman in his Tennessee town in exchange for obstructing efforts to investigate allegations that he sexually assaulted several women for years. The police department has denied any wrongdoing.
The racketeering allegation involving several Johnson City police officers appears in court documents in a federal lawsuit accusing construction contractor Sean Williams, now in custody on state and federal criminal charges, of drugging and raping women in the East Tennessee community from 2018 to 2021 while police did little to investigate it.
There was “an implicit or explicit agreement” that the officers would protect Williams, “allowing him to continue his criminal abuse and trafficking activities with impunity,” say attorneys for nine women, listed as Jane Does 1-9, who are suing. the city.
These plaintiffs raised the extortion claims months ago, but their May 14 filing makes them more explicit by alleging that bank documents support the claims. The same attorneys also revealed in April that they had provided hundreds of pages of information to a federal public corruption investigation of the police department.
Williams awaits trial on state charges including child rape, aggravated sexual assault 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 is also charged with escape, after authorities say 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 from The KeynoteUSA.
Erick Herrin, an attorney for the city and several officers who were sued, 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 an investigation.
“No evidence has been presented to support allegations of corruption by the Johnson City Police Department, and we welcome any investigation that may dispel such allegations,” the city said.
The May 14 filing claims Williams’ business partner, known as Woman 4, opened shell companies disguised as subcontractors and transferred thousands of dollars from Williams’ business, Glass and Concrete Contracting . The money was laundered so she could accept “owner withdrawals” to pay $2,000 a week to some Johnson City police officers, who had also confiscated cash from Williams’ safe, the document alleges.
The plaintiffs point to bank records and say that, for example, during a two-week period in June 2022, Woman 4 withdrew nearly $30,000 in cash from the company account. They say the woman appears to have withdrawn no more than $10,000 per day, “likely in an effort to evade mandatory suspicious activity.”
In a filing filed in March, the plaintiffs said Williams himself described the extortion in a message from jail in September 2023. They say he used a contraband cellphone to send the messages to an accomplice, who then posted them on Facebook . One mentioned weekly payments of $2,000 to agents who used fraudulent 1099 tax documents and “forged landlord sweepstakes.”
In a court filing in response, Woman 4’s attorney said her communications with Williams have been infrequent since their personal relationship ended in 2017. The filing says the Facebook post was made by “someone using the name Sean Williams” and says she doesn’t have any relevant information. She is aware of the allegations and she does not have any relevant documents.
Woman 4’s attorney 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 racketeering allegations, citing an ongoing investigation, and did not specify whether or not they are investigating the racketeering allegations.
The lawsuits say Williams’ crimes continued even after Jane Doe 1 survived a fall from the window of her fifth-floor apartment in September 2020. Officers investigating the fall found ample evidence of sexual assaults in her apartment, including a list of names labeled “violated.” ” Even when that woman went public, Williams’ identity was protected as “Robert Voe.”
Kateri Lynne Dahl, a former special prosecutor with the East Tennessee U.S. Attorney’s Office, was hired as a liaison to city authorities. She also filed a federal lawsuit against the city. She says she gathered substantial evidence that Williams had been dealing drugs and was credibly accused of sexually assaulting and raping several women, but police refused to investigate further and failed in their attempt to arrest him on a federal charge of possession of federal felon ammunition in April 2021. , letting him flee.
The city refuted Dahl’s claims in a statement that noted delays in processing.
Williams was not arrested until April 2023, when a university police officer in North Carolina found him asleep in his car and learned of the federal warrant. An affidavit says a search of the car found, along with drugs and about $100,000 in cash, digital storage devices with more than 5,000 images of child sexual abuse, as well as photos and videos of 52 female victims who were sexually assaulted by Williams in his Johnson City. apartment while they were in an “obvious state of unconsciousness.”
Many of the videos were stored in labeled folders, and at least a half-dozen names in the folders matched names on the “rape” list found in her apartment two and a half years earlier, the affidavit states.
Meanwhile, public outcry over police response to complaints from a growing number of women led the city in the summer of 2022 to order an outside investigation into how officers handled sexual assault investigations. And in November 2022, the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened a federal investigation into sex trafficking.
Findings from the city’s third-party audit, released in 2023, include that police conducted inconsistent, ineffective and incomplete investigations; relied on inadequate records management; They had insufficient training and policies and sometimes showed problems with gender-based stereotypes and biases.
The city said it began improving the department’s performance while awaiting the audit’s findings, including following the district attorney’s new sexual assault investigation protocol; review investigation policies and procedures; create a “comfortable space” for victim interviews and increase funding for officer training and a new records management system.
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