She couldn’t tell the prosecutor from the defense team.  When SL walked into the room where Jefferson County Prosecutor Michael Haas had told her to appear for a deposition, she saw men so friendly with each other she felt isolated and alone.  She had never met Haas.  They had spoken for the first time ten days earlier.  He had informed her she would have to appear at the Tacoma offices for the lawyer representing Patrick McAllister, who had previously been convicted of raping and assaulting her over a period of six weeks in 2010 and was facing retrial.

She had asked Haas to meet with her, to help her prepare to talk again about terrible things she had been trying to forget.  She wanted to do a good job.  She wanted to see McAllister brought to justice.  But Haas would not help her get ready.  All he did was send her a pile of paper she didn’t have time to look at until thirty minutes before the deposition started.

The deposition lasted over four hours.  The transcript reveals only a single break of some minutes.  It went through the lunch hour, but SL was not given a chance to eat.  It was a grueling, difficult experience.  She was taken again through the rapes, starting on March 18, 2010, when she arrived from the Philippines, a young woman from a small, remote village on the Island of Leyte.  She then spoke and understood very little English.

She had met McAllister through her sister’s husband, an American.  They had spoken by telephone then McAllister had visited.  The men in her family guarded him at night because their poor house was lacking walls.  McAllister grew weary of the village.  He wanted to go to a resort.  SL’s father came along to chaperone.  He made them all sleep in the same room, with his daughter in his bed.  After this he agreed to let her marry McAllister.

McAllister lied about his prior convictions for sexual assault to get SL through customs. (See this report by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.) He brought her to his Brinnon house (shown above) and the rapes began.  She says that almost every day he forced intercourse upon her.  He grabbed her neck and made her perform oral sex.  He beat and kicked her.  She tried pushing him off, but was overpowered.  She is tiny.  She stands not much taller than a grocery cart.  McAllister had been an iron worker and weighed 170 pounds.

She was raped in the living room and bedroom, beaten in the kitchen, kicked for no reason while she was doing the cooking.  When she locked the bathroom door to take a shower in peace, she says McAllister got the door open and raped her in the bathtub, pinning her against the wall.

She became sore and bruised; it didn’t matter.  When McAllister needed a boost , she says, “he took a pill to make his penis strong.”

McAllister tried to keep her isolated. She was scared to use the telephone—until the day she found the courage to call 911 and ask for help in getting out of his house.  The Sheriff’s sergeant who arrived at the house says she was the most terrified person he has encountered in his law enforcement career.

She answered all the investigator’s questions, never backing down.  Sometimes she asked the meaning of words or couldn’t remember exact dates.  But she always answered, no matter how humiliating the question.

Haas did not help.  He never called for a break.  Contrary to the rules on depositions, he let an investigator grill SL.  He did not stop questions about relationships before and after the incidents.  She was made to name her current boyfriend.  She was made to state the age at which her menstruation began.

SL had asked DeeDee Spann to be present and Spann was there, but only as an observer. Spann was a victim/witness advocate in the Prosecutor’s Office.  She had previously worked at Port Townsend’s domestic violence shelter, Dove House, where SL had stayed and received counseling after she fled McAllister.

Spann was so upset by the mistreatment of SL that with Haas’ Chief Deputy Prosecutor, Julian St. Marie, she sought a judicial order to stop it from happening again.

The motion was necessary because at the end of the deposition, Haas had agreed to give the defense lawyer and his investigator another shot at SL.

Highly Irregular

James Kennedy, a prosecutor in Clallam County and a former prosecutor in Haas’ office, has severely criticized Haas for letting any of this happen.  He is challenging Haas in the November election.  He says that prosecutors should always fight to keep a rape victim from going through something like this.  Haas’ predecessor, Scott Rosekrans, who won the initial rape conviction of McAllister, agrees.

Haas might dismiss their concerns as politically motivated.  But members of his own office also felt that the deposition he permitted veered out of bounds.

Before the second deposition could occur, Spann and St. Marie went to court to try to stop what Haas had agreed to.

Spann told the court that SL “was visibly distraught and tearful at times.”  She described the questioning as “relentless and with a very accusatory tone.” The transcript shows that Haas never called for a break to allow SL to compose herself.  He never objected to the investigator’s conduct.  To the contrary, at several points in the deposition he cracks jokes and makes light-hearted small talk with McAllister’s team.

In her motion, St. Marie argued that the sole purpose of the questioning was “bad faith” and intended “to annoy, embarrass or oppress the victim.”  She pointed out that SL’s relationships before and after the rapes were matters placed off limits by Washington’s rape shield laws and that only lawyers are permitted to take depositions.

Haas has not answered our questions as to why he arranged for and allowed SL to be subjected to such an ordeal.

We asked Rosekrans, who knew SL well from the first trial, why Haas would let the victim he was supposed to be standing up for be subjected to such mistreatment. .

“He must have been hoping she would be worn down and go away,” Rosekrans answered.

If that motive explained Haas’ otherwise inexplicable behavior, it didn’t pan out.

Instead of being worn down, SL demonstrated strength and determination.  Yes, she would endure another deposition.  She would do what it took to see that McAllister was retried.  “I wanted to go to trial,” she has told us.

The case was set for May. Haas was not prepared.  He had retained no expert witnesses nor interviewed any defense witnesses.  He had not secured key evidence that would destroy McAllister’s credibility.  He had not enlisted the assistance of the detective in charge of the case.  He had not even notified SL and her sister, two of the only four witnesses he had named, to make arrangements to travel to Port Townsend.  He had to do something.

Based on our interviews of SL and her brother, and a review of Haas’ correspondence and pleadings, what Haas did was avoid SL.  He never met or spoke with her again before he dropped the charges.

Our next report will show that Haas cut loose a violent, dangerous man when he had a stronger case than the one that sent McAllister to prison six years earlier.

Part 1 of “Dumping a Rape Case, and its Victim”

Part 2 of “Dumping a Rape Case, and its Victim”

The Conclusion of this series, on how Haas threw away evidence that showed McAllister’s defense was a fraud

and, related:

The Questions Michael Haas Won’t Answer