The alleged Greeley date-rape victim whose 5-year-old story has resurfaced in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race said she is speaking out now because of GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck’s indelicate choice of words.
The woman said she would “absolutely not” be coming forward 19 days before the general election had Buck treated her “with any respect.”
The woman, then 21, called police alleging her ex-boyfriend date-raped her after she invited him over when she was drunk. Buck, Weld County’s district attorney, had four attorneys, two of whom were women, review the case and decided against prosecuting.
He told the Greeley Tribune at the time that he feared a jury may think she had a case of “buyer’s remorse.”
Buck met with the woman in person to talk about his concerns. She brought her own attorney and a tape recorder and surreptitiously recorded the conversation because she says she “wanted it on the record.”
In the conversation, Buck warned her that if she filed a motion to compel prosecution, “it will be a very public, publicly covered event.”
He told her that lawyers representing her perpetrator could bring up all sorts of unsavory things about their past — including the fact the woman had a miscarriage while carrying the accused’s baby more than a year before the rape occurred.
“It sounds like he’s threatening me. I’m not a person with skeletons in my closet,” she said, of the tape. “I still to this day do not understand his choice. I was given a lot of reasons about me and what I did wrong . . . When you listen to the tone of his voice in the recording, it was very attacking.”
She is not being named per a Denver Post policy not to identify alleged sex-assault victims without their consent.
She stashed the tape away and tried to move on, she said.
After the meeting, Buck took the case to Boulder County’s district attorney for review. That prosecutor’s office affirmed his decision.
Liberal political advocacy group ProgressNow approached the woman this summer — now a college graduate and social worker — and asked whether she would be willing to talk about the “buyer’s remorse” comment.
The woman released the tape to the left-leaning Colorado Independent website last week at the news organization’s request. The story spread on news websites and cable television.
The woman never before had released the garbled audio, though she says she offered it in 2006 when local news outlets covered the alleged rape.
Buck campaign spokesman Owen Loftus said the incident’s national media attention is nothing more than a “Swift boating” three weeks before Coloradans go to the polls in the increasingly tight U.S. Senate race.
Buck “met with her so that she would understand why no jury would be able to convict the accused,” Loftus said Thursday.
In a September interview, Buck said he never meant to imply that the alleged victim had buyer’s remorse but that “a jury could conclude this,” he said.
“If you take it in context, people understand it was my trying to give a brief comment of what a jury might find as opposed to my views on sex assault or victims,” Buck said.
Allison Sherry: 303-954-1377 or asherry@denverpost.com
