Sexual Abuse & Domestic Violence

An Aleknagik man will serve three years of jail time after pleading guilty in the death of his wife, who was stabbed multiple times in February.

Robin Chythlook, 52, was sentenced to 10 years of jail time with seven years suspended, meaning he will serve three years.

Chythlook had originally been charged with attempted first-degree murder, but instead pleaded guilty Thursday to a reduced charge of first-degree assault with a deadly weapon.

Chythlook allegedly stabbed his wife more than two dozen times at their home, then threatened law enforcement when they responded to the scene.

Assistant district attorney Pamela Dale agreed to settle with a guilty plea to the reduced charge, saying proving attempted murder would have been difficult to do.

“I would’ve had to prove that he intended to kill her,” Dale said after the hearing. “He did stab her a great number of times, he stabbed her 28 times. What was unusual is that it wasn’t the sort of stabbing through the body that I would’ve been able to argue to the jury was a substantial step towards trying to kill her.”

Dale described the wounds as closer to a half-inch-deep punctures.

Investigating state troopers found Chythlook had used two knives in the brutal, unprovoked attack.

Chythlook’s sentence fits the guidelines adopted under the state’s recent criminal justice reform, known as Senate Bill 91, Dale said.

“When this case came in before SB 91 he would’ve been presumptive seven to 11 years. After the change in SB 91 he was presumptive five to nine years. And so the 10 with the seven (suspended) is within the sentencing range,” Dale said.

Chytlook will be on probation for three years after his release, and will be required to attend counseling for alcoholism and domestic violence.

He has been in custody since his February arrest.

An Anchorage attorney says U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas groped her 17 years ago, when she was a scholar in a post-college program in Washington, D.C.

Moira Smith, now an attorney for the gas utility Enstar, wrote on Facebook that it happened before a dinner party at her then-boss’s house in a Virginia suburb. She said in her Oct. 7 post that, “to my complete shock, he groped me while I was setting the table, suggesting I should sit ‘right next to him.’”

Smith’s post came as the country was reacting to a video of Donald Trump boasting he could grab women with impunity. Thousands of women took to social media to tell their accounts of being harassed and assaulted by men, many of whom were never held to account.

Smith later took down her Facebook post. The National Law Journal broke the story. Smith’s friends said today she’s not doing interviews but she issued a statement. In it, she said she was speaking up to set an example of truth-telling for her children and in hopes of ending the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct.

National Law Journal reports that Thomas denies the accusation and called it “preposterous.”

Anchorage Assemblyman Bill Evans said he’s known Smith since she was an intern at the law firm where he worked, Dorsey and Whitney. Evans said Smith is honest and trust-worthy.

“Certainly as credible as anyone I know. I believe entirely in what she said.”

Smith clerked for state Supreme Court Justice Dana Fabe and later worked at the firm Ashburn and Mason in Anchorage.

Assemblyman Evans said he and Smith run in the same social circles and saw her original Facebook post a few weeks ago.

“It was shocking and very saddening.”

Thomas is in his 25th year on the Supreme Court. The Senate confirmed him in 1991 despite law professor Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment.

The city of Bethel has had some trouble collecting taxes in recent months, but one tax they’re not having trouble collecting is the 12% sales tax from alcohol.  Since the city sold its first legal alcohol in April, Bethel has collected over a quarter of a million dollars from Bethel’s two alcohol vendors. A third vendor recently opened but those numbers were not included. .

At 5 p.m. you can see people stopping at the city’s new liquor store on their way home to pick up a six pack or bottle wine. Each purchase includes a bit to pay alcohol taxes to the city.

AC Quick Stop, which opened in May, paid $271,652 to the city in alcohol taxes. That means the store sold about $2.5 million from sales before taxes. The city is well on its way to meeting and possibly exceeding former Bethel City Manager Anne Capela’s estimated alcohol tax revenue of about half a million per year. She made that prediction based on the amount that the city brings in from cigarette sales tax.

Though most of the alcohol sales took place at the AC Quickstop liquor store, Fili’s Pizza paid the city $5,606 which means they made about $47,000 before taxes.

The city’s tax revenue reveals that the two vendors combined made almost $2.4 million since the first beer was sold on April 8, 2016.

But is it worth it? In other words — does the money the city makes from alcohol taxes help… more than it hurts by increasing the rate of alcohol-fueled crime? District Attorney for Bethel, Michael Gray, thinks it does help because he hasn’t seen any increase in crime, at least in Bethel.

“We were really expecting to see a real significant uptick. And so far, in terms of the cases referred to us, we just haven’t seen it,” Gray said.

The Association of Village Council Presidents recently passed a resolution condemning the effect of alcohol sales on the villages. Gray says the villages are another matter that’s difficult to measure, though he suspects legal sales may have caused an increase there.

“In August and September, we were noticing a significant uptick in the referrals for sexual assaults in the river villages. I can’t say that that’s related but I certainly suspect that it may be,” Gray said.

Gray says the additional revenue should be used to help Bethel’s police department.

“For years they’ve been understaffed, they have a hard time. Bethel’s a hard town to recruit people to come and live in.” Gray said.

Though Gray doesn’t explicitly support a liquor store, he thinks the income will make a positive difference if it’s used for law enforcement.

A new resource for Alaska Native and American Indian victims of domestic violence and sexual assault will be available in January.

Tracy Goodluck from the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs at the White House announced the Strong Hearts Helpline on Thursday at the Alaska Federation of Natives convention in Fairbanks.

“The new helpline will provide culturally and linguistically appropriate services by and for Native women and will assist American Indian and Alaska Native survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault with safety planning, emotional support and referrals to local resources,” Goodluck said.

The helpline is a collaboration between the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center and the National Domestic Violence Hotline. It’s scheduled to launch Jan. 4.

A legislative aide used his connections to try to affect a state law in a way that could benefit his son, who state prosecutors said sexually abused a 12-year-old girl when he was 18. News reporters Kyle Hopkins and Austin Baird of KTUU reported on the lobbying.

Baird spoke with me about what they found. Baird said it took months of interviews to get people to talk about it on the record. This transcript is edited for length and clarity.

A: This is involving a longtime legislative staffer, Tim Grussendorf, who’s worked with the legislature since 1990. Currently he’s an employee of Sen. Lyman Hoffman and the Senate Finance Committee. And exactly what he was working on was an effort to amend sex-crime laws. His son Ty Grussendorf is accused of sexual abuse of a minor and he was working on amendments that could have directly benefited his son’s case.

Q: How did lawmakers react to Tim Grussendorf approaching them?

A: There were very mixed reactions. A couple lawmakers who now say they did not get a full scope of the details of this case – some were working with him on a version of an amendment that could have potentially had a very direct impact on that case. And that would be Rep. Cathy Muñoz from Juneau, a Republican, and a Democrat from Sitka, Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins. How far along those talks got? No easy way to tell. But there was an amendment to look into this issue further, and that did end up in Senate Bill 91, the sweeping crime-reform bill that we heard a lot about all year long. And all that that does is ask the Alaska Criminal Justice Commission to look more closely at the sentencing standards for sex crimes.

Editor’s note: Kreiss-Tomkins sponsored the amendment that was adopted into law. 

Q: How did Ty Grussendorf’s lawyer describe what happened?

A: So, Ty Grussendorf was 18 years old in 2013 when he had a series of sexual encounters with a girl that was 12 years old at the time. Charges were filed in 2015. Ty Grussendorf’s lawyer, Julie Willoughby, in a court filing described the sex encounters as quote “mutually satisfying sexual adventures,” and argued that this girl who was in the sixth grade at the time had solicited Ty’s attention.

Q: So what were the grand jury charges?

A: The grand jury charged several counts of sexual abuse of a minor, and those are felonies that carry potentially decades in prison – and do have a hard mandatory minimum sentence attached to them if Ty Grussendorf is convicted. And those grand jury charges actually were tossed out by Judge (Philip) Pallenberg, who’s in Juneau and was considering that case (based on the grand jury hearing inadmissible hearsay evidence). But John Skidmore, the Criminal Division director of the Department of Law, he does say that the department is still actively pursuing this case, and it’s not an incident where it’s perhaps double jeopardy, because it never reached the point of a trial or anything like that. So the Department of Law is able to continue pursuing charges in this case.

Q: What do advocates for rape victims say about this?

A: One victim advocate that I would point to — Sen. Anna MacKinnon – is an Eagle River Republican and a former director of the nonprofit Standing Together Against Rape. She says she was aware of Grussendorf’s campaign to change the law. And her quote on this was: “I don’t want to disparage somebody trying to advocate for their son, which is fine, but it has to be in the seat.” She’s referring there to the place where people testify before legislative committees, on public record. She says: “Step up, do it in the hot seat, not behind closed doors.”

Q: Did you look at whether Tim Grussendorf crossed ethical lines, and if so, what did you find?

A: Certainly Tim Grussendorf says that he did not cross any ethical lines. And as far as whether or not he did – I’m not an attorney and it’s very tough to say. The organization that would look into that is the Alaska Select Committee on Legislative Ethics, and the problem with us trying to figure out if a complaint has been filed or anything like that – those are all kept private, so we really can’t say. And they couldn’t tell us if there has been a complaint all the way up until they find wrongdoing. So, there’s probably still a while before we would know even if there was a complaint filed, and this was an ethical violation under legislative rules and also Alaska statutes. So we don’t know yet for sure. And, really, we won’t know unless there does end up being a formal ruling from the ethics committee.

Clarification: An editor’s note has been added to this story that clarifies who sponsored the amendment relevant to sex crimes that passed with Senate Bill 91. 

A defamation trial against Rolling Stone, based on a 2014 article about an alleged rape on the campus of the University of Virginia, got underway in federal court on Monday.

The magazine retracted the story after scrutiny revealed inconsistencies. The trial beginning now involves a former dean at the school who has sued for $7.85 million over her portrayal in the piece.

Jury selection in the case began early Monday at a federal court in Charlottesville, Va., The Associated Press reports.

The 2014 article, written by Sabrina Rubin Erdely, was explosive. In it, a student identified as “Jackie” described a brutal gang rape at a fraternity party in 2012, followed by callous indifference from college authorities.

Several outlets, including The Washington Post, identified major inconsistencies in the reporting. Soon afterward, Rolling Stone retracted the story, saying the magazine had relied too much on “Jackie’s” account and did not adequately work to confirm her story.

An investigation found that repeated, systematic failures within the magazine led to the article’s publication.

In the article, “Jackie” and the alleged assailants were never identified by their real names. But Nicole Eramo, a former associate dean of students, was.

Eramo sued for defamation last spring. She said the article painted her as the “chief villain” of the story, full of indifference toward a sexual assault allegation.

In her complaint, Eramo says in part:

“Erdely and Rolling Stone claimed — both in the article and in a slew of media appearances and interviews designed to increase publicity for the article — that Dean Eramo intentionally tried to coddle Jackie to persuade her not to report her rape; that she was indifferent to Jackie’s allegations; that she discouraged Jackie from sharing her story with others; that she ‘abuse[d]’ Jackie; that she did ‘nothing’ in response to Jackie’s allegations; that she claimed that UVA withholds rape statistics ‘because nobody wants to send their daughter to the rape school’; that she did not report Jackie’s alleged assault to the police; that she ‘brushed off’ Jackie; and that she actively sought to ‘suppress’ Jackie’s supposed gang rape. … These statements, and the portrayal of Dean Eramo, in ‘A Rape on Campus’ and in Erdely and Rolling Stone’s subsequent public statements, are categorically false.”

The AP reports that Eramo’s attorneys intend to call “Jackie” as a witness, either in person or with video of her deposition being shown to jurors. If that happens, according to the news service, it will be the first time “Jackie” has publicly addressed the discredited article since it was published.

Reuters has more on the lawsuit, and some recent developments:

“Lawyers for Rolling Stone have argued that Eramo’s attorneys must prove that Erdely and the magazine’s editors acted with “actual malice” — meaning reckless disregard for the truth – when they published the claims against Eramo.

“Rolling Stone lawyers have said that up until the magazine’s publication of an editor’s note about the story’s inconsistencies, it had full confidence in Jackie and the story. …

“Defense lawyers said last week that Eramo’s lawyers had leaked a video deposition of Erdely to ABC television’s ’20/20′ news program for broadcast on Friday. They asked U.S. District Judge Glen Conrad to punish Eramo’s team for violating a protective order and to move the trial, claiming that the broadcast could taint the jury pool.

“Conrad barred Eramo and her legal team from breaching the order anew and from using the Erdely deposition at trial. They also could face more sanctions, he wrote.”

Three U.Va. graduates, members of the fraternity named in the story, previously sued for defamation, as well. Their case was dismissed, with a judge noting that the three individuals were not named in the story.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.