https://sanduskyregister.com/news/349405/who-is-arica-waters/
- Ohio Supreme Court appointed Judge Burnside
BCI (ran by AG Dave Yost ) - refuses to listen to victims stories
Burnside (retired judge), Wood (assistant AG), Slattery (Private Investigator for alleged rapist) all from Cuyahoga County
I emailed Governor Mike DeWines office about this and the media person for Jon Husted's office; and a woman (name withheld for now) from Ohio BCI (State's FBI) said that "they" won't let her investigate this. Just WHO is THEY? I know Dave Yost is one of them, but who else high up on the chain will not allow a "special agent that investigates rapes for the State of Ohio -- to do her job? None of this makes sense whatsoever.
A pre-trial has been set for 10/28/2021 in this case. We will soon find out if Judge Janet Burnside is going to allow the other two rape survivors to be given a chance to give testimony in Arica Waters case, or if they will be silenced by the judge the Ohio Supreme Court has sent.
We still don't know the reason why Judge Bruce Winters recused himself from the case.
Why does the Attorney General of Ohio's office seem so intent on sentencing Arica Waters?- Why has Drew Wood twisted rape victims words?
- Why has Wood also tried to silence the trauma expert that interviewed Miss Arica Waters?
***Advocates are concerned with the message Yost is telegraphing to victims: If you report being raped and a prosecutor doesn't believe you he could send you to prison.
It's not only the other alleged rape victims that are being barred by the state from testifying. The special prosecutor, in a court motion, also requested that the trauma expert's testimony and his report — which the court previously approved and funded — be excluded from Waters' trial. Is Arica Waters being given a fair trial?
Who is Arica Waters?
Matt Westerhold
Oct 22, 2021 5:00 PM PORT CLINTON — Life’s lessons come at their own pace. For Arica Waters, life slammed down on her right from the start.
Waters’ birth mother was a prostitute.
She was born with alcohol and cocaine in her system.
She had a rocky relationship with her adoptive mother growing up.
She struggled with abandonment issues.
She was bullied in junior high school so badly that she was hospitalized three times.
Her boyfriend when she was 13 was twice her age, 26.
She’d been sexually assaulted nine or 10 times, by her own recollection.
That's how Waters, 29, of Lyndhurst, described herself to a clinical counselor and trauma expert hired by the court, according to court records.
“She submitted in order to survive and get out of the situation without any harm or further transgression occurring to her,” the counselor wrote in his report.
***Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost says Waters lied about being raped in July 2020. He asked an Ottawa County grand jury to indict her on a felony falsification charge, and it did just three months later.
***The man she accused is wealthy, white, privileged, a former police officer who has a vacation home in Put-in-Bay.
***He's been accused of rape three times, an unfortunate fact that Yost hopes a jury never learns.
***The man is Yost's lead witness against Waters. He will testify that he and Waters had consensual sex after a pool party at his island home and again the next morning, at a condo apartment near his home on the island where he took her, both times.
***When he learned about being accused by Waters, the man she accused hired a lawyer, who hired a private detective, and they demanded that the sheriff charge Waters with falsification.
***Ottawa County prosecutor James VanEerten declined to take it to a grand jury, but Yost agreed.
It's unknown what's motivating Yost on this case, which appears to be the first one in Ohio in which a woman is taken to trial for allegedly lying about being raped. If she's convicted, Waters could face 18 months in prison.
***Advocates are concerned with the message Yost is telegraphing to victims: If you report being raped and a prosecutor doesn't believe you he could send you to prison.
According to a Michigan Journal of Law report about a Human Rights Watch 2013 study, "police sometimes claimed to have conducted a 'thorough investigation' when the actual investigation was minimal and was carried out primarily to undermine the victim’s credibility."
The law report called it "the first step in a chain of poor police practices that also involved declining to investigate sexual assault cases and ultimately threatening complainants with false reporting charges."
***The man Waters accused wanted her charged, and he also asked that a woman from Findlay, who this year accused him of raping her in 2008, also be charged.
***And, he also asked police and prosecutors to investigate and check the phone records of both women and Anjum to determine if they had conspired together to falsely accuse him of rape.
A detective subpoenaed the women's phone records, but no matches were found. "This is a tactic often used when there is an imbalance of power and influence," said Sarah Anjum, Waters' attorney, when asked about the law journal article. "The threat of prosecution to put pressure on a victim to retract their complaint or stop pursuing charges."
The man she accused is rich, powerful and white;
Waters is poor, Black and indigent.
Anjum is a Muslim woman.
***That threat — the fear of prosecution — is one of the reasons Anjum asked the court to appoint co-counsel, according to a pending court motion Anjum filed.
The filing is among about a half-dozen motions from the defense and from Yost that await rulings from visiting Judge Janet Burnside. Burnside was not appointed to the case until Oct. 18, after Ottawa County Judge Bruce Winters abruptly recused himself a few days earlier.
The third alleged rape victim, like the other two, reported being too inebriated to give consent and fearful she had been drugged prior to being assaulted. She decided against pursuing charges, however, after Ottawa County Sheriff Steve Levorchick, a captain on the force at the time, told her just a few days after the assault that the man she accused "has three lawyers and they're going to say you were a willing participant."
***Telling victims "you wanted it" is another tactic, according to advocates.
Yost does not want jurors to hear anything about all that. He told the court the woman said she thought she may have been a willing participant, twisting information Levorchick wrote in his report. Yost used only that phrase in his motion to convince a judge to not let jurors know anything about the other rape complaints.
Register file photo/LUKE WARK Ottawa County Sheriff Steve Levorchick
The woman, when Levorchick told her the man and his legal team would accuse her of "wanting it," penned a six-page statement in which she reiterated that she was raped, explaining it and repeating it. Yost did not include the hand-written note in his court filing, however, when he asked the judge to exclude it and the rest of the entire report.
***Yost definitely does not want his witness to have to answer questions about the other rape complaints made against him.
***He wants Judge Burnside to bar the women from testifying and prohibit Anjum from crossing-examining the witness about the reports, according to a motion filed by associate attorney general Drew Wood, the special prosecutor working for Yost.
For weeks and months, Yost failed to even inform the court, or defense counsel, of the existence of the two prior rape reports. That didn't happen until mid-September after the Register reported about the womens' complaints.
Arica Waters was raped on July 5 and again on July 6, 2020, according to her defense counsel, Anjum. She "was too inebriated to consent," Anjum said in a court filing.
If he gets Waters on the witness stand at her trial later this year, Yost might ask her if she is lying about that, about everything, about being raped, and about the things she told the trauma expert. It's not known if Waters will testify, however, but if she does Yost will likely seek an unrestricted cross-examination, unlike how he wants it with the suspect-turned-victim in the case, Yost's witness.
***The special prosecutor, in a court motion, also requested that the trauma expert's testimony and his report — which the court previously approved and funded — be excluded from Waters' trial." -SanduskyRegister