An Military main charged with sexually assaulting or raping greater than a dozen girls over a four-year interval within the Washington, D.C., space started this week at Fort Meade, Maryland.
Maj. Jonathan Batt faces 63 accusations, which embrace 10 specs of rape and 15 sexual assault prices in opposition to 17 girls, in accordance with the Military’s Workplace of Particular Trial Counsel. Batt additionally faces prices of aggravated assault, battery, obstruction of justice and abusive sexual contact.
Batt has pleaded not responsible to all prices, his civilian legal professional Nathan Freeburg informed Stars and Stripes.
The main was charged in October with 76 violations of the Uniform Code of Navy Justice in opposition to 20 girls. A number of the prices have been dropped previous to trial as a result of a few of the victims declined to take part within the proceedings, Michelle McCaskill, spokeswoman for the Workplace of Particular Trial Counsel, informed Stars and Stripes.
Court docket paperwork present that Batt is accused of quite a lot of sexual and aggravated assaults on girls in Arlington, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., between 2019 and 2023, Stripes reported. Some girls allege Batt choked them till they have been unconscious earlier than he raped them.
Different girls allege he used intercourse toys on the ladies in opposition to their will and bit and slapped them with out consent.
His obstruction of justice cost stems from an allegation that he informed one individual to not communicate with “somebody posing as a police officer” about “sexual allegations that some girls are making in opposition to me,” Stripes reported.
Batt graduated from the U.S. Navy Academy at West Level, New York in 2007. He was commissioned as an infantry officer and has served with the 82nd Airborne Division, fifth Ranger Coaching Brigade, the third Infantry Division and the seventy fifth Ranger Regiment.
Batt served 4 fight excursions in Afghanistan and was beforehand assigned to the Protection Division’s Joint Synthetic Intelligence Heart in Crystal Metropolis, Virginia.
The trial is predicted to final till June 27, McCaskill informed Stripes.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, authorities and the army for a number of publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written venture on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq Struggle.
