Spokane7
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December 3, 2009 in City
Additional charges filed in Fairchild rape case
Prosecutors say instructor bragged about interrogation skills
A man accused of raping a woman in a Fairchild Air Force Base interrogation room faces additional charges in an attack prosecutors say began after he showed the alleged victim torture devices and bragged about his interrogation skills.
Michael W. Fassbender, 32, is on leave from his job as a civilian instructor at Fairchild’s survival school, said his lawyer, Chris Phelps. Fassbender is employed there through SERE Solutions, a Spokane-based company that provides contracted instructors.
Fassbender was arrested Oct. 20 on one count of first-degree rape but released from Spokane County Jail the next day on $20,000 bail. Spokane County Superior Court Judge Ellen Kalama Clark on Thursday allowed prosecutors to amend charges to three counts of aggravated first-degree rape and one count of second-degree assault with sexual motivation.
In court documents, Deputy Prosecutor Sharon Hedlund described the attack as being “committed with deliberate cruelty.”
Fassbender “demonstrated an extreme lack of remorse,” Hedlund wrote.
Fassbender denies the allegations, Phelps said.
“We’re not surprised by the additional charges. It’s not unusual in these cases,” Phelps said. “It doesn’t change the facts at all.”
New court documents say Fassbender met the woman through an online dating service and they had their first date the night of the alleged attack. They dined at the Rusty Moose restaurant in Airway Heights before Fassbender took the woman to Fairchild and told her to leave her cell phone in the car because of security constraints, according to court documents.
The two reportedly drank a bottle of wine before Fassbender showed her torture devices and took her into a room, “where he told her he was such a good interrogator, that he could get information out of anybody,” documents allege.
Fassbender is accused of choking the woman into unconsciousness and slapping her during separate sexual assaults in the interrogation room that lasted for “an extended period of time,” according to court documents.
The alleged victim said Fassbender “bragged that he had done this to eight other women” and “told her that she could yell as loud as she wanted but that nobody would hear her,” according to the documents.
Fassbender drove her back to the Rusty Moose to get her car, where he kissed her and said “good night,” according to the documents.
She drove home and called a friend for help. She was transported to a hospital by medics.
The woman told deputies “she feared for her life,” according to the documents.
Deputies say that they found blood on a desk and chair in an interrogation room at the center and that the woman had red marks and bruises on her arms, chest and legs.
Moose head smashes through Cadillac driven by boy, 14 
DrChas on December 03 at 8:58 p.m.
S.E.R.E. Solutions, like Blackwater, hires these people to do dirty deeds that others would not consider ethical. What on earth is our government thinking of? A friend protested the rape allegations at S.E.R.E. offices across the street from Geiger jail. They physically attempted to wrestle away his camera, which would appear to be an attempted theft. They wouldn’t let him out of the office and attempted to keep him from calling the sheriff for help, which would appear to be wrongful imprisonment and maybe assault or even light duty battery.
I sincerely hope that the young lady experiencing this devastatingly traumatic evening has obtained legal assistance to explore possibilities of civil damages against both the “date” and his employer. Several of us have written to Representative McMorris and our Senators without receiving any response.
What gives?????
Struensee on December 04 at 5:55 p.m.
Attorney Phelps should stop with the cheeky charade that his client, Mr. Fassbender, is merely on “leave” from his contract-based SERE instructor duties. Yet to be decided by the finder of fact is whether Mr. Fassbender committed a criminal rape. What is not open to dispute is that the defendant seriously breached security by clandestinely taking a young woman into a secured government facility, after hours, without proper authorization, even if it was, to argue his defense, for consensual sex. It is safe to say that Mr. Fassbender’s security clearance is revoked, probably for his lifetime, because he has shown by a preponderance of the evidence that he betrayed a position of trust in matters affecting national security. His community must now, in due course, decide judicially whether or not he can be trusted to live openly and freely among them.
arroyoribera on December 20 at 1:54 p.m.
A number of comments including about the recent allegations of possible judicial misconduct in the Fassbender case can be read at a prior S-R article at:
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2009/oct/22/in-brief-woman-reports-rape-at-survival-center/
This is a hugely important story, giving the local community to understand that role that Spokane and Fairchild play in the so-called “war on terror” but what others call the degeneration of the U.S. into a stinking torture state (to use the words from Bruce Cockburn’s song).
So it is important not to so distracted by the details of the Fassbender rape story that one does not make the connections between private contractors (mercenaries); torture; Spokane, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram; and the CIA (JPRA/SERE, Mitchell/Jessen, Newkrik Road north of the casino, etc).
Spokane has a very ugly under-belly related to the military/industrial complex. It also has a culture of silence related to its history of barbarities (it did after all still the name, land, and river of a people it virtually eliminated).
Break the silence, heal your soul.
The story on the judicial misconduct allegations involving the Fassbender case can be read at
http://www.bloggernews.net/123132