An American man accused of sexually assaulting a college student in her dorm and later Facebook messaging her an alleged confession was handed to American authorities in Paris, French prosecutors said Thursday according to the AP.
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Ian Cleary, 31, of Saratoga, California, was charged in June 2021 with sexual assault by a Pennsylvania judge after he wrote “So I raped you” in a Facebook message to his alleged victim – prompting police to eventually reopen the 2013 case.
On Thursday, French prosecutors said they had handed Cleary to American authorities at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport, according to the AP.
The suspect was detained on the street of Metz, in northeastern France, in a police stop in April, 11 years after the alleged sexual assault and three years since he was declared a wanted fugitive by the U.S. Marshals Service. According to the AP, he told a magistrate that he had arrived in France from Albania.
Cleary’s extradition to the United States caps off a long and painful search for justice by Shannon Keeler, his alleged victim.
According to Keeler, Cleary stalked her and then raped her in her dorm in 2013, when they were both students at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Despite immediately reporting the incident to the police and conducting a rape test at a hospital, no arrest was made.
Keeler previously told the AP that authorities had indicated to her at the time that it would be difficult to prosecute an alleged sexual assault when the victim had been drinking. Her lawyer Laura Dunn later told The Post that the local Gettysburg police had responded to Keeler with “victim-blaming and indifference.”
In 2020, Keeler checked her Facebook inbox to find a string of disturbing messages from her alleged rapist, she said. The messages read: “So I raped you … I’ll never do it to anyone ever again … I need to hear your voice … I’ll pray for you.”
She forwarded the screenshots to police, who eventually reopened the case.
According to an affidavit, a warrant for Cleary’s arrest was filed after police matched the Facebook account that sent the messages to a cellphone number.
The maximum sentence for a sexual assault felony in Pennsylvania is imprisonment of up to 10 years.