Man who sent Facebook message about committing a 2013 campus sexual assault pleads guilty
Ian Cleary, 32, pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault more than a decade after Shannon Keeler says he sneaked into her first-year dorm at Gettysburg College on the eve of winter break and assaulted her. Cleary's guilty plea was the first time she'd seen him since the assault.
'I had been thinking about this moment for 12 years,' said Keeler, who clenched her husband's hand as Cleary was led into court by deputies. She called it a surreal moment. A decade ago, a former prosecutor had declined the case.
'It's taken a lot of twists and turns to get to this point,' said Keeler, now 30. 'It took a lot of people doing the right thing to get us here.'
Judge Kevin Hess set an Oct. 20 sentencing date. The two sides proposed a four- to eight-year sentence, which the judge can accept or not.
Keeler, in interviews with The Associated Press, described her decade-long efforts to persuade authorities to pursue charges, starting hours after the assault.
She renewed the quest in 2021, after finding a series of disturbing Facebook messages from his account.
Cleary has been in custody since his arrest on minor, unrelated charges in Metz, France, in April 2024. A defense lawyer told the judge Thursday that Cleary experienced several mental health episodes there and was hospitalized around the time he sent the Facebook messages in 2019.
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Indian Express
an hour ago
- Indian Express
From Obama's ‘treason' to missing gold reserves, the wildest conspiracy theories consuming Trump's Washington
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More than a decade later, Trump is coming full circle by trying to divert attention from the Epstein conspiracy theory with a new-and-improved one about Obama supposedly committing treason. The harmonic convergence of competing conspiracies has overshadowed critical policy issues facing America's leaders at the moment, whether it's new tariffs that could dramatically reshape the global economy or the collapse of ceasefire talks meant to end the war in the Gaza Strip. The Epstein matter so spooked Speaker Mike Johnson that he abruptly recessed the House for the summer rather than confront it. The allegations lodged against Obama so outraged the former president that he emerged from political hibernation to express his indignation at even having to address them. The whispers and questions — 'this nonsense,' as Trump put it — followed the president all the way to Scotland, where he landed Friday for a visit to his golf club. 'You're making a very big thing over something that's not a big thing,' he complained to reporters, suggesting, in his latest bid at conspiracy deflection, that instead of him, the news media should be looking at Epstein's other boldface friends like former President Bill Clinton. 'Don't talk about Trump,' he said. Conspiracy theories have a long place in American history. Many Americans still believe that someone else had a hand in killing President John F. Kennedy, that the moon landings were faked, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job or that the government is hiding proof of extraterrestrial visitors in Roswell, New Mexico. Sixty-five percent of Americans told Gallup pollsters in 2023 that they think there was a conspiracy behind Kennedy's assassination. Some conspiracy theories do turn out to be true, of course, or have some basis. But presidents generally have not been the ones spreading dubious stories. To the contrary, they traditionally have viewed their role as dispelling doubts and reinforcing faith in institutions. President Lyndon B. Johnson created the Warren Commission to investigate his predecessor's murder specifically to keep rumors and guesswork from proliferating. (Spoiler alert: It didn't.) Trump, by contrast, relishes conspiracy theories, particularly those that benefit him or smear his enemies without any evident care for whether they are true or not. 'There have been other conspiratorial political movements in the country's past,' said Geoff Dancy, a University of Toronto professor who teaches about conspiracy theories. 'But they have never occupied the upper echelons of power until the last decade.' Conspiracy theories are not the exclusive preserve of Trump and the political right. Around the time of last month's anniversary of the assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, some on the left once again advanced the notion that the whole shooting episode had been staged to make the Republican candidate into a political martyr. Trump, however, has stirred the plot pot more than any other major political figure. In the six months since retaking office, he has remained remarkably cavalier about suggesting nefarious schemes even as he heads the government supposedly orchestrating some of them. He suggested the nation's gold reserves at Fort Knox might be missing, resurrecting a decades-old fringe supposition, even though he would presumably be in position to know whether that was actually true, what with being president and all. 'If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset,' he told reporters. It fell to Scott Bessent, the decidedly nonconspiratorial Treasury secretary, to burst the bubble and reassure Americans that, no, the nation's reserves had not been stolen. 'All the gold is present and accounted for,' he told an interviewer. Trump has played to long-standing suspicions by ordering the release of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the assassinations of Kennedy, his brother Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an act of transparency for historians and researchers that may shed important light on those episodes. But Trump has gone beyond simple theory floating to make his own alternate reality official government policy. Some applicants for jobs in the second Trump administration were asked whether Trump won the 2020 election that he actually lost; those who gave the wrong answer were not helping their job prospects, forcing those rooted in facts to decide whether to swallow the fabrication to gain employment. Trump has likewise claimed that Biden was so diminished toward the end of his term that his aides signed pardons without his knowledge using an autopen. Biden was certainly showing signs of age, but the autopen story was conjecture. Asked if he had uncovered proof, Trump said, 'I uncovered, you know, the human mind. I was in a debate with the human mind and I didn't think he knew what the hell he was doing.' The past week or so has seen a fusillade of Trumpian conspiracy theories, seemingly meant to focus attention away from the Epstein case. Tulsi Gabbard, the president's politically appointed intelligence chief, trotted out inflammatory allegations that Obama orchestrated a 'yearslong coup and treasonous conspiracy' by skewing the 2016 election interference investigation — despite the conclusions of a Republican-led Senate report signed by none other than Marco Rubio, now Trump's secretary of state. She also claimed that Hillary Clinton was 'on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers' during the 2016 campaign. Relying on this, Trump accused Obama of 'treason,' suggesting he should be locked up and going so far as to post a fake video showing his predecessor being handcuffed in the Oval Office and put behind bars. The idea of a president posting such an image of another president would once have been seen as a shocking breach of etiquette and corruption of the justice system, but in the Trump era it has become simply business as usual. For all that, the conspiracy theorist in chief has not been able to shake the Epstein case, which reflects the rise of the QAnon movement that believes America is run by a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles. Most of the files, the ones that his attorney general told him include his name, remain unreleased, bringing together an unlikely alliance of MAGA conservatives and liberal Democrats. It was well known that Trump was friends with Epstein, although they later fell out. So it's not clear what his name being in the files might actually mean. But Trump is not one to back down. Asked last week about whether he had been told his name was in the files, Trump again pointed the finger of conspiracy elsewhere. 'These files were made up by Comey,' he told reporters, referring to James Comey, the FBI director he had fired more than two years before Epstein died in prison in 2019. 'They were made up by Obama,' he went on. 'They were made up by the Biden administration.' The theories are endless.
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
Prince Harry's Angola Trip Flops As Royal Expert Says Past Betrayals Still Haunt His Family Comeback
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Mint
2 hours ago
- Mint
Who is Derrick Perry? The shopper who averted major tragedy as 11 people stabbed at Walmart in Michigan
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