It's not unusual for victims of sexual assault to see their cases vanish into the ether, with unsolved cases caught in an often apathetic legal system. Sharilyn Lux's battle with the Seattle suburb of Snoqualmie, however, takes this kind of case further, as described by Kelsey Turner in an in-depth piece for InvestigateWest. The middle school teacher's story begins in February 2019, when she awoke one morning to find herself bruised and in pain, with no recollection of what had transpired the night before during her visit to a nearby bar, Smokey Joe's. Medical staff at a local hospital told Lux she'd likely been gang-raped—which is when her pressure campaign began against Snoqualmie to find out what had happened and who'd attacked her. Now, almost six years after that February night, Lux continues to insist the city has mishandled evidence and not done enough on her case.
City officials, for their part, say Lux's actions over the past few years have amounted to harassment, with more than 100 public records requests, dozens of 911 calls, and 17,000-plus emails, including lewd ones calling the recipients "f---ing losers." "We are at a point where judicial intervention is necessary," a lawyer for the city clerk said at a March hearing seeking a protection order against Lux. Still, Riddhi Mukhopadhyay, head of the Sexual Violence Law Center nonprofit, says the city may have gone too far. "A survivor felt like the system failed her ... and they got sick of her criticism, and then essentially decided that they would use the law to place a gag order on her," she says, calling the entire situation "really disturbing." More here, including eerily similar details of another unsolved case, involving a woman who says she was raped a decade before Lux, also after a Smokey Joe's visit. (More rape stories.)
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