Lackland trainer guilty in rape

TIMELINE: The sex abuse scandal centered at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland has become the worst in Air Force history with 33 basic training instructors under investigation for allegations of misconduct with 63 recruits and technical training students. The following photos depict the still-unfolding investigation. less TIMELINE: The sex abuse scandal centered at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland has become the worst in Air Force history with 33 basic training instructors under investigation for allegations of misconduct with 63 ... more Photo: John L. Mone, ASSOCIATED PRESS Photo: John L. Mone, ASSOCIATED PRESS Image 1 of / 60 Caption Close Lackland trainer guilty in rape 1 / 60 Back to Gallery

A judge today found an Air Force boot camp instructor, Staff Sgt. Eddy Soto, guilty of raping a former trainee.

Lt. Col. Matthew Van Dalen moved swiftly to the sentencing phase, where the victim tearfully testified about the impact the incident had on her life.

Identified as Airman 2, she said she pushed herself to come forward in the case in order to protect other airmen from being victimized.

“I just want to tell the Air Force if they can do something in basic training they won't have victims like me later on,” she said before leaving the stand, walking out of the courtroom with her head bowed.

Soto faces life without the possibility of parole in prison for the rape, one of six charges and eight specifications of misconduct the Air Force lodged against him.

He pleaded guilty to five of the charges, including having sex with two women, one an airman in technical school and another who had come to see her husband graduate from a basic training.

In a trial that began Thursday after a two-month delay, he pleaded not guilty to rape, sexual assault and wrongful sexual contact.

Prosecutors accused Soto of raping another woman who flew from California to San Antonio to see him, saying she firmly told him that she did not want to have sex.

The defense said the victim wanted a relationship, and noted that as they continued a long-distance romance she saw him texting other women and demanded he make a choice.

“'You're a player,'” Maj. Willie Babor, the defense attorney, summed up her ultimatum during closing arguments. “'If you don't stop, I'm changing my (flight) tickets and going home.'”

The defense said Soto called her bluff. The woman, making her third visit to see him in San Antonio, stayed with him and having what both said was consensual sex before going home as planned. She later said she was humiliated to find he had a new girlfriend after logging on to Facebook.

A key question in the trial — the tenth in less than a year to see a Lackland basic training instructor charged with sexual misconduct — is whether she had been raped and later sexually assaulted on one other occasion, or if she claimed to be victim out of her sense of shame.

The case pivoted on the point in part because she is Vietnamese. Prosecutors brought in one expert, Dr. Rita Chung, a George Mason University professor of cross-cultural studies, to help explain the airman's reaction when Soto first had sex with her.

That was in October 2010, after she flew from California to Texas. Prosecutors said that the woman brushed off Soto's efforts to kiss her after he picked her up from San Antonio International Airport. They said he physically overpowered her when they were in the bedroom of his home, despite her efforts to push him off her.

“'I'm not ready for sex,'” Capt. Matthew Neil, a prosecutor, recounted the encounter. “Words spoken by a woman who didn't want to have sex.”

Babor, the defense attorney, worked to punch holes in that claim, sometimes using the woman's own statements and the prosecution's Vietnamese cultural expert, Chung, to make his point. He noted that Chung said it was possible that Airman 2 felt shame because she was raped, but that shame wasn't possible if she slept around or lied.

That, he said, was ridiculous and undermined her credibility.

Babor also said that the woman couldn't recall facts only five times when questioned by prosecutors, but that she said, “I don't remember” more than 50 times when examined by the defense.

Evidence showed that Airman 2 had sex with Soto after the initial encounter, and returned to San Antonio twice more through the next spring.

Babor asked why she'd continue to see her rapist and asked the judge, who was asked to decide the case, to makes sense of 4,190 text messages the couple exchanged over six months or so.

Of those, 2,459 were sent by Airman 2, and 655 phone calls were made.

Prosecutors insisted that the woman did not want to have sex in their first visit, but tried to build a relationship with Soto because she was shamed as a result of the rape.

Neil, the lead prosecutor, said the woman saw Soto as a trusted mentor and blamed herself for having bought the plane ticket and for the rape itself.

As a woman who grew up in Vietnam until she was 21, he said she was strongly influenced by her country's culture and was “trying to save face” by working to develop a relationship with Soto.

Babor countered that the woman feared the reaction of her boyfriend if he got wind of her relationship with Soto.

She has since married.

In tearful testimony during the sentencing phase, Airman 2 said she could not tell her parents, who were proud of her for serving in the Air Force, or her husband.

“I can't even tell you what happened, because I just keep it to myself,” she said.

Babor, in his final argument before the sentence was given, said the judge didn't have the evidence necessary to convict Soto of rape, but prosecutors said the victim made it clear she wasn't a willing partner.

“When he tells her no, that means no,” said Neil. “When she tell him I'm not ready, that means no.”

sigc@express-news.net