Friday, September 4, 2020, 2:08 PM

Friday, September 4, 2020, 2:08 PM

Muskogee attorney and former assistant district attorney Jared DeSilvey, 49, has been accused of molesting and being sexually inappropriate with five of his children for at least 27 years, yet he has not faced prosecution.

When one of his daughters made the allegations official last year, Muskogee police investigated and submitted a criminal report to District Attorney Orvil Loge. Loge recused himself because he had earlier fired DeSilvey and therefore could not objectively prosecute him. The next day, all of the judges at the Muskogee County Courthouse also recused themselves from an ongoing divorce case with the mother, despite the fact that two of them had earlier presided over motions in the case. The criminal case was sent to the state attorney general’s office, which assigned it to Le Flore County District Attorney Jeff Smith in February of this year. His office initially declined to prosecute, but was only aware of the single allegation. The divorce case was reassigned to a judge in Wagoner County.

Meanwhile, four more of DeSilvey’s children from three different marriages have come forward with stories almost identical to the daughter who made the allegations in the criminal case.

Some of the siblings had not communicated with each other in years — and some have never communicated with each other. Though they are all related in one way or another, some of them have never met each other.

DeSilvey’s first recorded alleged victim reported that he first molested her in an apartment when she was just four or five years old. She alleges that he commanded her to lay beside him while he watched a movie in his underwear. If she refused, she said, he would hurt her mother when she returned from shopping. As she watched the movie with him, she said, he put his hand in her pants, underneath her underwear, and felt around “down there” while masturbating with his other hand. Later, she said, he would frequently burst into the bathroom while she was bathing and, using a washcloth, would run his hands over and inside her vagina, insisting to her that she loved it and it felt good — while simultaneously masturbating himself. She said the molestations continued for five more years. The victim’s mother said she once walked in on DeSilvey with his hand down the girl’s pants, but both DeSilvey and the girl were asleep at the time, and he blamed sleep for the incident. The victim confirmed that story.

That mother also said she yelled at DeSilvey in a separate incident when she saw him looking at what she considered child pornography on his computer. Another ex-wife said she also saw DeSilvey watching videos of “very young-looking” females “putting things inside themselves and pushing them back out.” “I don’t know if they were underage,” she said, “but they didn’t look like … adult women.” The third ex-wife said “I saw very young girls. I would say more like young teens. I don’t know if that is child porn, but it was weird.”

Another victim said he tongue-kissed her when she was four, and when she complained to relatives about it, he blamed her.

The bathroom incursions would become a recurring theme that all of his alleged victims recounted. Some of the girls have said independently of each other that after DeSilvey removed the lock from the bathroom door, they took to opening a drawer inside the bathroom to block the door from opening while they bathed. The mother who was in the home during that time said she didn’t remember him removing the lock, which could be unlocked with a thumbnail, but said both girls are adamant that the lock was removed. That drawer has also since been removed, one of the victims said, and cameras have now been installed in every room of DeSilvey’s house.

Though allegations of sexual misconduct with his children have been made against DeSilvey in two of his divorce cases, none of the cases were viewed criminally until one of his latest alleged victims made them, prompting her mother to file a protective order against DeSilvey late last year.

In all, MuskogeeNOW spoke with four alleged victims and the mother of a fifth, who is still a minor. We spoke with all three of his ex-wives. We also spoke with investigators, prosecutors and reviewed hundreds of documents while investigating this story.

As far back as 2003, a psychologist’s report to one of the divorce courts stated that DeSilvey had admitted being involved in behaviors that the psychologist determined were a “violation of necessary familial boundaries” and “grooming behavior.” The psychologist asked the court to reverse an earlier opinion that DeSilvey was suitable to have primary custody of the girl. The behaviors cited were taking baths and showers with the then-eight-year-old. That behavior, however, has continued to this day, according to several of the victims. One victim reported waking up last month with DeSilvey’s hand on her thigh.

All of the victims allege the same bathing behavior and say DeSilvey would routinely sit in or barge into the bathroom while they bathed, becoming angry if they tried to close a shower curtain for privacy. Three of the victims said they had to endure those incursions until well into and after puberty. The girls said he also would burst into their bedrooms while they were dressing, and would insist on conducting conversations with them while they undressed and re-dressed. One victim said he would routinely play video games until “three, four, five in the morning”, then when the victim’s mother was asleep, she said, he would get into bed with her, touch her “down there” and masturbate.

That victim said that she was so scared he would make good on his threats to hurt her mother, she sometimes would check to make sure her mother was still breathing while she was asleep. The mother, who had not heard that until we asked her about it, broke down and cried.

“He always said, ‘Don’t tell your mother or I will hurt her,’” the victim said. “He told me if he killed her, I would be stuck with just him, and I did what he wanted because I didn’t want that.”

One underage victim alleges that DeSilvey gave her alcohol — enough to get her drunk — and later in the night, he both watched her in the shower and told her he was attracted to her and thought about her while he masturbates. Then, she said, he asked her if she felt the same way, to which she replied no. That victim also says she is now continuing to remember even more sexual trauma. She also reported that DeSilvey bought her a dildo at a local store and smuggled it into the home in his pants.

That victim and her sister both started making sexual grinding motions against objects “when they were in diapers,” their mother said. She said at the time she had never been the parent to girls before, so she didn’t realize the behavior was unusual, but it became such a problem that she was called into the girls’ daycare to address the issue.

“I think maybe it was because they knew even that early that there would be sensations from doing that,” she said. “It is horrible to think they were taught that so young.”

A male victim echoed the shower accusations, and said DeSilvey would make comments to the boy’s mother about the size of the victim’s penis, and tell the boy explicit and graphic stories of his own sexual conquests when the boy was a preteen. At the same age, he said DeSilvey thought he was looking at pornography, so he took the boy to a bookstore, made him wait in the car and bought him an explicit porn magazine. All of the victims said DeSilvey frequently coached them on what to say when people started asking questions. Three of the victims said he gave them phones and then told them untrue things about their mothers and their mothers’ new significant others and told them to call him or call the police if they saw anything amiss.

Two of DeSilvey’s three divorce cases have each lasted for a decade or longer, with DeSilvey filing barrages of motions and complaints, following a similar pattern: alleging the other parent to be unfit and asking for changes to the custody agreements. Motion after motion alleges misdeeds by the opposing parents from small things such as not attending sports games to large things involving alleged criminal activity by the opposing mothers or their new spouses. One opposing attorney even quit the case eight years in, telling the judge “this matter has turned into protracted litigation” that took too much time away from all his other cases. His third divorce case, which follows the same pattern, was filed in 2016.

Initially, children exposed to his control told the courts and child welfare workers they had a close relationship with DeSilvey and wanted to stay with him instead of their mothers. To a person, they have later retracted those statements and said DeSilvey had told them what to say in their earlier statements.

When the various victims have made their accusations known, they say DeSilvey has immediately attacked them as either insane or being manipulated by their mothers. In one case, he accused his ex-wife’s new husband of molesting one of his accusers by putting his hand on her knee in church. He then asked a Wagoner County judge to seal all the documents in that case where the girl had alleged sexual misconduct against him after he had sent her to a mental care facility and said she was “crazy.”

“Must be why, after 20 hours of testimony, I kept sole custody”, he said regarding that case.

The victims say they believe DeSilvey’s successful court strategies so far have been based on the idea that none of the courts have had access to the fact that all five victims make similar allegations.

“I’m done having a crooked lawyer get away with ripping innocence from children, just to walk away free every time,” one of the victims said. Another said “abusers are cowards. That’s all he is and all he’ll ever be.”

A third victim said DeSilvey is “driven to ruin the others’ lives … (one of the mothers) has been financially ruined by the courts at the hands of someone who abuses (his) power. The kids have been ruined by these courts … We are angry.”

A fourth victim expressed concerns that DeSilvey’s youngest children are already showing signs of sexual inappropriateness, which are too disturbing to repeat here.

“The system has completely failed these (victims),” one ex-wife said. “He still has really young children, and the system is failing them, too. Someone has to do something.”

The most recent victim’s mother and step-father said they fear what DeSilvey will do when the girl is forced on Monday to return to his house — a proposition she has opposed.

“I just worry that with this stuff out now, she will have some sort of ‘accident’ over there,” the girl’s mother said. The girl’s step-father said the girl’s mother was held in contempt of court for not bringing the girl to DeSilvey’s house once before. Four deputies showed up at the house to retrieve her, and the girl, according to the step-father, “had an anxiety attack so bad the (deputies) called EMS and she was transported to the hospital.”

DeSilvey responded to a text request for comment and said “I can show every bit of that shit to be complete bullshit.”

When asked if he was saying all five children made the stories up, he didn’t directly answer; instead, he said “Think about this (ex-wife’s name omitted) says I am a bad guy, yet … she GAVE ME primary custody of my two girls by agreement.” He didn’t mention that the allegations were made after that, and did not respond to a question mentioning that.

Then he brought up something that had not been mentioned to him during the conversation, or by any of the victims: “In 2016, she tried to take custody of (child’s name omitted) from me and went from having joint to me having sole. In that 2016 case, for the first time, she made allegations of me raping her DURING OUR marriage.”

Asked if he had an answer to the question “did you molest or were you sexually inappropriate with any of your children or step-children,” DeSilvey said “Hell no. Not in any way. Period.”

And then he went on to disparage the victims: “My kids who say negative things about me have one thing in common - their mother who is out to get me, who tried to get my law license revoked, and who has lost in court every time that ACTUAL FACTS are required.”

Le Flore County’s DA, Jeff Smith, said his office initially declined to prosecute on the most recent victim’s allegations because it did not see enough evidence in that single accusation to win a conviction. Because of double-jeopardy protections, trying a case with insufficient evidence and losing later insulates the suspect from being tried again for the same crime.

“We take allegations like these seriously,” Smith said. “If there is enough evidence, we will certainly file charges. When we first reviewed that case, I don’t think we were aware of all the other victims.”

Smith said on Thursday that he is going to re-investigate the case with his first assistant district attorney based on the sheer volume of accusations and corroboration from all five alleged victims.

Today, Smith said he had reviewed the case in light of the new information in this story and his office is now interested in pursuing this case.

“All of the victims should contact the investigators at the Muskogee Police Department and give their statements,” he said. “When that is all done, we will review the entire case and move forward from there.”