What Almost Ran

This is what I had written for the paper. 

Clark County needs a real choice for District Attorney in 2026—not another automatic re-election. I’m asking you to treat this as a civic call to action and use any platform you have to help recruit and spotlight a serious challenger to Steve Wolfson. Mr. Wolfson announced today that a challenger should think twice before running against him.

Steve Wolfson, despite his lengthy tenure and advanced age, has run our county’s justice system into the ground. Between plea deals and limited bonds it’s bad enough, but there are so many more cases that aren’t even charged.

I have had personal experience with Mr. Wolfson as a sexual assault victim. My assailant was not charged.

And I’m going to tell you why this matters—not just to me, but to every woman in this county who has ever been told, explicitly or implicitly, that her rape doesn’t count because she doesn’t fit the movie version of a “perfect victim.”

For the last two years I have been screaming. Internally. Externally. Just screaming. Screaming in pain. Screaming for help. Screaming so it will just end.

The end, in my case, is justice.

The screaming began at a hotel on Warm Springs by the airport. I was in a room with three men—one I had known ten years, another six, and a third about a month. There was alcohol. There was cocaine. And there was video.

I was sexually assaulted by two of my friends. The main assailant would tell me that night, while I screamed and begged for mercy, that he loved me. The two men would then shake hands in some form of exchange that I was not party to, but the subject of. He said, “I’m taking her home and I’m keeping her.”

I would spend the next five months with a man who had a severe issue with alcohol and who would routinely pin me down and force himself on me at night, so blackout drunk he didn’t remember in the morning.

On other nights, he would threaten me with murder-suicide. Occasionally he would stumble toward the closet to get his father’s service revolver, specifically to blow my head off and see my brain splattered on the wall.

Mine was intimate-partner sexual assault, which is one of the most common—and most routinely minimized—forms of rape. It rarely looks like the movie version. Survivors often stay. They often remain in contact. They often freeze, comply, or return because trauma, coercion, fear, finances, kids, isolation, and manipulation don’t vanish just because a crime occurred. Those realities are not “proof nothing happened.” They are the predictable dynamics of intimate-partner abuse.

Trauma and trauma bonding are the neurobiological functions that keep victims with their attacker. Trauma bonding, to define it, is a push-pull of brain chemicals. Stress chemicals like cortisol that kick in for survival mode are met with oxytocin, which is key in bonding and calming. The person causing harm—and the need for survival—is also giving you what you need to feel safe in your mind’s neurochemistry.

I ask myself why I stayed with him and stayed so long. It took months before I could understand it. It took longer for me to believe it was true.

I reported my sexual assault by my boyfriend five months after the videos were taken that February night in 2024. I had finally watched the videos and saw what was on them. The police were actually the people who really convinced me it was rape. I asked several times if they were sure. It could not have been, could it? But he loved me. He told me he loved me while it was happening on the video.

The definition of rape is penetration against the will of another. Per the Violence Against Women Act, that includes any penetration. Consent is defined as being freely and enthusiastically given and, per VAWA, can be revoked at any time. Additionally, per VAWA, the relationship between the victim and the aggressor is of no consequence legally. Even within a relationship, consent must be given and can be revoked at any time.

This brings me to Steve Wolfson.

My case went through the Clark County District Attorney’s Office initially. It would later be seen and declined in the attorney general’s office but that’s a different story. I received a call from the victim’s advocate a few days after my police interview. My assailant was being arrested at that moment. At the same time, my assailant was texting me that he had just been escorted out of his office by Capitol Police and they were searching his car. I believed he was being arrested. The victim’s advocate told me it would be momentary.

I held my breath.

My assailant continued to text me into the next day and then the next, which was a Sunday. I did not know why he hadn’t been arrested. I began feeling guilty, and I informed him his arrest was imminent Sunday afternoon.

Monday, I spoke with the victim’s advocate and she said it was a jurisdictional issue and he was going to be arrested still. The next day came. I received a call, and this time she said that the DA had declined charges and the case was no longer being investigated.

The whiplash was jarring, to say the least. I somehow went from having the police convince me it really was sexual assault, to the relief of him being arrested, to the confusion of it all just suddenly stopping.

I’ve been in that moment for a year and a half—still in utter shock that a violent act of sexual assault could take place on video and still the person committing that act was free. Not just free, but uncharged. He was never even put in handcuffs for what he did to me. It’s on video.

It took months and dozens of emails (if you don’t have an active case you can’t call the Clark County District Attorney’s Office; you must email), and finally me just getting the random urge to show up and refuse to leave until someone talked to me and told me why. When I told them that, a meeting was scheduled.

That would take place a week later, in late September 2024. I was shocked when I was told I would be meeting with Steve Wolfson himself. I wasn’t sure what the actual District Attorney would be doing with my case; I thought I would be talking to some deputy.

When I arrived, Mr. Wolfson is the one who came and got me from the waiting room. He introduced himself as Steve. I told him to call me Katie. He was wearing a pastel dress shirt, sleeves rolled a quarter way up.

We went into a conference room where two others were waiting: Michelle Jore and Robert Daskas. Daskas informed me sternly that that particular room was not one where anything could be recorded.

The meeting proceeded. Steve, as he had told me to call him, was explaining his prosecutorial duty to not try cases that he could not win. I said simply: “It’s on video.” Due to the position and profession of my assailant, Steve also told me he did not know him because I had said something about me not being a member of the Las Vegas legal community like other parties.

I was told by Jore that in one of the videos I had asked if we would close the window—as if that was somehow consent for the previous 30 minutes of me screaming and begging him to stop.

I could not comprehend how or why this case was not winnable. It is the absolute legal definition of sexual assault. It hits every point. It is visually clear and I speak in plain language. I said “no,” “please stop,” “you’re hurting me.” He tells me to “shut up” and says “don’t be stupid,” and when I ask him to pull his hand out of my body he says, “No, I’m not going to pull it out. I’m going to [continue to penetrate] you with it.”

He acknowledges my revocation of consent and plainly states he will continue without my consent. That is precisely what that means.

I asked Steve about the video and he brushed it off. It was in this moment I was told he had never seen it. Steve Wolfson sat in front of me denying, now for the third time, charges on my rape case that is on video without ever seeing said video.

I was no longer calm. I pulled my phone out and pulled up the video. Steve says to me, “Ms. Light, if you play that video, I will terminate this meeting.” I’ve been known for having a defiant streak, and let me assure you that streak came out when I looked him in the eye and pressed play.

Mr. Wolfson jumped out of his chair and scurried down the hallway. I followed, volume up as far as it could go, and said defiantly, “What’s the matter, Steve? You don’t want to hear me scream?” I then muttered an insult. Not my finest moment, but given the situation, understandable.

Mr. Daskas then informed me that I was being removed from the building for “forcing” Mr. Wolfson to hear that video. I will pause a moment on that particular word choice to a rape victim.

I, not to be outdone, said, “Go ahead. Do I appear to be someone who has never been in cuffs before?”

This made Mr. Wolfson snort in amusement despite himself. We stood in silence for a moment before I just started sobbing because the whole thing had just been too overwhelming to me.

Mr. Wolfson then agreed he would watch the video. Daskas became concerned by this, for reasons that are still a mystery to me, and said, “Boss, no!” That always struck me as off—why everyone was so worried about Mr. Wolfson watching the video.

Mr. Wolfson said it was okay, he was going to watch it, and we would meet again the following week via Teams.

The meeting was the first thing in the morning. I was hopeful that despite the issues, Mr. Wolfson had finally seen what was on those videos. He had not.

Mr. Wolfson opened with a simple question: “Ms. Light, did you have sexual intercourse with [that assailant] any time after that video was made?” I found this question perplexing because it was in the police documentation that there had been further sexual assaults and we were dating. In fact, I mentioned both of those facts myself in an email to Mr. Wolfson directly.

I answered, “Of course I did. We were in a relationship.”

Mr. Wolfson was ready with his answer. He knew what he was going to say. He had clearly practiced it because he started, paused, and restarted in that way where you want to deliver a line perfectly. He said to me that he and his office could

 “prosecute men who raped prostitutes, but you stayed with him.”

And there it is. That is the line. That is the worldview.

The effect of that statement was clear: a hierarchy of victims—some “good,” some disposable. It felt like a moral judgment that reduced me to a category, basically calling me a slut instead of treating me like a human being reporting a crime. In addition, it is not even a correct statement of the law, both federally and in Nevada.

He hovered his hand over the button to end the meeting. I certainly believe he wanted some hysterical yelling reaction out of me. He had inflicted that particular harm and those cutting words with intent to cause harm.

I refused to give him the reaction he wanted.

I knew that it was not law that an intimate partner relationship gave a legal exclusion to consent. I knew that. So did he.

I smiled and told him I would be back and I would be going through Metro because I believe NSP had mishandled the case. I ended the call.

There are no words in the English language that accurately describe how I felt at that moment. I had already doubted myself. I had spent months trying to accept that a sexual assault not only happened, but wasn’t my fault. To be demeaned like that was difficult. In my mind, at least, I immediately read it as Mr. Wolfson calling me a whore and not worthy of justice.

By the end of the month I was in intensive trauma therapy and had to quit my job in order to do the therapy. Mr. Wolfson’s comment had a hand in the ultimate necessity of that.

I hear it from men. The lawyers I’ve met socially, I ask them what their thoughts are and what the defense is that is so impenetrable by our prosecutors. I’ve gotten some answers and I’ve researched every single one of them. I have case and code for each argument I’ve heard. This isn’t an unwinnable case. It’s an unwilling prosecutor.

In talking specifically to men regarding my case, I’ve noticed some very clear lines. It’s always a man of a certain age that will tell me it was my fault for being in that situation to begin with. They are also the ones who say, “I’m afraid of what you might say I did,” as if being a victim made me a threat to them.

That age is approximately that of Mr. Wolfson.

Steve Wolfson has been in office longer than I’ve lived here, and I remember when the Golden Knights didn’t exist.

It is time for a change. It is time for a fresh beginning with the next generation of prosecutors who no longer believe that women are sometimes at fault for the sins of men. Our prosecutors need to have modern legal education and become trauma-informed, lest we continue to allow them to inflict more trauma upon trauma victims.

Rape is a dynamic and complex thing. It does not look the same for everyone. It is not the movies. It is not the sobbing woman in the corner with a torn dress and mascara running down her face. It is not limited to masked men violating virgins in a dark alley.

The most common form of sexual assault is intimate partner sexual assault. It was just thirty short years ago it was deemed illegal in all states for a man to rape his wife.

We have moved forward and we have put into place laws to protect the most vulnerable women—the ones who sleep next to their assailant every night like I did. We now need to start prosecuting those cases.

Clark County cannot go on like this. Women cannot go on like this. We need a DA who does basic due diligence, treats victims with respect, and who serves the community—not stereotypes.

So here is the ask—directly to you: make it safe for someone credible to run. Nevada’s candidate filing period for non-judicial offices is March 2–13, 2026.

Run a public call: Who is running against Steve Wolfson? If no one is, why not?

Start naming the lane: former prosecutors, public defenders, judges, and serious civic leaders—this office is winnable if people believe it is.

Force the conversation.

Give challengers oxygen: profiles, interviews, and a clear message that this election is not a formality.

And to qualified candidates reading this: if you’ve ever complained privately about the culture, the priorities, or the blind spots—as I know so many in the Las Vegas legal community do—stop whispering. Run.

How many cases haven’t been tried? How many rapists are on the streets because Steve Wolfson, who would be crowned, not elected, if he runs unopposed, felt the victim was a little too much of a slut? Or because he deemed intimate partner sexual assault an unwinnable case? How many of us are out there?

Run against him if you’re qualified and trauma-informed. I’m not qualified. But apparently neither is he.