Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose

Attorney General Ford,

This email is not directed generally to your staff. It is not a public-records request. It is not a comment to the Public Records Task Force. It is not correspondence intended only for one of your deputies or attorneys. I am writing this to Aaron Ford personally so there is a written record that I told you.

I was sexually assaulted by David Cassetty, then the Deputy Insurance Commissioner for Consumer Affairs and Enforcement. The assault was recorded on video. This is not a case in which the central question is whether I communicated that I wanted the sexual act to stop. On that video, I stated, “Pull it out!”David Cassetty responded, “No! I’m not going to pull it out. I am going to fuck you with it.”He said it twice. I was screaming, telling him to stop, and physically attempting to remove his hand from my body. He was never even charged. Your office declined prosecution twice.

Your office rejected a fourth, nearly forty-minute video of David Cassetty and Michael Crumb raping me. Afterward, Cassetty and Crumb call me a “champ,” and Cassetty then brags: “When I saw her the other night, she told me I couldn’t fuck her ass. So I took that as a CHALLENGE and I fucked her ass.” That alone should concern you.

Rather than the State of Nevada directing its investigative attention toward David Cassetty or Michael Crumb, whose conduct was captured on video, I became the subject of a counterterrorism investigation for alleged “indirect threats.”The supposed threatening conduct was that I said I intended to attend a campaign event I had been invited to via email by your own campaign. I am a politically active Nevada Democrat. Attending political events is not unusual behavior for me. I’m from the Washington DC area. I’ve met every sitting president since I was born. I’ve a great story about my son putting Bill Clinton’s tie in his mouth. Yet saying I intended to attend a political event to which I had been invited somehow became grounds for scrutiny by a counterterrorism unit.

I have been trying ever since to obtain the records that explain how that happened.

Your office ignored my public-records requests concerning the actual matter- the rape itself. I was trying to determine what the State knew, what it investigated, what decisions were made, why those decisions were made, and how the person reporting a sexual assault by a state official somehow became the person being investigated.

There have also been numerous formal complaints submitted to your office concerning this matter, and those complaints have been ignored. These were formal attempts to put the circumstances before your office through the channels available for doing exactly that. Between those complaints, my records requests, correspondence, litigation, public testimony, and contacts involving multiple Nevada agencies, this has not been some obscure matter buried where no one could reasonably know about it.

There is another fact that makes my inability to obtain the underlying records particularly troubling. I was told by a person at the Division of Insurance that David Cassetty had been sexually involved with a member of the Attorney General’s staff. I received that information from someone at the Division of Insurance who was not bound by the nondisclosure agreement that employees had been required to sign before the matter was even referred to Nevada State Police.

I sued you for the public records. Then I waited a year. When your office finally produced a record, it consisted of one page. There was nothing about David Cassetty’s actions, nothing explaining the handling of my sexual-assault complaint, nothing explaining why no charges resulted from conduct captured on video, and nothing explaining the actions taken by state officials. Instead, the one page I received contained false and unsubstantiated statements about me.

I have researched intimate-partner sexual assault and trauma responses. I have written what is intended as a handbook for prosecutors about these cases because I could not understand how something that appeared so obvious to me could disappear inside governmental institutions.

This is the postscript where I actually talk about my case. I would appreciate you reading it. 

*****

Collateral Damage

*****

Email to the Clark County, Nevada District Attorney
July, 2024

I write today to discuss a case that has been brought to you recently involving redacted. I am the victim in the video.

It is my understanding that context seems to be the issue in the decision not to move forward with this case. I do find that interesting from an academic standpoint. If sexual assault is defined simply as “forced sexual penetration against another person’s will.” The video clearly shows that. Any reasonable person would see that and hear the word “no” and see me grabbing at his wrist trying to pull his hand out of me, while screaming and they would say the fits the legal definition of sexual assault in Nevada law.

However, in this case it is a question. Was I doing this voluntarily? Did I give consent? What is on film is fact. You can see it, it is real. It would appear that I said no. It would appear I begged him to stop.

The real question in this case is one of substantial circumstance for women all over this country. When does no actually mean no? What rights to legal protection do women forfeit by being in a relationship with their attacker? At what point or state of mind does a woman have to be in to finally take action against their assailant and at what point is that too late. In Nevada it is twenty years. This happened within the current calendar year.

These are definitions that we need as women. Honestly, how do we navigate not knowing? It’s a contract you enter into with someone giving sexual consent. If I can’t say “no, stop, you’re hurting me” and have it stop, there must be a caveat in the contract somewhere stating that there are exclusions of when no doesn’t mean someone has to stop. Without a legal definition of what constitutes forfeiture of protection by law from sexual assault, how am I actually supposed to navigate?

There are a lot of women not currently protected from sexual assault under the law. We put ourselves in situations that are dangerous and it’s our fault. But Jesus, I should have been able to say no. Just because I walk into a bad part of town doesn’t mean I deserve to be shot. Just because I know my attacker and had a relationship with him, doesn’t give him the right to penetrate me against my will as I told him to stop.

I know it is easier to prosecute the men in the shadows who violate virgins. But that is not the only definition and victim profile that exists. Women deserve better protection and we can’t protect ourselves unless we have legal definitions.

If that was your wife, your daughter, your sister, or your friend in that video, would that be sexual assault? I’m certain you would say so. I certainly would.

It’s not a matter of proving that, it is clearly defined as sexual assault. It’s a matter of does no actually mean no and at what point that is. That is the crux of his defense. It’s not sexual assault because she stayed and dated the guy. So, is that not still sexual assault? Legal definition. Black and white. If sexual assault is forced sexual penetration against another person’s will, if those are the words that define what sexual assault is, then that not being sexual assault isn’t possible.

It’s a tough case and a tough question and frankly I want an answer. This is important. I didn’t handle it well and I should have taken it to the police. But again, I was questioning if I was being sexual assaulted. Yes, that’s what it looks like. Yes that’s how it felt. Yes that is what I would call that looking at it. But, he was a man I had been engaged in a sexual relationship with for six years. I didn’t think anyone would believe me, because of this murky water with known persons and ongoing relationships.

This was a tangled. incident. There is a lot to it. But so few cases are cut and dry. You have video recordings. Moment by moment what happened. What was said. Who did what. If that’s not enough to prove it there needs to be some sort of legal precedent clearly defining this.

When I taught, I taught that law had letter and intent. This is sexual assault, letter of the law. Is it sexual assault intent of the law? It’s truly fascinating and I hope you will at least review it again and see if you see my point.

Please contact me if you have any questions or just even thoughts about this.

Regards,
Kathleen Light

————————————————

I wrote that email because I wanted an answer.

Not comfort. Not sympathy. Not a civics lesson on prosecutorial discretion. I wanted an answer to a very simple question: when does no actually mean no?

Because I had video. On that video I said no repeatedly. I begged him to stop. I grabbed at his wrist trying to pull his hand out of me while I screamed. It was not subtle. It was not poetic. It was not open to some great philosophical debate about human intention and ambiguity. It was plain. It was clearly stated. And still the answer from the Clark County District Attorney’s Office was no charges. The issue, somehow, was “context.”

Because what context meant in my case was not that the conduct on the video was unclear. It meant I knew him. It meant I had slept with him before. It meant I stayed. It meant I did not behave like the kind of victim the system prefers. It meant I was not a stranger sexual assault case gift-wrapped for easy prosecution and public approval. It meant I was a woman in the murky water of intimate partner sexual assault, and our institutions still do not know how to look at women like me without blaming us for drowning in those murky waters.

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 by the airport. There were three men in that room. I had known one ten years, one, the main assailant, six years, and one about a month. There was alcohol. There was cocaine. There was video.

Four separate videos actually.

In that room I was sexually assaulted by two of my friends. The main assailant told me he loved me for the first time while I screamed and begged him to stop. Then the men shook hands over me in an agreement I was not party to, but instead subject of. “I’m taking her home and I’m keeping her,” he said.

I would then spend five months with a man who routinely pinned me down and forced himself on me at night, so blackout drunk he did not remember it in the morning, and who on other nights threatened me with murder-suicide and went for his father’s service revolver to blow my head off. He said he wanted to see my brain splattered on the wall.

Mine was intimate partner sexual assault, the most common and one of the least prosecuted forms of sexual assault. It does not look like the movies. It looks like women staying. It looks like women freezing. It looks like women doubting themselves. It looks like trauma bonding, shame, confusion, and trying to survive inside a relationship that has already turned into a crime scene.

When I finally reported, five months later, it was because I had watched the videos for the first time. The police were actually the ones who convinced me it was sexual assault. I asked more than once if they were sure. It could not be, could it? He loved me. He told me he loved me while it was happening. But love is not consent. A relationship is not consent. A history is not consent.

The law already knows that.

My case went first through the Clark County District Attorney’s Office. I was told at one point that my assailant was being arrested “at that moment.” At the same time the assailant was texting me that he had been escorted out of his office by Capitol Police and that his car was being searched. I believed an arrest was happening. The weekend came and went. I broke and felt guilty and told my assailant Sunday to be prepared. The police told me he was to be arrested and it was going to happen at any moment. Then a day later I was told it was a jurisdictional issue and the arrest would still happen. Then, the day after that, I was told the District Attorney had declined charges and the case was no longer being investigated.

That kind of whiplash does something to your nervous system. It takes you from terror to relief to confusion to collapse in a matter of hours. One moment the state is telling you that what happened to you was real enough to justify arrest. The next, it is telling you the same conduct is not prosecutable. I had been so relieved he was going to be arrested and unable to contact me as we continued texting for months after I reported. I knew I needed to walk away, I just couldn’t. He would need to be in jail to break that contact. That was the trauma bonding.

It took months and dozens of emails to get a meeting with the District Attorney. If you do not have an active case, you cannot call the Clark County District Attorney’s Office. You email. And email. And email. Eventually I got tired of being ignored and showed up in person and refused to leave until someone talked to me and told me why. That is how the meeting got scheduled. That is how I ended up across from the District Attorney.

When I got there, District Attorney himself came out to get me from the waiting room. He introduced himself as “Steve.” I told him to call me “Katie.” We went into a conference room where the Deputy District Attorney in charge of my case as well as the Chief Deputy for criminal were waiting. The Chief Deputy immediately announced that nothing could be recorded in that room. The message was clear: they were in control of the record. I was not.

Then “Steve” began explaining that prosecutors could not try cases they could not win. I answered him with the same fact I kept coming back to because it was the fact that made everything else so obscene.

“It’s on video.”

That should have ended the argument. Instead it began one. The Deputy mentioned something about me asking whether we should close the window in the third of the four videos, as if that somehow retroactively converted the previous half hour of screaming into consent. I tried to explain that the video showed exactly what sexual assault looks like. I said no. I said stop. I said you’re hurting me. My assailant told me to shut up. When I asked him to pull his hand out of my body, he said “no, I’m not going to pull it out, I’m going to f** you with it.” He was, in effect and in plain language, acknowledging my revocation of consent and telling me he intended to continue and escalate anyway.*

I asked the District Attorney somewhat sarcastically if he had even watched the video. Then I learned he had never watched the video.

The actual elected District Attorney for Clark County, Nevada which is major metropolitan area containing Las Vegas had declined charges on my sexual assault case personally—now for the third time, as I understood it—without ever viewing the evidence.

That was the moment I stopped being calm.

I pulled out my phone and pulled up the video. He told me that if I played it, he would terminate the meeting. I looked him in the eye and pressed play. He jumped up out of his chair and scurried down the hallway. I followed him with the volume all the way up and said, “What’s the matter, Steve? You don’t want to hear me scream?” I muttered an insult under my breath. The Chief Deputy informed me that I was being removed from the building for “forcing” the District Attorney to hear the video. That word — forcing — landed on me like another assault. Then I said, “Go ahead. Do I appear to be someone who has never been in cuffs before?” The District Attorney snorted in some amusement.

Then I broke down sobbing because by that point the entire spectacle had become too grotesque to process upright.

The District Attorney then agreed he would watch the video and meet with me again the following week. The chief deputy objected — “Boss, no!” — which remains one of the strangest details of the whole story. Why was everyone so worried about the elected District Attorney actually seeing the evidence in a sexual assault case? What exactly were they trying to protect? Him? The office? The declination? Themselves?

At the second meeting, held over Teams, I hoped he had watched it. I had sent it to him directly via email every single day that week.

The District Attorney opened with a question: had I had sexual intercourse with my assailant after that video was made? I answered plainly. Of course I had. We were in a relationship. That was not some shocking revelation. That was the whole point. Mine was intimate-partner sexual assault , not a stranger in an alley.

He had his line ready. You could feel it. He started, stopped, and restarted the way people do when they have rehearsed and want to get it exactly right.

He said his office “could prosecute men who raped prostitutes, but you stayed with him”.

There it was. That was the answer to my email. That was the answer to “when does no actually mean no?” Apparently not when the woman stayed. Apparently not when she loved him.

The statement was not just cruel. It was legally false. A relationship does not nullify sexual assault. Continued contact does not nullify sexual assault. Subsequent sex does not travel backward in time and manufacture consent where there was none. He knew that. I knew that. So what he gave me in that moment was not legal reasoning.

I believe he wanted a reaction from me. Something explosive. Something hysterical. Something he could point to and say, see? That is what we are dealing with here. Instead I smiled and told him I would be back, that I would go through Las Vegas Metro Police because I believed Nevada State Police had mishandled the case, and then I ended the call.

What he did that day did not end with the meeting. That is the part people do not understand when they talk about prosecutorial decisions as if they are clinical, bureaucratic, almost bloodless things. A declination is not just a memo. It is not just a line in a file. It enters the victim. It attaches itself to every doubt she already has and gives those doubts institutional authority.

Maybe it was your fault. Maybe staying meant consent. Maybe if you really had been sexual assaulted you would have left. Maybe if you really had been sexual assaulted you would have gone to police immediately. Maybe you were too messy, too sexual, too damaged, too complicated to count. Maybe women like you are not the women the law was written for.

But, my situation is exactly why the laws are written the way they are. That is why relationships are specifically excluded in Nevada law as being indicative of consent. I am why Rape Sheild exists. My case is why the consent based model is now the standard. I am the person the modern laws were written for. Me. My case. Those laws exist specifically to prevent what happened to me both in the assault and in the institutional response.

That is collateral damage.

Not because the prosecutor caused the original assault. He did not. But because he took the raw material of trauma and fed it the oldest lie in the book: that the victim’s behavior after sexual assault is the real issue, not the assailant’s behavior during it.

By the end of that month I was in intensive trauma therapy and had to quit my job to do it. The District Attorney’s comment had a hand in that. Not because it was the first wound, but because it was the state stepping directly into the wound and grinding it deeper.

People like to imagine prosecutorial decisions as detached exercises in evidence and judgment. But, malinformed prosecutorial decisions do damage. They can reinforce every trauma distortion already in a victim’s mind. They can make her question reality, question law, question whether the word no has any meaning at all once it is spoken inside a relationship. They can teach her that what happened to her may satisfy the legal definition of sexual assault in theory, but not in practice, not for her, not with her facts, not with her body, not with her life.

And then people wonder why women become angry. Why they document everything. Why they read case law at three in the morning. Why they build websites. Why they write books. Why they refuse to shut up.

This is why.

Because when the people entrusted to apply the law cannot or will not do it, the victim is left to carry the truth herself. She has to build the record. She has to preserve the sequence. She has to learn the law well enough to defend herself not just from the rapist, but from the prosecutor’s lack of knowledge on the subject. She has to become archivist, advocate, witness, expert, historian, and alarm bell, all because some man in a pastel dress shirt decided that “you stayed” was a sufficient substitute for legal analysis.

This book is a trauma response. That is not an apology. It is a fact. It exists because I cannot let another woman go through what I went through and call that justice. It exists because uninformed prosecutorial decisions do not stop at “no charges.” They keep happening inside the victim long after the meeting ends. They become secondary injuries. They reshape the way she sees herself, her assault, her worth, and the law that was supposed to protect her.

You never know what a trauma response might look like. Sometimes it looks like collapse. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it looks like this book.

*****************

Attorney General Ford, I am not asking you for sympathy. I am asking you to do your goddamn job that I voted to elect you to. At this point I am not willing to accept another explanation that some unnamed person somewhere within government handled this and therefore no one in a position of authority actually knew.

Unless your entire staff is cognitively impaired, you clearly have had full knowledge of this. If not, fire some people. You could have at least used the part about Cassetty sleeping with Lombardo’s ex-wife in your campaign. There have been public-records requests, communications with your office, records involving multiple Nevada agencies, formal complaints to your office, my public testimony, and litigation—including litigation concerning the records themselves. I am sending this directly to you because I want to eliminate the possibility of anyone later saying that Aaron Ford personally did not know.

Please watch the attached video of my rape. When you watch it, I want you to remember what David Cassetty himself has said in the current civil case. David Cassetty acknowledges that I revoked consent. He stated: “In a later encounter the same evening, Plaintiff requested that Plaintiff remove his hand and Plaintiff [sic] did so promptly.” His own statement recognizes that I had specifically revoked consent. Yet, in perhaps the dumbest argument I have personally ever seen from someone who actually attended an accredited law school—though, it is of note, Mr. Cassetty is merely a lawyer and no longer an attorney—he apparently believes it helps him that when he did it again after I revoked consent, he complied “promptly.”

More importantly, in response to the Request for Admission, “Admit no safeword or non-consent agreement existed,”David Cassetty responded: “Admit.” There was therefore no safeword, no agreement that “no” meant something other than no, no agreement that “stop” meant something other than stop, and no agreement that “pull it out” meant anything other than remove your hand from my body.

Then, after you watch the video, remember the defense he has actually offered for why he continued. His explanation is: “I understood her to be requesting I stop progressing with the act, to give her time to adjust before continuing, and not to end the act entirely.”Read that carefully. His explanation is that I protested and he personally decided what I meant by it.

I said, “Pull it out.” He responded, “I’m not going to pull it out. I am going to fuck you with it.” Twice. His defense now is essentially that although I communicated that I wanted him to stop, he interpreted my words as permission to resume when he decided I had been given enough time to “adjust.”Watch the video and tell me at what point I was allowed to “adjust.” There was no safeword agreement and there was no non-consent agreement, by his own admission. That is the case the State of Nevada allowed to disappear without even being put in handcuffs.

What has happened since that assault has caused trauma far beyond the original crime. This matter has demolished my life. I have lost time, work, stability, relationships, and pieces of myself trying to force institutions that were supposed to function. Every refusal to look, every unanswered complaint, every unexplained decision, every withheld record, every law your office broke,  and every institutional effort directed at me instead of the conduct I reported has compounded that harm.

At some point institutional responsibility becomes personal responsibility. You are the elected Attorney General. These decisions and failures have occurred within an office carrying your name and exercising authority entrusted to you by the people of Nevada. I am telling you directly what those failures have done to a human being. Morally, Aaron Ford, you bear responsibility for what your office has done and for the damage that continued while you had the power to intervene and did nothing.

Do not ever tell anyone that you care about women while refusing to look directly at what happened to this one. I hope this follows you beyond your failure in November. I hope that as the campaigns, titles, offices, and political ambitions disappear into the past, you remember that there was an actual human being on the other side of these decisions. I hope that as you grow old, the weight of the knowledge of what happened here—and what you chose to do or rather not do once you knew—bears down on your conscience and your soul.

Attorney General Ford, that is why I am writing to you personally. I want you to watch the video, read his words, look at the complaints, and look at the records.

Most importantly, I want this in writing. Whatever anyone claims later, you have now been personally informed. Please finally take some action to rectify the situation by charging him before you leave office.

You are a religious man, so I leave you with this:

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

— Matthew 25:41–46 (KJV)

Best of luck in November.

Kathleen Light

702-469-7523

P.S. Because I have already been subjected to a counterterrorism investigation over alleged “indirect threats,” I want to make this explicit: nothing in this email is intended as a threat of any kind, direct or indirect. My statements concerning your conscience, your soul, God, and Scripture are moral and religious statements only. I am not threatening you with any action whatsoever. What happens between you and God is between you and God, sir and best of luck with that. I ain’t throwing stones. 

Sent from my iPhone