ShareThisBy ADAM LYNN
Tacoma News Tribune
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
A woman who claimed she was gang-raped by three employees of a Tacoma car dealership won a multimillion-dollar judgment against two of the men this week.
The woman also reached a $100,000 out-of-court settlement with Mallon Ford, where the men worked at the time of the alleged rape.
She sued the dealership for negligence, claiming it hired one of the men, Richy D. Carter, even though he had a previous assault conviction and was "known to be violent and assaultive toward women," according to her lawsuit.
On Monday, Superior Court Judge Vicki Hogan ordered Carter and Michael Dolajak to pay the woman a total of $2.5 million for causing her "extensive emotional and physical distress," according to court documents.
Hogan issued the default judgment when the two men failed to show up to defend themselves at trial.
The judge dismissed the case against the third man, who still works for the dealership.
The woman, who called herself "L.S." in court filings, filed a police report the night of the alleged incident, but none of the men was ever charged.
The woman's attorney, Lincoln C. Beauregard of Tacoma, said his client was satisfied with the outcome. "She basically wanted to make sure the truth came out," the attorney said.
Attorney Dan'L W. Bridges, who represented Mallon Ford, said the woman originally had sought more than $1.5 million from the dealership. The fact that she settled for less than 10 percent of that shows her case against the dealership was weak, he said.
"While $100,000 is a large sum of money, it is little more than the defense costs through trial and less than defense costs if an appeal was filed," Bridges said. "This is actually an entirely favorable result in terms of dollars and cents. The downside is that it deprives my client of the vindication it would have received at trial."
The dealership maintains it did nothing wrong in hiring Carter, Bridges added. The dealership made Carter get a job elsewhere, complete anger-management classes and abide by the requirements of his probation on the assault charges before it hired him, the attorney said.
The woman claimed she was raped in the early morning hours of May 11, 2003, after spending several hours drinking with Carter, Dolajak and the other man.
She met Carter the day before when she bought a car at the dealership, according to her complaint. Carter invited her to go out that night to celebrate her purchase and she agreed. On their way home from a bar in Kent, they stopped at a friend's apartment to use the bathroom, according to the complaint. It was there the woman claimed she was attacked and raped by both men.
Bridges said no formal charges were ever filed because the woman gave inconsistent stories to police detectives.
(Contact Adam Lynn at adam.lynn(at)thenewstribune.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps-McClatchy Western Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
