Newly Surfaced Statements Reveal A Culture of Indifference To Sexual Assault
Stretching back throughout his career, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson’s comments and actions reflect an apathy toward sexual assault cases.
In a trailer park in rural Clark County, a man grabbed a six year old girl, pulled her into his trailer, and put his hands down her pants. The police arrested the man for the crime. A jury convicted him. Ultimately, though, one of Steve Wolfson’s most trusted and senior prosecutors in the Clark County District Attorney’s Office undermined the case, which resulted in the man who committed the sexual assault being sent back into the community.
“That misconduct occurred is clear,” the Nevada Supreme Court wrote in an April 2021 opinion that mentioned by name Robert Daskas, a prosecutor in the Clark County District Attorney’s Office.
What happened in the case is that after a witness testified to seeing the young girl leave the man’s trailer, Daskas met privately with the judge in his quarters, excluding the defense lawyers from the conversation. This private conversation violates the norm that a judge should only have conversations about the trial while lawyers from both sides are present. After Daskas’ meeting with the judge, the judge allowed the prosecution’s witness to be released into the community despite the fact that she had outstanding warrants in a different criminal case.
The Nevada Supreme Court stated that it could not determine who was most at fault for the misconduct, but the bottom line remains that a prosecutor having a private conversation with a judge during a trial at the very least raises the appearance of impropriety. This is especially true when a witness for the prosecution gets what appears to be a benefit in exchange for her testimony shortly after the private meeting between the judge and the prosecutor.
When prosecutors don’t play by the rules, the result often is that people who commit sexual assault and other serious crimes go free. Despite the poor judgment, Daskas still holds a prestigious role in Wolfson’s office, heading the criminal division where he supervises 85 prosecutors.
Prosecutors in Clark County handle thousands of cases each year, so it’s hard to flag a single case and draw too many conclusions from it. But what’s striking about this case is how similar it is to a case that Steve Wolfson handled as a private criminal lawyer earlier in his career.
Wolfson represented a bus driver who beat, raped, and fondled multiple 13-year-old girls. Even though Nevada law clearly states that a child under 16 can never consent to sex with an adult, Wolfson told the judge, according to The Las Vegas Review-Journal: “From what I gather, most of these acts are consensual anyway.”
Consensual.
Frank Rudy Cooper, a law professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas William S. Boyd School of Law, told Vegas Watch that the rape of a 13-year-old girl by an adult man involves “an automatic force finding,” which means that it is legally impossible for a child this young to consent to sex with an adult.
Judith Whitmer, Chair of the Nevada State Democratic Party, told Vegas Watch, “These statements should make everyone question whether or not we can trust District Attorney Wolfson to handle cases involving sexual violence against women and girls. To think that we have an elected prosecutor—a Democrat, nonetheless—who thinks that it is even possible to have a consensual sexual relationship with a 13 year old is appalling.”
As the elected leader of the office, Wolfson sets the tone for how seriously prosecutors in the Clark County District Attorney’s Office take sexual assault cases--and how much of a priority those cases receive within the office.
Wolfson’s personal law firm website, which was up and running as recently as October 2020, provides a peak into Wolfson’s perspective on sex assault cases. “Sex crime allegations are not always true and accurate and are oftentimes false acounts,” Wolfson’s website read.
This sentence strikes a discordant tone in today’s cultural landscape where powerful and wealthy men have been removed from elected office, CEO and corporate board positions, and movie producers and news anchors roles as their statements and actions perpetuating and condoning sexual harassment and assault have come to light. In 2017, over 3 million women marched in hundreds of cities and towns across the United States to raise awareness of sexual harm and underscore the need to believe women.
But this unvarnished language from Wolfson’s website does more than simply record a statement sharply out of view from today’s political and social context. The statement also helps to explain why Wolfson has failed to prosecute serious sex assault claims made against the wealthy and the well-connected.
When Kathryn Mayorga, a school teacher, said that international soccer phenom Cristiano Ronaldo raped her in a Las Vegas hotel room, Wolfson refused to prosecute. Ronaldo himself had acknowledged that Mayorga “kept saying no” and “don’t do it” and that he “apologized afterwards.”
Wolfson also failed to prosecute Steve Wynn, the billionaire hotel magnate, after a married female manicurist said that Wynn raped and impregnated her while she was working at one of Wynn’s hotels. Even though Wynn’s hotel settled a lawsuit for $7.5 million, Wynn claimed the sex was consensual.
Perhaps Wolfson simply didn’t believe these women. After all, in Wolfson’s worldview, these claims “are oftentimes false accounts.”
What’s striking is that when confronted with a false account that ran in the opposite direction--a teenaged sexual assault survivor convicted of killing her attacker--Steve Wolfson fought tooth and nail to keep her locked in prison.
As new information emerged in the case, an FBI agent audited the evidence that comprised the prosecution’s theory of guilt, and dubbed it “complete and utter bullshit.” Nonetheless, Steve Wolfson was so hellbent on disbelieving the woman’s story that he fought her effort to test DNA evidence to help prove her innocence even after the Innocence Project offered to pay for the testing. Ultimately, the woman, Kirstin Blaise Lobato, was exonerated--no thanks to Steve Wolfson.
After reviewing Wolfson’s pattern of comments and behaviors, Jennifer Ring, Professor of Political Science at the University of Nevada Reno and former director of the school’s women studies program, told Vegas Watch that Wolfson “shouldn't be trusted with handling cases regarding women and girls.”
Ring described comments like Wolfson’s as “a big problem and it's tediously upsetting to keep having to swat down continuing incidents and attitudes like these...like playing Whack-A-Mole.”
Whitmer, the Chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, told Vegas Watch that she is “calling on District Attorney Wolfson to publicly address these statements, and affirm that he is committed to seeking justice for victims of sexual assault and violence.”
“In recent years,” Whitmer continued, “we’ve seen a lot of women courageously speak out against abusers. But we’ve also seen a lot of people dismiss this courage as ‘cancel culture.’ Statements like those made by District Attorney Wolfson—who has the power to deliver justice for victims—discredit the real experiences of women and girls across the nation, and here in Clark County.”