Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office Employees Jay Boyarsky (left), Kasey Halcon (center) and James Gibbons Shapiro (right) April 2019. Photo Credit: Susan Bassi
She was just a teenager. Her testimony threatened to topple the careers of police officers and high-ranking public officials across the San Francisco Bay Area. The explosive case—one of Northern California’s most sordid sex scandals—involved the police officers who exploited her, and those who investigated them.
As investigations spread across five law enforcement agencies and three counties, the young woman—a central witness—was abruptly shipped off to a sketchy rehabilitation facility on the East Coast. Police called it a “paid vacation”. Her attorneys called it witness tampering and obstruction of justice.
For years, the truth behind who coordinated and paid for her police-sponsored vacation remained a mystery that no one, including the media, was able to solve. Then came a new police transparency law and a bitter divorce case involving a high-ranking official in the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Victim Services Unit, uncovering a decade-long sophisticated cover-up in the Bay Area police misconduct scandal…