Man who “held his girlfriend captive for days in his Minnesota dorm while he raped and tortured her” gets deal

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A man accused of holding his girlfriend captive in her Minnesota college dorm room for three days while raping, beating and waterboarding her has agreed to a plea deal that could see him sentenced to up to seven and a half years in prison.

Keanu Avery Labatte, 20, of Granite Falls, pleaded guilty Friday to an amended charge of second-degree sexual abuse, admitting to choking and sexually assaulting the woman in her room at St. Catherine University in September. In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop four other charges, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported.

His lawyer, Thomas Beito, said Labatte admitted to choking her during the attack. “He did not admit to the other offensive details at play here, such as waterboarding, taking her hostage or kidnapping her,” Beito said. “We deny that any of that happened.”

Labatte remains free on $80,000 bail until sentencing on Nov. 4. Beito said he will ask Judge Kellie Charles for probation “due to his age and the fact that he has no significant criminal history.”

Dennis Gerhardstein, spokesman for the Ramsey County District Attorney’s Office, said prosecutors would ask the judge to give Labatte the full 7 1/2-year prison sentence.

According to the complaint, Labatte went to campus on a Thursday to visit his girlfriend of two months. After finding texts, pictures and social media content there that made him angry, he took her phone away, the complaint says. She was strangled, threatened with a knife, forced to lie in a bathtub while Labatte covered her face with a washcloth and poured water on her, and sexually assaulted, the complaint says.

That Sunday morning, she persuaded him to let her go to get something to eat from the cafeteria, but she went to the university’s security office and reported that she had been abused. They notified police, and officers noticed marks on her neck, the complaint states.