Climber receives life sentence for sexual assault in Yosemite

A professional rock climber who repeatedly sexually assaulted a woman during a weekend trip to Yosemite National Park in 2016 was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday, prosecutors said.

Mountain climber Charles Barrett, 40, was given the maximum sentence for his February conviction on two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact, Phillip A. Talbert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said in a statement Tuesday.

Mr. Barrett “used his status as a prominent climber to attack women in the climbing community,” Mr. Talbert said. Three other women testified that he sexually assaulted them, although their cases were not charged in federal court because they were outside the prosecutor’s jurisdiction. “Barrett’s long history of sexual violence justifies the imposition of a life sentence,” Mr. Talbert said.

Timothy Patrick Hennessy and David A. Torres, Mr. Barrett’s lawyers, said in a joint statement on Tuesday: “We believe the imposition of a life sentence was excessive. Nevertheless, we will appeal.”

The case illustrates growing concerns about the risk of sexual harassment and abuse faced by more and more women in mountaineering, as more and more of them report harassment or worse.

In August 2016, Barrett was living and working in Yosemite National Park when a 19-year-old woman visited the park for a weekend of hiking, prosecutors said in court documents. The park covers more than 300,000 acres on the central western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in east-central California.

According to court documents and evidence presented at trial, Mr. Barrett abused her three times in the woods and “strangled her so badly that she was scared to death.” Prosecutors did not name the woman, but she described the abuse in detail in court documents.

“I remember thinking at some point: If he kills me, it’s over,” the woman said in an affidavit.

Prosecutors said Barrett had previously “publicly responded with threats and intimidation” toward his victims.

In 2017, seven years after he attacked one of the other victims who testified at trial, Mr. Barrett intentionally climbed at a climbing gym the victim attended, prosecutors said.

“She then reported Barrett’s attack on her to the gym owner in an effort to protect other women at the gym,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said, adding that Mr. Barrett responded by harassing and threatening the woman for several years.

In August 2022, Mr. Barrett was convicted of the criminal threats he made in January 2022, prosecutors said.

While in prison in the 2016 Yosemite case, Barrett made hundreds of phone calls to victims and “showed no remorse or regret,” Talbert’s office said.

“Instead, he threatened violence and revenge lawsuits against the victims,” the office said.

Mr. Barrett was an inmate at the Sacramento County Jail in California, a spokeswoman for Mr. Talbert’s office said on Tuesday.

Cicely Muldoon, director of Yosemite National Park, said in the statement that Mr Barrett’s “conviction sends a clear message about the consequences of this criminal conduct.”