Police officer with troubled FBI past convicted of child rape in Alabama

Messages were sent to Bauer’s lawyers seeking comment. Bauer did not respond to a letter sent to him in prison by AP.

During the trial in Alabama, the child, now a young teenager, tearfully testified that he was repeatedly abused by Bauer over a period of years and was too afraid to say no or tell anyone what happened.

Jurors also saw a recording of the child’s interview with a child abuse investigator in 2021 in which she described the same abuse.

The AP is withholding some details of the allegations to protect the girl’s identity. Police were called in after the child eventually told a friend and the friend’s parents alerted the school.

Bauer took the stand and testified in his own defense during the trial. When asked if he molested or anally abused the child, he replied “no, never.”

“If she said I did something to her, that’s a lie,” he said under cross-examination.

Bauer’s time with the FBI was not discussed in detail during the trial. The judge granted the defense’s request to exclude testimony regarding allegations by a colleague in Louisiana that he raped her at knifepoint.

According to the FBI, Bauer forged a letter that cleaned his record and allowed him to be hired by the Alabama State Police in 2019. The document, obtained by AP, confirms his 10 years of “creditable service” and declares him “re-employable.”

After Bauer’s arrest, the FBI told the AP that the letter in question was “not authentic” but declined to comment on the subsequent investigation. Federal authorities did not file charges against Bauer but were prepared to do so if he were released from custody, according to two former law enforcement officials who were not authorized to discuss the federal investigation and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Bauer’s arrest came amid a reckoning in which the FBI promised to crack down on sexual misconduct. An AP report previously found that there were repeated cases in which supervisors avoided disciplinary action and were forced into retirement despite receiving full pay, even after allegations of sexual misconduct against them were proven to be substantiated.

The case also shines a spotlight on the sloppy system of decertification in the U.S., in which problem officers stayed in the police force by joining a new agency or being transferred to another state. For years, federal agencies did not provide data on officers who were fired or disciplined to the National Decertification Index.

Alabama authorities either overlooked or were unaware of Bauer’s past misconduct. The AP’s investigation found that he concealed his firing from the FBI in his application to join the Alabama State Police. Among other things, he had been suspended without pay and had his security clearance revoked in 2018 after a series of allegations of sexual misconduct while working at the FBI’s New Orleans office. An internal investigation found that Bauer had at least violated FBI policy, including by having sex in an FBI vehicle.

Many of the allegations were reflected in Louisiana court documents that had been public for a year when Bauer was hired in Alabama. The woman who accused him of rape, a colleague of Bauer’s at the FBI, wrote in a request for a restraining order that Bauer choked her and made her “fear for her life.”

Bauer has denied these allegations and told colleagues that the acts were consensual. But the woman had previously told AP that Bauer sexually abused her so frequently that her hair fell out.

“It was a year of torture,” she said. “He literally kept me awake for days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, and in six months my weight went from 150 pounds to 92 pounds. I was physically dying from what he was doing to me.”

___

Mustian reported from Miami.

___ Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected] or https://www.ap.org/tips/

Kim Chandler and Jim Mustian, Associated Press