A former C.I.A. officer who drugged, sexually assaulted and photographed more than two dozen women while he served in various posts around the world was sentenced on Wednesday to 30 years in prison, federal prosecutors said.
The former officer, Brian Jeffrey Raymond, 48, of La Mesa, Calif., pleaded guilty in November in a U.S. District Court in Washington to four of the 25 criminal charges that he had faced: one count each of sexual abuse, abusive sexual contact, coercion and enticement and transportation of obscene material, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a statement on Wednesday. His sentence was the maximum requested by prosecutors.
“When this predator was a government employee, he lured unsuspecting women to his government-leased housing and drugged them,” Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. attorney, said. “After drugging these women, he stripped, sexually abused and photographed them.”
The assaults occurred from 2006 to 2020 in multiple countries where he had been working for the U.S. government, prosecutors said.
Mr. Raymond “drugged and then photographed or video-recorded 25 victims while they were nude or partially nude,” prosecutors said.
Many of the recordings featured Mr. Raymond “touching and manipulating the victim’s bodies” when they were unconscious and incapable of consent, prosecutors added.
Mr. Raymond then “attempted to delete the explicit photographs and videos depicting the victims after learning about the criminal investigation,” according to prosecutors.
They said that Mr. Raymond’s most recent assaults took place in 2019 and 2020 in Mexico City, where he was living while on assignment at the American Embassy.
While in Mexico, he raped six different women, and each assault followed the same pattern, prosecutors said in court documents.
Mr. Raymond met his victims through dating apps, engaged with them in Spanish and presented himself as a “high-level embassy employee in whom the government had reposed special trust,” according to charging documents.
In May 2020, the F.B.I. and the State Department began an investigation into Mr. Raymond after the authorities in Mexico responded to a report of “a naked, hysterical woman desperately screaming for help” from the balcony at Mr. Raymond’s Mexico City apartment, according to prosecutors.
During his sentencing on Wednesday, some of Mr. Raymond’s victims shared their stories, according to The Associated Press.
“My body looks like a corpse on his bed,” one victim said of a photo of herself. “Now I have these nightmares of seeing myself dead.”
At the hearing, Mr. Raymond told Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court that he had reflected on his “downward spiral,” according to The A.P.
“It betrayed everything I stand for, and I know no apology will ever be enough,” he said. “There are no words to describe how sorry I am. That’s not who I am, and yet it’s who I became.”
A lawyer for Mr. Raymond did not immediately respond to inquiries on Thursday.
In a statement after Mr. Raymond’s sentencing, the C.I.A. said that it “condemns in the strongest terms the crimes” he committed.
“We take any allegations of sexual assault or sexual harassment extremely seriously and have taken significant steps to ensure we maintain a safe, inclusive and respectful environment for our work force,” the agency said. “There is absolutely no excuse for Mr. Raymond’s reprehensible, appalling behavior.”
In addition to the prison sentence she imposed on Wednesday, Judge Kollar-Kotelly also ordered that, once released, Mr. Raymond be on supervised release for the rest of his life and pay $260,000 in restitution to the victims.
He will also be required to register as a sex offender.
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