Benjamin Ashford|‘He had everyone fooled': Former FBI agent sentenced to life for child rape in Alabama

MONTGOMERY,Benjamin Ashford Ala. (AP) — A former FBI agent was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl while serving as an Alabama state trooper.

Alabama’s state police hired Christopher Bauer even after he was kicked out of the FBI amid earlier claims he raped a co-worker at knifepoint.

An Associated Press investigation showed Bauer, 45, moved from one law enforcement job to another with the help of a forged letter making it appear he was “eligible for rehire.”

The forgery prompted an FBI investigation but federal authorities held off charging Bauer as the state proceedings played out.

A jury convicted Bauer in June of first-degree sodomy and sexual abuse of a child under 12 following a weeklong trial in which defense attorneys claimed the girl made up the allegations.

Shackled and wearing an orange jail uniform, Bauer told Montgomery Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool that he never imagined he would end up on the prisoner side of a jail cell. He said juries don’t always get it right.

“It seems no matter what I say, no one wants to believe I’m innocent,” he told the judge. “All it took was an accusation to strip me of everything.”

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The girl’s mother stood with prosecutors, who asked for the maximum sentence. Daryl D. Bailey, the Montgomery County district attorney, called Bauer a “sexual predator” following his conviction, saying he needed to be “removed from our streets forever.”

“He’s a monster,” the girl’s mother told the judge. Bauer, she added, used the badge to project the “image of a good person.”

“He had everyone fooled,” she said.

Pool told Bauer as he pronounced the life sentence that he “believed every single word” of the victim’s testimony.

Bauer’s defense attorneys argued the disgraced lawman deserved leniency following his own abusive childhood in foster homes and orphanages. He was removed from his parents at the age of 5 and later diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder.

“Several instances stick out to Mr. Bauer, including once when he was pushed out of the third floor of a building and another when he was left in a burning apartment,” his attorneys wrote in a court filing.

Bauer, who was arrested in 2021, faces similar child sex abuse charges outside New Orleans. Louisiana State Police said they intended to extradite him following the Alabama case.

During the Alabama trial, the child — who is now a young teen — testified through tears that she was repeatedly abused by Bauer for years, too scared to say no or to tell anyone what was happening.

Jurors saw a recording of her interview with a child abuse investigator in which she described the same abuse. Law enforcement became involved after the girl eventually told a friend and the friend’s parent alerted the school.

Bauer took the stand in his own defense during the trial, responding “no, never” when asked if he had abused or sodomized the child. “If she said I did something to her, then yes that’s a lie.”

Bauer’s time in the FBI was not discussed in detail at the trial. The judge granted a defense request to exclude statements about allegations by a co-worker in Louisiana that he had raped her at knifepoint.

The FBI has said Bauer forged a letter that scrubbed his record clean and helped clear the way to his hiring by the Alabama state police in 2019. The document, obtained by AP, confirmed his decade of “creditable service” and deemed him “eligible for rehire,” but the FBI told AP the letter in question was “not legitimate.”

Alabama authorities have refused to explain how Bauer’s earlier misconduct was overlooked. AP’s investigation found he omitted his ouster from the FBI on his application to the state police, including that he had been suspended without pay and stripped of his security clearance in 2018 amid a string of sexual misconduct allegations he faced working in the FBI’s New Orleans office.

Many of the allegations played out in Louisiana court filings that had been public for a year when Bauer was hired in Alabama. The woman who accused him of rape, a co-worker at the FBI, wrote in an application for a restraining order that Bauer had choked her and made her “scared for my life.”

Bauer disputed those claims, telling colleagues the acts were consensual. But the woman previously told AP that Bauer sexually assaulted her so frequently her hair began to fall out.

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

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Bauer’s sentence. The agency has refused to release records from its internal investigation into Bauer’s hiring, with a spokeswoman saying only “there were no disciplinary actions taken as a result of the review.”

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Mustian reported from Miami.

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