US jury acquits woman in stabbing of alleged stalker who sent revenge porn to her children

A San Francisco jury acquitted a woman of felony assault charges in the stabbing of a man she said stalked her and sent revenge porn to her children, the public defender’s office announced Monday.

Public defenders accused the San Francisco Police Department of failing to “meaningfully investigate” the woman’s claims of self-defence and said she had been “wrongly criminalised”. They identified her as Maria, but declined to provide a full name, citing her status as a stalking victim.

Police arrested Maria in October 2021, after she was accused of stabbing the man she had briefly dated three years earlier. The man threatened Maria to get her to accompany him to his apartment, where, according to public defenders, he hit and grabbed her from behind. Believing the man was going to rape her, Maria grabbed a kitchen knife and sliced his arm, the public defender’s office said.

The incident followed years of alleged harassment in which the man recorded a sexual encounter without Maria’s consent, created a fake Facebook account to send a video of the encounter to her teenage children and showed up at her workplace “on a daily basis,” Valerie Ibarra, a spokesperson for the public defender’s office, said in a statement announcing the acquittal.

In court, Maria’s teenaged children testified that they received the sexually explicit video from the man, whom they had never met, according to the public defender’s office. Co-workers testified that the man regularly followed her to and from work.

Jurors also reviewed body-worn camera footage and transcripts from two San Francisco police officers who acted as certified Spanish interpreters at the scene of the stabbing. According to the public defender’s office, Maria “made multiple attempts to explain the ongoing harassment, but the officers either left out key details from their reports or failed to translate everything she was saying”.

Police did not investigate Maria’s claims that she acted in self-defence and failed to contact witnesses to corroborate her account, said Deputy Public Defender Will Helvestine.

“This egregious prosecution holds up an ugly mirror to the criminal justice system,” Helvestine said in a statement Monday. “It shows how police can refuse to meaningfully investigate certain leads, how prosecutors pursue cases based on half-truths in police reports, and how people who are clearly victims can end up being wrongly criminalised.”

Representatives from the Police Department and San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins’ office did not immediately reply to requests for comment Monday. – San Francisco Chronicle/Tribune News Service