ST. LOUIS – Insurance companies have agreed to pay $560,000 to settle part of a lawsuit filed by a mentally incapacitated woman who claimed she’d been raped by a Gasconade County law enforcement officer.
Civil suits say Marty Rainey, who was a county deputy sheriff and a police officer in Rosebud and Hermann, Mo., groped the woman and raped her and forced her to have sex with his friend, Jonathan Pohlmann.
The suits say the departments failed to properly supervise Rainey, as they knew or should have known that he “regularly and persistently pursued inappropriate contact and relationships with women whom he met thought his duties.”
An insurance company representing Rosebud agreed to pay $60,000 without admitting liability in the case, according to the agreement. Lawyer D. Keith Henson released that settlement within days of the newspaper’s request.
Gasconade County and lawyer Ivan Schraeder initially refused to release any settlement documents or even reveal the amount of the settlement. But they relented after a Post-Dispatch reporter informed them that Missouri’s Sunshine Law required them to provide the settlement amount if paid for by or on behalf of the county.
Schraeder said Thursday that an insurance company for the county agreed to pay $300,000. But plaintiffs lawyers Daniel Orlowsky and Adam M. Goffstein said the insurance companies actually paid $500,000 on behalf of the county. They declined any other comment on the county.
Schraeder stressed that no county money was being used for the settlement. He said that the county and county officials denied the claims in the suit and were not admitting liability.
Rainey hanged himself March 25, 2016, in the Ste. Genevieve County jail while awaiting trial on federal and state charges related to a series of allegations by prosecutors that he’d threatened or coerced six women into having sex with him, a friend, or both, sometimes while in uniform. Other women said Rainey tried or succeeded to get them to strip so he could photograph their genitals.
Pohlmann is currently serving a 10-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to violate civil rights and a seven-year state sentence for sexual assault.
The suit says Rainey met the 25-year-old disabled woman while on duty as a deputy sheriff investigating a complaint made by the woman’s mother. He began sending her text messages that quickly turned sexual — 1,670 in total, the suit claims. He told the woman that if she did not give him nude pictures her mother would be in trouble, then groped her while in uniform and in his marked cruiser, the suit says.
The lawsuit is still pending against Hermann police, and was amended this month to say that police there retaliated against the disabled woman for years after she complained about Rainey in October 2012.
Hermann Police Chief Marlon Walker denied those claims in a brief phone interview last week.