The Victim Who Became the Accused

In some cases, women are accused of lying about rape if they are thought to be promiscuous—an assumption that overlooks how this reputation can contribute to a social context in which their protests may be ignored. In 2016, in Connecticut, an eighteen-year-old named Nikki Yovino had just started college when she reported that she’d been raped by two football players. She had met them at a party, and ten minutes later they all went into the bathroom and had sex. One of the men recorded a video of the encounter without her knowledge. Two months after she made her report, a pair of detectives came to her house and interviewed her alone in the basement using interrogation techniques designed to elicit confessions from criminal suspects. They lied to her, telling her they had other video footage from that night which didn’t actually exist. “I want you to really tell me the truth, because I have this on video,” a detective named Walberto Cotto said. “I saw what I saw.” He told her, “People don’t get this opportunity.”

“I know,” she said.

“We’re talking about people’s lives,” he said. “And we’re talking about yours as well.”

When she explained that she’d been scared in the bathroom, he told her, “Come on. I’m not—you can’t trick me.” He said, “In the bathroom, you pulled your pants down. You said yes.”

“Uh-huh,” she said quietly.

“And it’s not that far-fetched. It’s actually common.” He went on, “If you think you’re the only college girl that went with athletes . . . let’s nip what got out of control now.” He asked, “Were you forced to have sex?”

“No, but I would consider it—I would consider it peer-pressured into it.”

“So what? I mean, so what? I mean, come on. We’re eighteen years old.” He told her, “So let’s stop the peer-pressure nonsense, because they didn’t force you.”

“No, but I wasn’t comfortable with it—”

“There’s a big difference between being comfortable—” the other detective said.

“Being comfortable and being forced,” Cotto continued. “And if you want to say that you’re comfortable because you don’t want people to think you’re less than, you know, less than a wholesome girl or whatever.” He asked her, “You went in there to have sex?”

“Yes, that’s what I assumed at that point,” she responded.

“You’re the one who did it,” he said. “Not a third person. Not a person outside of you who is Nikki.”

She agreed, but said the situation was so upsetting that she cried when it was over.

“I’m going to tell you when you started crying,” he said, “because I know this for a fact.” The real reason she cried, he said, was that she thought a male friend would judge her for what she had done.

“No,” she said. “I was upset at the situation.”

“That you created?”

“What happened,” she said.

“That you created?”

“Yeah.”

“Upset over your embarrassment,” the other detective said.

She was charged with making a false report, a misdemeanor, and with “tampering with or fabricating physical evidence,” a felony—for requesting a rape exam that, the state said, she didn’t actually need. She pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor, and the prosecution agreed to drop the felony charge. Nevertheless, she was punished with half a year in prison and three years of probation. Her lawyer, Ryan O’Neill, told me, “When you’re a young lady who has made a report to a trusted authority figure and he didn’t believe you, why would you—regardless of your own feelings about guilt or innocence—face the risk of going in front of another group of strangers and ask them to believe you?” O’Neill sensed that law enforcement in Connecticut had wanted to send a message that women can’t get away with lying about rape, but he didn’t understand why Yovino’s case had become the vehicle. “It’s like, Is this really the best you can come up with?” he said. “A scenario where there is a genuine perception from both sides that may lead to opposite results?”

In June, 2021, Sharon Tovar, a white forty-seven-year-old home-health aide, called the sheriff’s office in Hancock County, about seventy miles from Put-in-Bay, and reported that she believed she had been the victim of a crime, thirteen years earlier. Tovar had been raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. “I was very naïve—the type of loner nerd who stayed at home writing poetry and sending letters to sick people in the congregation,” she told me. In 2008, a year after leaving the Jehovah’s Witnesses, she went to a networking event, at a bar and grill in Findlay called the Landing Pad, for people in the assisted-living industry. She had had one or two drinks when a man who she assumed was a bartender handed her one more. Suddenly, she felt more drunk than she’d ever been in her life. She didn’t know the man’s full name, but he guided her out of the bar and drove her to his office, which had a large bed in a finished basement where they quickly had sex. Then he returned her to the bar. She remembered little from the encounter except that when they had left the bar he had told her, “I want to hurry and get you back here before anyone notices you’re missing.” She said, “Those words kept ringing in my ears, and the more I repeated them the more I realized what happened was very calculated.”

A few months later, Tovar took her father to get his foot fitted for a prosthetic limb. When the prosthetist entered the exam room in a white lab coat, she said, she recognized his face: he was the man from the bar. It seemed to her that he was avoiding eye contact. “It was as though he were looking through me, like I didn’t exist,” she said. The prosthetist was Jeremy Berman.

At the time, Tovar, who was recently separated, was raising four children on her own. “I didn’t have time to sit around and dwell on something that I only remembered the half of,” she told me. As her children grew older, she became active on Facebook groups for former Jehovah’s Witnesses who were struggling with depression and with experiences of childhood sexual abuse. Through letters and petitions to lawmakers, she advocated for bills to extend the statute of limitations for reporting sexual assaults. In 2021, after years of encouraging other women to go to the police, Tovar decided that she should do so, too.

Tovar told her story to a Hancock County detective, but after a while she became anxious that she wasn’t hearing any updates about her complaint. As she waited for news, she searched online to see what had become of Berman. At that point, there had been only one article that mentioned Arica Waters, a brief summary of her indictment, seven months earlier, and Berman’s name was not included. But Tovar did find an article in the Sandusky Register noting that Berman had won “detective of the year.” The article also described the problem of unsolved roofie rapes in Put-in-Bay. “My mind was reeling,” she told me. “I was, like, What the hell? He’s a doctor during the week and a detective on roofie island on the weekends?” She called the editor of the paper, Matt Westerhold, to ask for more information. She said, “I wasn’t planning on telling him, but the next thing you know I was, like, ‘This is what he did to me.’ ”

Westerhold had always been curious about Berman’s arrangement with the Put-in-Bay police department. “I had never heard of such a thing,” he told me. “It didn’t sit well with me.” He wanted to read Tovar’s complaint, so he called Levorchick, the sheriff of Ottawa County, mistakenly thinking that the incident had happened there. Levorchick assumed that Westerhold was asking about Waters, and he explained that her rape complaint wasn’t credible and that she had been charged.

Westerhold called Tovar to share the news that she wasn’t the only woman who had complained about Berman’s sexual behavior. Tovar told me, “I don’t even know if a God really exists, but the fact that I came forward when they were about to try Arica Waters—and no one knew about it, because they had all kept it quiet—makes me think maybe there is.”

Several weeks later, a Hancock County sergeant named Jason Seem went to Berman’s prosthetics office to ask about Tovar’s complaint. “She thinks that you spiked one of her drinks and brought her back here and sexually assaulted her,” he said, according to a recording of their interview. (Tovar wasn’t sure that her drink was spiked, but she remarked that she didn’t understand how a few drinks had made her feel “that out of it.”)

Berman groaned softly. “Never happened,” he said.

Berman did confirm that he had a bedroom in his office basement and that he’d once co-owned the Landing Pad. But he didn’t know who Tovar was. “Doesn’t ring a bell at all,” he said. “I’ve never spiked anyone’s drink. I haven’t done anything of that sort.”

Berman told Seem, “There’s also ramifications for false allegations, too. I hope you’re looking at that.” He warned, “Moving forward, unfortunately, this is a serious felony accusation.”

After the meeting, Slattery, the private investigator, sent an e-mail to Seem proposing that Tovar and Waters were conspiring. The two women had been in California at roughly the same time—evidence, he said, that they may have been planning their allegations in concert. “They both seem to be professional victims that use and abuse people and strain the justice system with these false complaints,” Slattery wrote. The areas of California that the women had visited were more than three hundred miles apart, but Seem took the allegations seriously enough to request that the Hancock County prosecutor issue a subpoena for Tovar’s phone records. The subpoena was granted, but the records revealed no communication between the two women.

Not long afterward, Seem sent his assault report to the county prosecutor, who determined that Berman should not be charged, because of insufficient evidence, and Seem closed the case. When Tovar received a copy of her closed-case report, she saw a reference to a “second investigation from 2008” that had “some similarities to this one.” She called Westerhold and said that it appeared as if a third woman had accused Berman of sexual assault. Westerhold was skeptical. “It was almost like ‘I don’t want to know,’ ” he said. “This is a rabbit hole. It just goes deeper and deeper.”

Westerhold sometimes consults a woman named Tracy Thom, who is known in the area as a kind of volunteer victims’ advocate—she began the work after struggling to get a restraining order against an ex-boyfriend. Although Thom likes to refer to herself as a “dumb blonde with an iPad,” she is a rigorous investigator, who, having seen how hard it is to navigate the legal system alone, tries to help others in her free time. She read through Tovar’s records, concluded that there was indeed a third woman, uncovered the woman’s name and number, and then called her. They talked for more than an hour. Then she e-mailed Waters’s attorney to say that she had spoken with two other alleged victims of Berman. She wrote, “Their stories are similar and validate each other’s claims.”

The third woman, whom I’ll call Bridget, had gone to the police and got a rape exam in 2008, but several days later she decided that she did not want to “pursue this matter any further,” Levorchick, the sheriff, wrote. “She told me she believed that she had too much alcoholic beverage to drink on the date of the incident and that she believed that she could have been an active participant in the sexual behavior, although it is quite unlike her. Especially since she has had no sexual activity for over one year.” She asked Levorchick to tell her the results of her urine test, because she was concerned that a drug had been put in her drink, but it’s unclear if the test was ever completed. Seven months after Bridget’s report, the urine analyst called Levorchick to ask what he should do with her sample. The analyst wrote in his notes, “He told me not to proceed with analysis of evidence since she doesn’t want to prosecute.”

Bridget signed a form stating, “Of my own free will, and after careful consideration, [I] choose to no longer pursue the case.” But a statement that she had written by hand contradicted the description of her as an “active participant.” She wrote that she had been at a bar on an island near Put-in-Bay when she began talking with Berman, who offered her a job and then invited her to his condominium on the mainland, where he gave her a drink. “The next thing she remembers is ‘coming to’ while in the hot tub,” Levorchick’s report said. She was naked. A friend of Berman’s was having sex with her, and Berman was touching her sexually. “I broke down I began to cry really hard I was telling Jeremy that this is not me,” she wrote. “I would never do this.”

Berman declined to be interviewed, though he did say that all three allegations are false. Bridget also chose not to speak with me, saying that the idea caused her distress. James VanEerten, Ottawa County’s prosecutor, said that he recently discussed the case with Bridget and that she did not want it reëxamined. He said, “She told me, ‘I was sexually assaulted. I know I was sexually assaulted. But I made a conscious decision not to pursue the case. I still stand by that.’ ” VanEerten was made uneasy, however, by evidence suggesting that the sheriff’s department had mishandled her allegation, and, after he asked the court to consider appointing a special prosecutor, an investigation was launched into possible irregularities in her case. (Levorchick denies that Berman received special treatment.)

Tovar created a petition on Change.org to demand that Yost, Ohio’s attorney general, stand on the “right side of sexual assault.” She wrote, “Three women who do NOT know each other, who live in different cities, who have never talked to each other, but all 3 women have accused the same man.” She posted a glamorous photograph of herself—she was wearing makeup and her hair was windswept—next to Waters’s mug shot. “I had a big old grin on my face,” she said. “And Arica Waters had a forlorn look and she was in an orange jumpsuit.” Tovar didn’t think that her case had been handled well, but, “when I saw the two pictures, it really hit me—this is how a white woman is treated, and this is how a Black woman is treated,” she said.