Don Haidl was Assistant Sheriff in Orange County when his son and two friends gang-raped an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl. The rape was videotaped by them. It was incredibly vicious. She went to the police and Don Haidl used his position as Assistant Sheriff to shame and attack the victim in the press.
Even the titles of some stories need a trigger warning
Everybody expected that Assistant Sheriff Don Haidl—a chain smoker with a cocktail near-permanently attached to his hand and a scowl on his emaciated face—would do everything he could to keep his son out of prison following the arrests. But few people could’ve anticipated the extent to which Haidl’s legal defense team—totaling more than a dozen defense lawyers, including a former state Supreme Court justice, a retired FBI agent and, get this, a publicist—would go. Private investigators aggressively tailed and photographed Doe and her parents for years. A poster was circulated in Doe’s neighborhood soliciting dirt on her. Her medical records were illegally released to reporters. She was repeatedly called a “slut,” and her female friends were privately convinced to alter their stories to match the defense’s case. Haidl brought in a veteran Los Angeles porno star to testify that Doe was faking unconsciousness in the video while playing the role of a corpse. Not satisfied, he also paid a New York doctor to claim with all seriousness that Doe didn’t need to give oral consent to the gangbang because her rectum had done so when it accepted the insertion of foreign objects. The defense team even got CBS show 48 Hours to broadcast a fact-ignoring feature sympathetic to their clients.
OC Weekly: Meet Jane Doe
- HipHopWired: Three Men Who Raped Girl with Pool Cue, Lit Cigarette Lose Appeal to Have Case Overturned
- OC Weekly: Raped Again?
- OC Weekly: Meet Jane Doe
- LA Times: In Rape Cases, Who’s on Trial
06 July 2004
