When a prosecutor began chasing an accused sexual predator, she lost her job but unravelled a scandal. A report from Johnson City, Tennessee. Plus:

How Police Let One of America’s Most Prolific Predators Get Away

Ronan Farrow
Farrow is an investigative reporter and a contributing writer at The New Yorker.

In July, 2021, I received a message from an encrypted e-mail account. Using a pseudonym, the writer told me that she was a federal prosecutor desperate to apprehend a serial predator and was encountering obstruction. “There is a possibility that this person is being protected by local law enforcement,” she wrote. “All I want is some accountability.”

In the following four years, I interviewed more than fifty sources and scrutinized hundreds of pages of legal documents tied to the case, as a growing number of lawsuits and investigations suggested that one of the most prolific rapists in American history may have operated unchecked for years due to police corruption.

The anonymous prosecutor who e-mailed me was Kat Dahl. She had been assigned to work with the police in Johnson City, Tennessee, and had been stationed there for just over a year when she learned of a local businessman named Sean Williams. A woman had recently fallen from his window, winding up in a coma. While searching his apartment, police had found a handwritten list: twenty-two names, one accompanied by the word “baby.” At the top was an underlined word: “Raped.”

Dahl became fixated, staying up late researching Williams and driving to locations linked to him. But she faced resistance. Johnson City police seemed reluctant to share materials. They failed to search devices they’d recovered. They appeared uninterested in pursuing interviews with accusers. When Dahl began seeking out victims, she faced complaints about her job performance.

Thwarted in her efforts to pursue the rape allegations, Dahl eventually secured an indictment against Williams on a more minor charge. But, even then, he evaded capture an improbable number of times, ultimately remaining at large for more than two years. Investigators would eventually find in Williams’s possession thousands of videos and images that, prosecutors say, depict sex crimes against some sixty-seven victims, many of whom were drugged and unconscious, including multiple minors. Williams has denied giving women date-rape drugs, and says that any encounters with his accusers were consensual.

Speaking to me from jail, Williams made a surprising claim: that his criminal activity had been made possible because, for years, he had been paying off Johnson City police officers through an associate. He also accused police of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from his safe. A lawsuit brought by his accusers has forced officers to disclose financial records that, the plaintiffs say, document the payoffs. Police have denied the existence of any scheme to protect Williams, but recently agreed to a twenty-eight million dollar settlement with victims of sexual violence.

Key elements of Williams’s account of the scheme remain impossible to prove, and more conclusive investigations may prove elusive. The Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section, which is responsible for investigating police corruption, is being reduced by the Trump Administration to just a handful of employees.

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