Campaign ad about sexual assault kits leads NC attorney general employee to quit

A campaign ad run by Attorney General Josh Stein upset one of Stein’s employees to the point that he resigned.

The television commercial accuses Stein’s Republican opponent, Forsyth County District Attorney Jim O’Neill, of allowing rapists to go free.

The commercial opens with a woman named Juliette praising Stein for his work to get sexual assault kits tested and rapists convicted.

William “Bill” Hart Sr. doesn’t take issue with that part of the ad. It was what followed that led him to resign.

“As a survivor of sexual assault that means a lot to me,” the woman said, “and when I learned that Jim O’Neill left 1,500 rape kits on a shelf, leaving rapists on the streets, I had to speak out.

“Jim O’Neill can not be our attorney general.”

Until Oct. 5, Hart worked part-time for Stein as the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative site coordinator for the N.C. Crime Lab. The position is funded by the federal government to allow North Carolina, and the rest of the country, to test rape kits.

The U.S. Department of Justice created in 2015 the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative to ensure that those kits were being tested. After Stein, a Democrat, took office in 2017, he proposed and the General Assembly passed a law that required all law enforcement agencies to report how many sexual assault kits they had that were untested.

In 2018, Stein received a $2 million federal grant to test and track those kits.

Hart said Stein’s commercial about the rape kits first caught his attention on Sept. 29.

Hart said he immediately took the next few days off of work, telling his boss that he was thinking about resigning but wanting to make an informed decision that was not based on emotion.

He watched the commercial again.

“What she said about Josh is true,” Hart said. “He has been working hard with a lot of other people to get these kits off the shelves and get them tested but it wouldn’t have happened, I don’t think, if we didn’t have the feds getting involved and providing grant money for people to work on this project.”

But Hart said he was bothered by the ad’s last statement because he felt that it not only wrongfully attacked O’Neill but every other district attorney in the state.

“Neither Jim O’Neill nor any other DA in the state have anything to do with sending sexual assault kits for testing,” Hart said. “It’s law enforcement that sends them. Not the DAs.”

Who is at fault?

Hart spent seven years as a prosecutor for the Wake County District Attorney’s office where he focused on sexual assault and rape cases. He also worked 27 years for the state Department of Justice, the last eight as the head of the criminal division, before retiring.

He also worked as director of management services for the Wake County Sheriff’s Office.

Hart said his son, William Hart Jr., first held the site coordinator position under Stein but ended up on active duty with the Army JAG Corps. Hart was asked to step in for his son in January 2019. He said he wants to make it clear that the feelings he has about the commercial are his own and not reflective of what his son thinks.

Hart made $45 an hour in a contract job that was expected to go on for another year.

Hart said while district attorneys should not be blamed for the rape kit backlog, neither should law enforcement. The process of getting the kits tested is complex, he said.

In the 1970s and ‘80s, when he was a prosecutor, there wasn’t DNA technology. After technology became available, there wasn’t immediately a database to match DNA with other samples. So Hart said testing only made sense when there was a known suspect.

Hart said some of the untested sexual assault kits date back as far as the 1980s. Earlier this year, Stein celebrated with the Winston-Salem Police Department an arrest in a 29-year-old rape case.

“There were limited resources,” Hart said. “The lab only had so many people that could do testing and there were limited funds to do testing.”

Resignation

Hart said when he saw the commercial he immediately called O’Neill to tell him that neither he nor the people who worked with him in the lab were involved in its creation.

“I’ve had a good relationship with the elected DAs and assistant DAs and law enforcement agencies for over 40 years,” Hart said. “I was sort of out there sticking my name and my relationship with them as I was asking them to work with us on locating and tracking all of these kits.”

What’s more, Hart said, the 2017 numbers the commercial refers to were a rough estimate. He said the Winston-Salem Police Department and the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office didn’t even give their final count of kits until July, and that to him means O’Neill wouldn’t even have had full knowledge of what was in their inventory.

Adding to his frustration, Hart read in The News & Observer a statement by the Conference of District Attorneys saying that prosecutors have nothing to do with and are not in possession of untested rape kits.

Hart said he was dismayed that the commercials didn’t stop after that.

“I told my wife that’s it, they’re still running it, I’m done,” Hart said. “If Jim O’Neill left kits on the shelves, then every DA left kits on the shelves, and law enforcement left kits on the shelf, and it just creates a false impression.”

Hart provided his resignation letter to The News & Observer.

In response to questions about the resignation, Stein’s campaign provided a statement to The News & Observer saying: “We know that North Carolinians want an Attorney General like Josh Stein who addresses problems head on, not one like Jim O’Neill – who blames others for his lack of action.

“Josh Stein organized a statewide count to determine the scope of the problem, raised grant money to begin testing kits, went to the legislature to get additional funds to eliminate the backlog, and rapists around the state have been arrested as a result. All while Jim O’Neill did nothing but blame others for the 1,500 untested kits sitting on shelves in the county he was elected to protect.”

15,000 untested rape kits

Stein’s campaign staff said the commercial is no longer on the air and was phased out in the normal course of the campaign cycle, though O’Neill said someone he knows saw it Monday.

An attorney representing O’Neill sent Juliette, the woman in the ad, a cease-and-desist letter saying that her statements were “demonstrably false and constitutes legally actionable defamation.”

The letter includes references to the state’s law on the chain of custody of rape kits that does not include the district attorney, though the law does allow for his office to be part of the vetting process of what kits get tested when.

“The Forsyth County District Attorney’s Office has never been the ‘custodial agency’ of 1500 rape kits,” the letter states. “There is no shelf at the Forsyth County District Attorney’s office or anywhere else in which Mr. O’Neill has ever had control where 1500 kits were located.”

Stein’s own attorneys responded with their “disappointment” that O’Neill’s attorneys reached out to the survivor instead of the committee to take down the commercial and said they were trying to “intimidate her.”

Stein’s attorneys said that when O’Neill announced his campaign against Stein he tweeted that he would “focus on clearing the decades-old backlog of untested rape kits…” and that on Sept. 4 he said one of the reasons he filed to run against Stein was that “prosecutors across the state” have been asking Stein to focus on rape kits and clearing the backlog.

The return letter said that because O’Neill recognized in his attorney’s letter that the backlog was due to law enforcement, he must realize Stein is no more at fault than himself for the backlog. The return letter also says that Stein recognizes that it takes leadership to fix the problem.

In the letter, Stein’s attorneys say O’Neill didn’t secure grant funding or encourage law enforcement to review and process the backlog.

The two letters were provided to The News & Observer by Stein’s campaign.

Stein said in an interview Thursday that he looked into the backlog when he became attorney general and learned there was no count of how many kits were untested around the state.

Stein said he was dismayed to find out in 2017 after the new law led to more reporting that there were more than 15,000 untested kits.

“This is a woman’s most intimate violation, and that’s followed by this invasive test, and they didn’t do anything with it,” Stein asked.

Stein worked with the General Assembly to create the Survivor Act ordering that all sexual assault kits collected after July 1, 2019, be tested. Anything before that date is required to be tested, too, unless there is clear evidence that the allegation is unfounded, the victim decides not to move forward with prosecution or the case already ended with a conviction, the suspect’s DNA is already in the state’s database and the suspect does not request a DNA test.

This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 3:59 PM with the headline "Campaign ad about sexual assault kits leads NC attorney general employee to quit."