Woman attacked at KC massage business had to fight for her own justice: ‘There is a way’ | Opinion
Most people would have given up after being repeatedly told by cops and prosecutors that yes, they believed that she’d been assaulted, but no, nothing was ever going to come of her complaint about one of five such reported attacks at the same Westport massage place.
But because Kendra O’Sullivan, who persisted for more than four years anyway, is not most people, she finally got some satisfaction from the courts last month. After refusing a $25,000 settlement a year ago, she won $200,000 in a civil suit against Imperial Foot Care from a Jackson County jury on July 28.
I wrote about O’Sullivan two years ago, and couldn’t believe her grit even then. She kept investigating her own case, no matter how many times she heard that she was wasting her time, and she kept contacting officials, no matter how many times they told her they were sorry but couldn’t help.
Eventually, in 2021, Missouri did close down Imperial Foot, though O’Sullivan believes it may now have moved across the state line to Kansas, operating under a different name and at least nominally under different ownership. (More on that in a minute.)
The man O’Sullivan says attacked her, Xiang Jun Wang, was found guilty, even though the charge was, absurdly, handled only as an ordinance violation in municipal court and would have resulted in a $250 fine. It didn’t, though, because even that conviction was later overturned at a second bench trial, last December, by Judge Kea Bird-Riley.
“The defense realized that prosecutors were missing a piece of evidence, a 1099 proving he worked there on the day I was attacked,” O’Sullivan said. “I have it, but city prosecutors never submitted it, so he came and said, ‘I don’t know where I worked then.’ The detective said he did it, but the judge ruled not guilty.”
Xiang’s attorney, Kevin Jamison, who also represented Imperial Foot in the civil case, said, “It’s questionable whether she identified the right guy. He was emphatic it wasn’t him. Given the lighting, she wasn’t wearing her glasses, and that cross-racial identifications are notorious, it was a ‘he said, she said.’”
Even the civil settlement is less than a sure thing, since O’Sullivan will still have to pry it out of Imperial Foot or their insurance company. Jamison says there’s no money to win, since the corporation no longer exists.
But there is a lot more to this settlement than money, and even if she never sees any of it, she told me, winning after a three-day jury trial has allowed her to get on with her life, finally, in a way that she never could before.
“There’s an emptiness in my brain now,” where the need to make things right used to be, and “that feels so good.”
Jury: Attack was real, Imperial Foot Care responsible
To me, the at least psychic payoff for Kendra O’Sullivan’s persistence shows 1) the power of truth and tenacity, no matter what anybody says; 2) why we should never take ‘no’ for an answer when that’s the wrong answer; and 3) why we’re wrong to ever think that victims can “just move on” without ever seeing any semblance of justice.
“Everything that everyone told me would happen was wrong!” she told me.
In the end, out of sheer determination, said her Kansas City attorney, Dan Curry, “She made that trial happen. She was fighting this on her own for so long before she got legal help, and she pushed it to the end,” after most of us would have long since given up. And you bet they will fight to collect the settlement, he said.
“When you have a client pursuing justice” as she was, Curry said, “it’s really special, and she was able to hold the organization accountable, which is very hard to do. Having a jury of her peers say yes, this happened and Imperial Foot is responsible? That happened.”
And whatever happens now, that made all the difference in her life.
Kendra O’Sullivan, who is 30 now, was a successful young saleswoman, loving her life in Kansas City on May 8, 2019. But she had a migraine that day, and massage had always eased her headaches before, so she stopped at Imperial Foot Care.
That what happened to her then was handled by a court that deals mainly with traffic tickets is even more absurd if you know that, as she told me in 2021, she spent 70 terrifying, this-can’t-be-happening minutes having her nipples pinched, her underwear pulled down, her legs pulled apart and her skin rubbed so hard it hurt as she and her assailant fought over custody of the towel that was supposed to be covering her.
She managed to fend off her attacker’s attempt to penetrate her digitally, she said. But when he pulled her head back, hard, and put his entire body weight into pressing into her eye sockets with his thumbs, “Everything stopped. I told myself nothing is worth being blinded over.”
When she finally did get away, she said, he followed her to the front desk, where she was so panicked that she paid, tipped 20% and ran to her car.
The next day, when O’Sullivan reported what had happened to the Kansas City Police Department, even the desk sergeant told her the story sounded familiar. Because there had just recently been another, similar complaint against an employee at that same place.
In the end, I found a total of five KCPD incident reports that showed allegations of sexual assaults at Imperial Foot Care.
Jackson County prosecutors declined to pursue suspect
The owner, Lin Ling Feng, who lives in China, took her time getting back to a KCPD detective with the identity of the so-called therapist who’d seen O’Sullivan that day. But even the owner said he had been accused by another customer later the same month that O’Sullivan had reported him.
Xiang had been fired because of the complaints, the owner told police, and had left town for Houston in May. But was that even true?
It was at least in part because he’d supposedly moved to another state that Jackson County prosecutors twice declined to take the case, the second time after city prosecutors sent it back with a request that the state look at it again.
It was too serious for city court, Assistant City Prosecutor Annie Booton told O’Sullivan in an email. But again, the state said no. O’Sullivan said Jackson County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Jill Icenhower told her that they had gone around the room at a meeting and not a single person thought it was a case worth taking. “She said, ‘Kendra, you’re safe. He’s in Houston.’”
Mike Mansur, spokesman for Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, told me at the time that “because it involved someone already in Houston, they determined it was a misdemeanor.”
Not even, actually; it was a municipal ordinance violation filed in city court. O’Sullivan now believes that the suspect never left Kansas City, because he was not extradited, yet did show up for court, where he always maintained his innocence. “He did move,” said Jamison, his attorney, and “has moved several times since then.”
Because the suspect was a stranger to her, the case didn’t even go to the excellent, if insufficiently funded and wildly overburdened domestic violence city court that usually handles the nonsensical number of sex crimes that are dealt with as ordinance violations.
About a week after the attack, O’Sullivan lost her job (and with it, her health insurance) because “I cried at my desk. They said I isolated myself from others, wasn’t being a team player and was behaving defensively.”
Then she couldn’t pay her rent, lost the apartment she loved in Union Hill and wound up living in her car for several months before finally moving back to Minnesota, where she’s from, and getting treatment for her serious PTSD.
She opened her own business, as a headhunter, but mostly kept working on her case, driving back to Kansas City a total of 21 times, for every court date, even though these were sometimes canceled without any notice. She kept doing this even after Imperial Foot countersued for defamation, a suit that later was dropped.
Has business just moved to a new town in Kansas?
The owner of the business flew here from China for the civil case, “which everyone said they wouldn’t do,” O’Sullivan said. “Everyone has just gotten used to not getting justice. There is a way to get justice.”
It cost her plenty to pay for interpreters and filing fees and depositions and expert witnesses, “but I felt like I was going to spend more on therapy for not seeing it through, so it’s still worth every penny. It was never about the money. This is how you punish bad behavior. This isn’t, ‘Yay, payday for Kendra,’ it’s justice.”
How that feels is the real reward: “This is the first time in four years I can say people believed me that the harm is real and they should be punished. Now it’s not snowballing anymore” in her head.
She walks a lot, works out every day, spoils her four godchildren and 10 nieces and nephews, has a part-time job teaching newborns how to swim, and just recently started seeing someone, for the first time since that massage that wasn’t a massage in 2019.
“I get to have healing, and I’m really proud,” as she has every right to be. “My life was on the line, and I got my life back.”
She’s still keeping tabs on what she suspects may be a reconstituted Imperial Foot Care, though, in a Kansas town where the police chief told me they are just starting to look into the local massage place that might involve the same cast of characters. It initially raised suspicions not because of O’Sullivan, but because of its hours of operation. “Not even CVS stays open that late,” he told me.
Kevin Jamison says it’s not Imperial Foot by another name, because “Miss Feng told me” she had no other local businesses, though he also said that “some of the same massage people may be there.”
I’m not naming the town so as not to compromise that still preliminary investigation. But if I were running such a place and wondered whether both the cops and Kendra O’Sullivan were onto me, I would worry.
