NC woman sues sheriff, deputies who didn’t believe sexual assault claim and charged her

In 2020 while she was still a college student, Dyanie Bermeo of Mint Hill said she was sexually assaulted during a traffic stop in rural Virginia, then arrested and shamed by the law enforcement agency she turned to for help. She was twice tried in the courts for the crime of false claiming before eventually being cleared.

When The Charlotte Observer wrote of Bermeo’s experiences in 2021, her attorney singled out the Washington County Sheriff’s Office for its handling of her client’s case.

READ MORE: She dreamed of being a cop. Then a blue light flashed in her mirror.

“They arrested her, publicly humiliated her on Facebook, and then dragged her through two criminal trials. They failed to investigate her sexual assault, coerced her to recant, and then spent the next year trying to put her in jail,” attorney Melissa Hordichuk of Charlotte told the Observer at the time.

“They get to be accountable for all of it.”

Now they could be.

In a new lawsuit filed in the federal courts of Western North Carolina, Bermeo accuses Washington County Sheriff Blake Andis and four of his detectives of multiple federal and state claims. They include fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress as well as constitutional violations of Bermeo’s civil rights, her right to equal protection, malicious prosecution, among a dozen allegations in all.

The 36-page complaint, which also names sheriff’s investigators Scott Snapp, Jamie Blevins, Scott Adkins and Brad Roop, alleges that the officers’ missteps upended Bermeo’s life.

“This experience fundamentally changed Plaintiff’s view of the criminal justice system and has completely derailed the trajectory of Plaintiff’s career in law enforcement,” the lawsuit states. “In one fell swoop, Defendants destroyed Plaintiff’s bright future, caused her immense mental and emotional trauma, and robbed Plaintiff of her lifelong dream of being a police officer.”

Andis declined comment Friday, saying he had not seen a copy of the lawsuit. During a brief phone interview last year, the sheriff stood by his office’s investigation while offering to reopen the probe if Bermeo so desired.

“We had a strong case, confession and all,” Andis told the Observer. “The officers involved did the best they could.”

But experts who testified for Bermeo at her second trial said Andis’ office failed to adequately investigate her claims before pivoting on very little evidence to the belief that she had made it all up. The detectives then lied to Bermeo about what their investigation had found to pressure her into recanting, the lawsuit claims.

In a statement to the Observer on Thursday night, Hordichuk said a public airing of her client’s ordeal is important and overdue.

“After two long years, Dyanie will finally have the opportunity to hold these officers accountable for violating her constitutional rights,” said Hordichuk, executive director and managing attorney of the Access to Justice Project in Charlotte.

“If we allow law enforcement officers to arbitrarily arrest sexual assault victims who don’t fit their paradigm of what a ‘genuine victim’ looks and sounds like, we are sending a chilling message to survivors and effectively incentivizing perpetrators to continue committing acts of sexual violence.”

Bermeo, who now works for a Charlotte law firm, did not respond to an Observer request for comment.

A guilty verdict then an appeal

Every year, more than 460,000 Americans are sexually assaulted. Experts say many victims never step forward, partly out of fear of not being believed.

How often false reporting actually occurs remains a source of debate, with estimates ranging from 2-3% of all sexual assault cases to as high as 10%. Many experts say the latter figure is inflated by a number of factors, including the practice by some police departments to classify cases they do not solve as false claims.

Bermeo said her assault occurred in rural Abingdon, Va., on the night of Sept. 29, 2020, as she was driving from her family home in Mint Hill to King University in Bristol, Tenn., where she was a junior majoring in criminal justice. She said her attacker posed as a police officer.

At the urging of a close college friend and her criminal justice professor, Bermeo reported the incident to the sheriff’s office the next day. Some two weeks later, Adkins charged her with filing a false report.

Her arrest came two days after a campus interrogation in which Bermeo appeared to acknowledge to Adkins and Roop that she had fabricated her assault. Bermeo said the attack did occur, and that she only told the detectives otherwise because they promised to quietly close the case and let her get on with her life.

On Oct. 16, 2020, the sheriff’s office posted a photograph and details about Bermeo’s arrest on its Facebook page. That led to subsequent stories in the Observer and other news outlets, along with a torrent of social media invective directed at the student.

Bermeo said she was threatened with expulsion by her school, ostracized by longtime friends, and later left the campus to complete her studies from home.

In April 2021, she was convicted at her first trial by a Washington County judge, then found not guilty four months later by a higher Virginia court that heard her appeal.

Bermeo’s lawsuit alleges that as a Latina attending college in an overwhelmingly white area, she was singled out.

On June 28, 2021, the sheriff’s office made a second false claiming arrest. This time, it involved a local white woman, identified in the complaint as Jane Doe, who also claimed she had been assaulted during a traffic stop. She was later found guilty at her trial and given a suspended 30-day jail sentence.

There was one big difference, according to Bermeo’s lawsuit. At no point did Andis’ office say anything about the woman’s arrest or prosecution on Facebook.

“Dyanie is unfortunately not the only woman who has been arrested and prosecuted for ‘false reporting’ a sexual assault in Washington County,” Hordichuk said in her statement.

“Dyanie is, however, the only victim who was publicly humiliated and defamed on social media by these officers.”