No trial set 17 months after Golubski arrest: ‘It’s like they’re playing games with us’ | Opinion

Month after month, Ophelia Williams shows up in a Topeka courtroom hoping that a trial date might finally be set in the federal case against former Kansas City, Kansas, police detective Roger Golubski, who stands accused of raping her for years after he initially arrived at her home to arrest her 14-year-old twins.

Last week, she came in on a walker, having broken several bones when her car slid on black ice as she was driving her grandchildren to school. But once again, she might as well have stayed in Kansas City.

Because 17 months after 71-year-old Golubski’s arrest by the FBI, prosecution promises of a spring trial date have not only come to nothing but leave me wondering the obvious: Spring of what year? At this rate, Donald Trump’s courtroom appearances will be in the history books by the time we hear opening statements.

U.S. District Judge Toby Crouse blew right past Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Hunting’s request that a trial date be set now, instead of waiting until after a July evidentiary hearing to only then start looking for a free month or six weeks on Crouse’s calendar.

“I’d prefer to wait,” Crouse said, turning a baseball over in his palm, as he did through much of the hearing.

I’ve seen him do that before, but for Williams and other victims who feel that they are still not being taken seriously, this “hey, it’s pitchers and catchers day” visual was a painful one. And for those victims who fear that Golubski, who is in renal failure, will die before the case ever gets to court, the overall lack of urgency is even more agonizing.

So you’ll bump any other cases for this one once we get to July, Hunting asked.

No, the judge said, “we’ll handle them in order.”

Blocking off a month or more for trial, and seating a jury for it, is going to be especially challenging because Golubski’s attorney, Chris Joseph, now says that since his client is hooked up to a dialysis machine for six hours three days a week, the trial can take place only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

“This is catching me flat,” the judge said.

Some other defense attorneys, Joseph said magnanimously, might be more hard-line about asking that Golubski also get two days off in between every dialysis treatment to let the “brain fog” clear. If that happened, of course, the defendant would not have time enough left over either for treatment or to be in court.

There’s nothing in the record to suggest that prosecutors have made any formal request to get an independent review of the defendant’s medical condition almost 18 months after his arrest, either to confirm the need for an altered trial schedule or to assess how quickly his condition is deteriorating. Instead, they seem to be taking Joseph’s word on how he’s holding up.

Defense: Victims smell money

Prosecutors did not answer my emails asking whether that’s the case, but they did answer William Skepnek, the civil attorney for Ophelia Williams and other women accusing Golubski of abuse, in an email on the same subject.

“Given our repeated and lengthy conversations with defense counsel,” federal prosecutor Tara Allison wrote Skepnek, “we haven’t had the need thus far to resort to subpoenas in order to obtain the information we need on this issue” of Golubski’s condition. Trust but don’t bother to verify?

Allison is not some rookie, but was part of the team that successfully prosecuted three former Minnesota police officers on civil rights charges in the death of George Floyd. So the relaxed approach here makes even less sense. Is that, victims wonder, because the law enforcement community is ambivalent about not only prosecuting one of its own but potentially implicating others?

According to Joseph, Golubski’s attorney, the women the former detective has been charged with raping and otherwise abusing only began making these allegations because they smelled money.

In the narrative laid out in a recent pleading by Joseph, Wyandotte County women only started telling tales about him after Lamonte McIntyre, who because of Golubski’s coercion served 23 years in prison for a double murder he did not commit, was well on his way to being exonerated in 2017.

McIntyre and his mother Rosie, who alleged that Golubski sexually assaulted her and later targeted her son out of spite because she resisted, received a civil settlement of $12.5 million settlement from the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas in 2022.

Page out of Harvey Weinstein playbook

The defense portrait of Golubski’s victims as money-mad liars is perfectly standard.

But it ignores the panic of the women I’ve interviewed who came forward about Golubski despite believing that they were putting their lives at risk by doing so. They did not even see taking that risk as a very good bet, because of their deep doubts that he would ever be held to account no matter how many women came forward.

If their tears, hyperventilating and regular late-night terrors were manufactured, then move over, Viola Davis, is all I can say.

This narrative also ignores the fact that they did not only start speaking about Golubski privately after the McIntyre case made him infamous.

“There is no substantiated evidence that any of the accusers ever made these claims until after Lamonte McIntyre’s cases were the subject of rumors, rallies, and news headlines,” Joseph wrote.

Only, women in Kansas City, Kansas, have been sharing horror stories about him with loved ones for decades. Others, who did not survive to complain in court, were also known by their families to have been under his control for many years.

If accusations about the former detective were crafted only for cha-ching, then how canny of them to put family and friends onto him decades ago. That’s some 20/20 foresight.

As in the two trials of former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, the government wants to present evidence of “prior bad acts” to show a pattern of behavior. In this case, the prosecution wants to show that between 1975 and 2010, Golubski routinely used his KCKPD badge to prey on powerless Black women already even more vulnerable because of an addiction or arrest or family member in legal trouble.

The two women Golubski is charged with violating and the seven others prepared to back them up by telling their own stories under oath on the witness stand are “simply smearing Golubski’s character,” Joseph wrote.

“The government thinks a jury will more readily believe” the allegations “if they are presented among a chorus of voices accusing Golubski of sexual crimes and misconduct. But the voices joining the chorus suffer from similar credibility problems.”

Weinstein’s lawyers said almost exactly the same thing during his 2022 trial in Los Angeles.

Golubski’s victims were targeted in the first place, they have always said, because they were unlikely to ever be believed over a police detective.

Documents from McIntyre case irrelevant

It also came out in court in Topeka last week that there has been no progress, either, in getting the documents in the McIntyre civil case redacted for the defense team. That has been delaying the case for many months.

And now, Joseph said in court, that they have “found” 100,000 extra pages of documents. So “it’s very unclear who pays,” he said after the hearing. Who pays, in other words, for those redactions on top of the others, which also still have not been done.

At every month’s status hearing, it’s like this case just fell out of the sky, to the surprise of all but the defense attorney, who seems to have been in court before. I really don’t think that if they cared more, the prosecution could possibly be this slow.

Both the necessity of getting these documents and the delays in even starting to redact them have always felt like an excuse, especially because there’s such little overlap between that case and this one.

In her original motion opposing the unredacted release of those documents to Golubski’s criminal defense team, McIntyre attorney Cheryl Pilate wrote that the whole effort “rests on the false premise that the McIntyre civil case is somehow ‘inextricably intertwined’ with the federal criminal cases now pending against Defendant Golubski. That argument is baseless. Neither Lamonte McIntyre nor Rose McIntyre is anticipated to be a witness in those criminal cases.”

“The McIntyre lawsuit was focused primarily on Lamonte McIntyre’s wrongful conviction, Golubski’s violation of Lamonte’s constitutional rights in a criminal investigation, and the policies and practices of the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department. Any alleged ‘overlap’ in the subject matter of the civil and criminal cases — i.e., the misconduct of Roger Golubski — does not justify the oceanic fishing expedition that Golubski now seeks.”

The ocean is wide, and prosecutors do not seem to be outswimming even the manatees.

“It’s like they’re playing games with us, because they don’t care anything about us Black women,” said Ophelia Williams. Golubski “don’t even have to come to court if he don’t want to” — he hasn’t been, lately, though he’s no longer in the hospital — while “we burn up the gas for nothing. All the justice is for him.”