Cheryl Delostrinos' case represents a structural crevasse in sexual assault crimes, caught between the limits in the definition of consent, and a jury’s willingness to believe victims. by Marcus Harrison Green Cheryl Delostrinos, a South End organizer and abolitionist, doesn’t believe in the criminal justice system.  She didn’t believe in it on June 18, 2024, when she says she went to a strictly-professional meeting over drinks with Pedro Gomez, the one-time director of external affairs for former Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell.  She didn’t believe in it when, according to police reports, she woke up drunk and disoriented to Gomez performing oral sex on her. Or when she told him “no,” and Gomez continued to pull her toward him, lift her, and force her back onto the bed despite her repeated verbal refusals.  She didn’t believe in it when she made the police report and submitted to a sexual assault kit. But she turned to the system anyway, because she believed it was the only way to find some accountability for what happened to her. Then she waited a year and a half for a charging decision on her case. Delostrinos was right to doubt the system’s ability to help her find justice. In December, Delostrinos learned that the King County Prosecuting Attorney's Office declined to charge Gomez with a crime.  KCPAO didn’t decline to charge Gomez because they doubted her account. In fact, in a written response to The Stranger’s questions, the prosecutor’s office emphasized on five separate occasions that they do believe her.  What is at question is how her experience fits into state law. And in this case, everyone The Stranger spoke to agrees that it’s simply too limited to deliver justice in many sexual assault cases like hers. Her case represents a structural crevasse in sexual assault crimes, caught between the limits in the definition of consent, and a jury’s willingness to believe victims.  In a confidential declination memo shared with The Stranger, the Prosecutor’s Office said the case was “legally insufficient” under Washington law, meaning prosecutors concluded they could not prove the elements of rape in the second- or third-degree beyond a reasonable doubt when weighed against what they described as the “most plausible, reasonably foreseeable defense.”  For Delostrinos, the decision arrived as both confirmation and a fresh rupture. “The process of learning about the KCPO’s decision felt broken,” she said, describing how direct communication came only after her attorneys reached out, and how an SPD advocate followed up days later with information she already had. She said she was “not surprised” by the declination because, in her view, “I do not believe the criminal legal system is structured to believe or meaningfully support survivors of sexual violence, especially in cases that live in the gray areas where there is no direct video evidence of harm.”  The standard being quietly demanded of survivors, she said, is both unreasonable and revealing: “It is not my instinct, nor should it be expected, to video record an assault or a moment of non-consent while in a situation of violence.” Without that, she added, “it becomes my word against his.” KPAO considered the possibility of charging Gomez with second- or third-degree rape, both as “alcohol assisted” sexual assault. First, they’d have to demonstrate that Delostrinos was too drunk to consent.  In the police report, Delostrinos reported that she came-to during the alleged rape, and said “no” when she realized what was happening to her.  The legal and cultural definitions of consent differ. Colloquially, we tend to learn that a drunk person cannot consent, particularly if they’re blacked out. But according to Washington state law,  a victim’s intoxication isn’t enough for a charge to stick. They have to be incapacitated, and that incapacitation needs to be obvious—like someone struggling to walk, vomiting, or phasing in and out of consciousness.  Bridgette Maryman, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for the county and chief deputy of the gender-based violence and prevention division, recognizes the limitations of this definition.  “Alcohol can cause someone to be in a blackout state where they have no memory of what happened, but they're walking, they're talking, they're driving, they're making purchases, and seeming to other people that they may be capable of consent, and that's just the reality of the way alcohol impacts us and the limits of our law as it relates to rape,” she told The Stranger. “It sucks.” The other hurdle in this case is reasonable doubt. In Washington, like all other states, for a prosecutor’s office to press charges, they must demonstrate that they can prove the case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In Delostrinos’ case, the DNA evidence indicated that sexual contact indeed happened. So the defense’s job would be to cast doubt on Delostrinos’ incapacitation. KPAO identified several routes that the defense was likely to take—security camera footage showing her walking steadily out of the building, a phone call to a friend where she simply called the encounter a “wild night,” and the possibility that a fight with her fiancé after the alleged rape might have motivated her to file a false report. (Yes, false reports are incredibly rare—somewhere between 2 and 10 percent of cases—but the statistical likelihood of a crime is not admissible evidence.) The legal burden of a criminal case is intentionally high and meant to avoid wrongful prosecution.  “The defense can present and argue mutually exclusive theories of the case that conflict with each other,” says Patrick Lavin, the chair of the special assault unit at KPAO. But as long as one of them can cast reasonable doubt—perhaps that a victim had a motive for making a false report, or that an assailant had reason to think they had consent—a charge can’t stick. That’s a defense attorney’s job. This is all standard, good lawyering, the KPAO lawyers emphasized to The Stranger.  And the KCPAO memo is explicitly about the legal calculus. It’s not an assessment of whether Delostrinos was harmed, but whether the case state could survive a jury instructed to acquit if they have a reasonable doubt. “We believe Cheryl and our charging decision is in no way a reflection of the reality of what happened to her,” says KPAO’s Bella Halroyd, who wrote the charging decision. “It is merely an assessment of what we can legally prove beyond a reasonable doubt, and those are very different things. Our system is inadequate to provide healing to most survivors.” Delostrinos is unsure whether she’ll pursue a civil case against Gomez and emphasized that she first filed charges “to create accountability by naming the harm, informing my community, and removing this person from a position that allowed them to continue using their power and platform to harm others,” she said, adding that she is “deeply grateful” for the people who navigate the system in alignment with her abolitionist values. “I don’t know what accountability looks like moving forward,” she told The Stranger. “But I am committed to my own healing and to supporting other survivors of sexual violence in my communities.” She hopes that the act of coming forward opens the door to “deeper conversations, shared responsibility, and collective action toward safer, more accountable communities.”  Still, the declination carried its own loss: “While I would not have chosen to move forward with charges even if they had been filed, I am still disappointed that I was not given that choice,” she said. “The loss of that agency matters.” ...read more read less