Not Enough Evidence in Abigail Simon Suit

By Barton Deiters
WOOD
March 14, 2017

http://woodtv.com/2017/03/14/judge-not-enough-evidence-in-abigail-simon-suit/

[with video]

The lawsuit against the Catholic Diocese of Grand Rapids and schools by the teen victim of sexual abuse by a tutor has been dismissed.

That includes the case against the tutor, 34-year-old Abigail Simon, who remains in the state women’s prison.

The spectacular 11-day trial in November 2014 was the subject of national attention — due in no small part to Simon’s defense that she was the victim of rape by a 15-year-old Grand Rapids Catholic Central High School student, not the other way around. But evidence including recorded phone messages and thousands of text messages convinced a jury that Simon was the sexual aggressor. She was convicted of four felony charges and sentenced to prison for eight to 25 years.

About a year after the conviction, the victim filed a lawsuit against the school, its leaders and the diocese, which oversees the schools.

The teen’s attorney, Brian Molde, argued that the school administration did know or should have known that Simon was a threat to the boys at the school and to his client in particular.

“There were memos written actually calling her a danger to students,” Molde told 24 Hour News 8 over the phone on Tuesday as he traveled out of state.

Molde said it was known that his client and Simon, who made $45,000 per year tutoring student athletes, were intimate.

“People were talking about this relationship, that Abigail Simon might be abusing the students, including my client,” Molde said.

However, Kent County Circuit Court Judge George Quist ruled there was not enough proof that the school leadership knew of the abuse and could have stopped it.

“To take that amount of evidence and say it was not foreseeable that this abuse was occurring or was going to occur is just incredible,” Molde said. “We think that Judge Quist just got it wrong.”

Molde is appealing the decision, but after receiving a handwritten note from Simon — who is representing herself from her cell at the Huron Valley Women’s Correctional Facility near Ypsilanti — saying that she had no money and could not attend any hearings, the suit against her was dropped.

APPEAL IN CRIMINAL CASE

Meanwhile, the criminal case against Simon is being considered by the Michigan Supreme Court on a number of issues, including whether Simon should be subject to lifetime electronic monitoring and whether her case should be resentenced after sentencing guideline rules were changed. The court has to decide if everyone convicted of criminal sexual conduct against a minor is subject to the lifetime monitoring or if it is only when the victim is younger than 13.

Abigail Simon at sentencing. (Jan. 14, 2015)

Simon is represented in her criminal case by one of the state’s most renowned appellate attorneys: F. Martin Tieber, who says jurors was given bad instructions by Judge Paul Sullivan that did not allow them to properly consider Simon’s defense. Tieber said Sullivan’s instructions to the jury limited what it could consider.

“It didn’t include forcible rape and that was her argument — that at the point of the penetration, he overpowered me,” Tieber said.

Molde said the defense is beyond absurd.

“If you reverse the sexes in this situation, there is absolutely zero percent of the public that is going to treat this as some kind of child sexual fantasy,” Molde said.

The victim in the case is now 19. The former star athlete was for a short time on the roster of a MAC conference school but did not continue, his lawyer says, because of the trauma he has suffered. He currently attends community college.

“This is a lifelong injury that he has suffered and he is going to be dealing with it for the rest of his life,” Molde said.

It’s likely to be mid-summer before the criminal case is decided at the appellate level.

While Tieber hopes the appeal ends in an order sending the case back to circuit court, an entirely new trial is not necessarily the best thing. Instead, he’s hoping for a new plea agreement offer that reduces charges or some other deal that gets Simon out of prison earlier than under her current sentence — which is between 2022 and 2039.

“She is very strong in her belief that we have a good issue and that we have a very reasonable shot at having somebody on the Supreme Court take a very close look at this,” Tieber said.