Her case began the CIA #MeToo movement. A jury found the man she accused of assault not guilty

By Katie Bo Lillis, CNN

(CNN) — It was the first case in the CIA’s #MeToo moment — when a line of women who came to Capitol Hill beginning in early 2023 to report to Congress that they had been the victims of sexual assault or harassment while working at the agency.

Rachel Cuda, a trainee, was the first. Dozens more would follow.

Her story was harrowing: She claimed that a fellow trainee had “strangled” her in a stairwell at the agency. That summer, a judge in Fairfax County, Virginia, found her alleged attacker guilty of misdemeanor assault in a bench trial.

In more than a year since, courts in Virginia and Washington, DC, have returned two more guilty verdicts in trials of CIA officers accused of sexual misconduct. Congress issued a series of damning reports — and passed legislation reforming the agency’s processes for handling allegations of assault and harassment. For the first time, what victims say is a culture that protects predators had leaked into the public eye.

Cuda’s story had started a movement.

“I’m that first guy through the door. I can take this impact for you. Somebody’s gotta do it. Somebody has to go outside of the institution to shine a line on this—because this didn’t just happen to me,” she said in an interview with Elle published earlier this week.

But in the end, the first case became one of the messiest.

On Wednesday, a Virginia jury unanimously overturned the original conviction of Ashkan Bayatpour, declaring him not guilty of assaulting Cuda.

“Sexual harassment is a real national security issue that threatens unit cohesion and forces good people out of serving our country,” Bayatpour said in a prepared statement released after the verdict on Wednesday. “These kinds of allegations should be taken seriously and investigated thoroughly. But we have to find a better way to sort out credible allegations from lies.”

The trial exposed the challenges of adjudicating these types of allegations between close colleagues, not just in the CIA, but in any workplace. And it cast Cuda, the woman whose alleged assault more than any other had come to define the issue at the agency, as a complicated heroine for a movement that she helped begin.

A midday walk between two work friends — “worky-work soul mates,” in Cuda’s words — ended in the encounter in the stairwell in which she said she was “strangled” but which Bayatpour said involved a light flutter of a scarf over her shoulders as part of a misguided effort to cheer her up.

It followed months of instant messages between the two that were full of friendly banter that defense lawyers said was clearly pockmarked with double entendres — a pattern in a work relationship that led Bayatpour to believe a sexual joke would be funny.

Victims’ rights advocates point out that women who come forward with allegations of sexual assault are often not believed.

But during closing arguments, even the state prosecutor seemed to tacitly acknowledge that Cuda’s account of the incident appeared full of little inconsistencies, a slowly evolving narrative that Bayatpour’s defense attorney had just argued at length had become more dramatic in each retelling.

“Let’s summarize: Ms. Cuda is a liar. Check,” the prosecutor said, referring to the defense team’s position.

Even so, she argued to the jury: “You can still find him guilty. It’s an unwanted touching.”

‘Worky-work soul mates’

Cuda and Bayatpour had not known one another long. They were both new employees of the CIA, training to become case officers. But they became fast work friends and chatted endlessly over Skype, the internal instant messaging service used at the agency.

Cuda testified in court that the two were not close; that Bayatpour had pursued her romantically but that she is married and had rebuffed him.

But reams of internal Skype messages between Bayatpour and Cuda suggest two new colleagues who seemed to talk constantly. Cuda often sent him heart emoticons and told him she “loved” him. In messages where Bayatpour suggested social activities, Cuda responded enthusiastically.

They took frequent walks around agency grounds, and Bayatpour testified that Cuda often seemed to be going through a hard time. She confessed challenges in her marriage to him, he testified, and, later, began sharing explicit details with him about a sexual relationship he said she told him she was having with another colleague at the agency, whom they called “tall guy” in internal messages. According to Bayatpour, the will-they-won’t-they build-up to that alleged relationship with “tall guy” became a frequent topic of discussion between the two, as had discussions of her sexual preferences — including, he said, that she liked to be “choked.”

Cuda denied telling Bayatpour that she liked to be choked, denied the affair, and denied sending a graphic text message — presented as a screen shot at trial — that Bayatpour testified was Cuda detailing an alleged encounter with “tall guy” in May.

The Skype messages between the two were often rife with sexual innuendo. Bayatpour from the stand frankly acknowledged that although their relationship was platonic, they often engaged in flirtatious banter and jokes with sexual undertones, describing himself now as embarrassed. He enjoyed hearing all the dramatic details of her life, he said, because it was entertaining — like watching “The Bachelorette.” He saw his role as her cheerleader, he said, often bucking her up.

“Wtf would I do without you,” she wrote in one Skype message.

Cuda repeatedly insisted either that their banter was not sexual in nature, or, if it was, that she was uncomfortable with Bayatpour’s language. Although she frequently responded with “lmao,” “hahahahahaha” and similar online expressions of amusement, those were all examples of “uncomfortable laughter,” she said.

She would, she said, sometimes express discomfort to Bayatpour that “there were multiple men who were coming on to me” at the agency.

An encounter in the stairwell

On July 13, 2022, both parties testified, Cuda asked to go for a walk around the agency grounds. During that walk, Bayatpour gave her a royal blue scarf, a light, pashmina-style garment. Bayatpour testified that he had been given it for free by some friends connected to the Blue Angels (the Navy’s flight demonstration squadron), and it had been gathering dust in his office until, on a whim, he decided to give it to Cuda. At the end of the walk, he walked her up the stairs back to her fifth-floor office.

The two parties presented dramatically different interpretations of the encounter in the stairwell.

Cuda told the jury that Bayatpour asked for the scarf back. As they were walking up the stairway, she testified, she saw the scarf come over her head from behind. She turned around, she said, and he started to cross the ends of the scarf aggressively. Bayatpour, she said, was making “a face I will never forget” — a face, she said, that indicated to her that he was trying to hurt her. Cuda testified that he told her, “This is what I want to do to you,” and leaned in to kiss her. She disentangled herself, she said, and kept walking towards her office. At the top of the stairs, she claimed that Bayatpour draped the scarf over her head again from behind and said, “There are many uses for this.” When she came out of the stairwell onto the fifth floor, she said, Bayatpour “grabbed me by the arm, spun me around, leaned in” and kissed her on the cheek.

Almost none of what Cuda claimed, Bayatpour said, was true.

In an initial recorded interview with internal investigators at the CIA several days after the incident played at trial, Cuda calmly described Bayatpour draping the scarf over her head and crossing the ends, but said she didn’t “catch” what he said. She did not mention that he had “grabbed” her at the top of the stairs and kissed her on the cheek.

In Bayatpour’s version of events, Cuda had spent much of their long walk venting to him about her love life and her struggles at the agency — something he said she often did. At the end of the walk, he said, she asked him how he was doing. Bayatpour told her he was in love, that he thought he had found the woman he was going to marry. Abruptly, he said, she ended their walk and he immediately felt like he had been insensitive, gushing about his happy life while she was struggling.

“In the stairwell, I was thinking, I need to do something funny to break the mood,” Bayatpour told the jury.

Bayatpour said he asked for the scarf back from Cuda and, standing approximately face-to-face with her, lightly draped the scarf over her neck and waggled the two ends, saying “Hey, there are many uses for this” — a reference, he thought, to her past confessions about being choked that they had laughed over. Cuda, he said, rolled her eyes. They exited the stairwell and parted.

It was a joke, his attorney said — perhaps a bad joke or an inappropriate joke, but not one intended to do bodily harm or in any way express hostility to Cuda.

Cuda, seated in the first row of the courtroom with her husband and a small number of supporters, wept through the beginning of his testimony and, later, shook her head repeatedly as he described the encounter and their relationship.

Hinting at the complexity of the case, the jury initially deadlocked at 6-1 — with no indication of which way they were swinging. But within an hour, they had returned their unanimous not-guilty verdict.

What Cuda’s story — including the acquittal of the man she claimed attacked her — will mean for the movement built by survivors and advocates hung over the proceedings during the three-day trial.

In his closing arguments, Bayatpour’s attorney seemed to allude to the fears of some advocates: Sexual harassment in the workplace is a true problem, and female victims have historically been voiceless in a male-dominated society. It was a good thing that society was beginning to wake up to that reality, he said.

“But baseless accusations detract from that,” he said. “It doesn’t help it.”

A lawyer for Cuda, Kevin Carroll, said in a statement that the CIA had “put its thumb on the scale in this criminal proceeding,” by requiring Cuda to make multiple video-taped statements about her alleged assault that were then used at trial by Bayatpour’s defense.

“The Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division urgently needs to investigate how the CIA systemically discriminates against the Agency’s female sex crime complainants in favor of their alleged male assailants,” Carroll said.

Top CIA officials say that the agency is taking the issue seriously.

“While we have more to do, I’m proud of the progress we have made to substantially improve our response to reports and expand significantly the resources available to those who have witnessed or been the victims of sexual assault or sexual harassment,” Director Bill Burns said in a statement earlier this year.

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