Assault victim on Westport massage business: ‘If they had rats, they’d be shut down’
It will soon be two years since Kendra O’Sullivan went to get a massage at a place in Westport called Imperial Foot Care. She was having a migraine that day, May 8, 2019, and a massage had always eased her headaches.
This time, though, she says, she spent 70 terrifying, this-can’t-be-happening minutes having her nipples pinched, her underwear pulled down, her legs pulled apart and her skin rubbed so hard it hurt as she and her assailant fought over custody of the towel that was supposed to be covering her: “It was an assault and not a massage.”
She managed to fend off his attempt to penetrate her digitally. But she told me that when he pulled her head back, hard, and put his entire body weight into pressing into her eye sockets with his thumbs, “Everything stopped. I told myself nothing is worth being blinded over.”
When she finally did get away, she said, he followed her to the front desk, where she was so panicked that she paid, tipped 20% and ran to her car.
The next day, when O’Sullivan reported what had happened to the Kansas City Police Department, even the desk sergeant told her the story sounded familiar. That’s because there had just recently been another, similar complaint against an employee of Imperial Foot Care.
Turns out, that February 2019 report involved a different employee. And those weren’t the only such complaints to Kansas City police. Five KCPD incident reports I found showed allegations of sexual assaults at Imperial Foot Care.
So what has happened in all the months since then that O’Sullivan has been checking in regularly with police and prosecutors and emailing city and state officials?
Imperial Foot Care is still open for business. The case still hasn’t gone to court. And the suspect, Xiang Jun Wang, who has been charged with a mere city ordinance violation, has moved to Houston.
The owner of Imperial Foot Care, Lin Ling, who spends much of her time in China, did not return my email seeking comment. She also took her time getting back to police when they asked for her help figuring out who had given O’Sullivan this so-called massage.
Jackson County wouldn’t prosecute
It took Lin months to finally get back to a detective with the identity of the employee, who Lin said had been accused by another customer later the same month that O’Sullivan had reported him. Xiang had been fired because of the complaints, Lin told police, and had left town in May.
To recap, the owner knew enough to fire him in May, but didn’t supply a name to police, who had contacted her on June 27, until September 9. That’s when police finally had an ID and could show O’Sullivan a photo lineup with him in it. Only then, in part since he had moved away, authorities wouldn’t prosecute him.
Jackson County prosecutors twice declined to take the case — the second time after city prosecutors sent it back to the police with a request that the state look at it again. It was too serious for city court, Assistant City Prosecutor Annie Booton told O’Sullivan in an apologetic email.
But again, the state said no. O’Sullivan says Jackson County Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Jill Icenhower told her that they had gone around the room at a meeting and not a single person thought it was a case worth taking. “She said, ‘Kendra, you’re safe. He’s in Houston.’ ’’
In the detailed log O’Sullivan has kept of every interaction related to this case, she wrote that Icenhower “also said that the jail is full and they don’t want to pay to get him. The community is safe now that he’s gone. And I am safe because I moved to Minnesota. So why would we put money into this at the state level? That took me down a peg and I decided not to try and reach out to any more officials.”
Icenhower did not return a call for this piece but Mike Mansur, spokesman for Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, said the same thing a different way: “Because it involved someone already in Houston, they determined it was a misdemeanor.”
Not even, actually; it’s a municipal ordinance violation-level assault filed in city court, handled right alongside traffic tickets. And because O’Sullivan was allegedly attacked by a stranger, it won’t even go to the domestic violence city court that usually handles sex crimes.
The charging document says Xiang “did inflict bodily injury or cause an unlawful offensive contact on Kendra O’Sullivan by twisting and pinching her nipple and grabbing her vagina 6-10 times over a towel while O’Sullivan was there for a massage.”
“We are sympathetic to the victim and have tried to keep her informed,” Mansur said, but “we were limited by the evidence,” which he said included no mention of eye-gouging. Asked what it means that a case like this is considered no big deal, he said, “Sometimes things are a big deal, but we just don’t have the evidence.”
‘It’s so shameful’
Municipal Judge Courtney Wachal, who oversees the domestic violence court and gets the cases the state won’t take, said this doesn’t happen sometimes but all the time. She continues to see a steady stream of cases that in her view should absolutely have been filed as felonies.
“They wouldn’t extradite on a city charge,” she said of O’Sullivan’s alleged assailant, “and if he stays in Houston, nothing will ever happen to him. You cannot tell me that is not a state charge.”
I wrote about the shockingly serious cases Wachal’s court handles — from strangulation to attempted shootings — a year ago this month. If anything has changed since then, the judge said, it’s not for the better. “It’s so shameful,” she said of the many cases Baker’s office refuses to file. “How long can they continue to be, ‘We didn’t file that’?’’
Good question.
Xiang’s attorney, Kevin L. Jamison, who got another continuance in the case last week, said, “He’s pled not guilty and that’s the extent of it. No attorney ever got sued for malpractice for telling his client to shut up.”
What’s his client’s version of events? “He’s not in the area and doesn’t speak English, so it’s difficult for me to know.”
If Xiang is found guilty, the most he could theoretically get is six months in city jail — four, really, because of overcrowding. But if he doesn’t decide to come back to get arrested, no one is coming for him.
Again, he would have to come back to Kansas City, get stopped for speeding or something else, and if police checked, they’d find his outstanding warrant and could take him in. Oh, and since this offense is an ordinance violation, it probably wouldn’t even show up on a criminal background check.
Icenhower did, Mansur said, report the business to its licensing board and to the state attorney general’s office.
A spokesman for Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who often says it’s a top priority for his office to crack down on sketchy massage businesses, said they are aware of Imperial Foot Care and are looking into the situation there.
Lisa Carlos, an investigator for the Missouri Department of Commerce & Insurance, said her office completed its investigation into Imperial Foot Care late last year, and forwarded its findings to the massage therapy board for action that could include a criminal referral or revocation of professional license.
But meanwhile, Imperial Foot Care continues to advertise that it’s “a place to relax and make you feel good!”
“You get special one-on-one attention,” according to its website.
The receptionist who answered the phone at Imperial Foot Care, Owen San, said he had heard about a few such complaints, but not six, counting the one the owner told police about: “My manager hasn’t told me that many.”
He does remember one former employee, “one or two years ago,” who left and moved to New York after being accused of sexual assault. “He told us he didn’t do anything. He doesn’t want to make trouble so he goes to New York instead.”
Victim lost job, insurance and apartment
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said the city’s Health Department might be able to get involved, since repeated reports of violence are as much a health issue as code violations. “We have the right to step in. We need to review how we’re missing this.”
So far, though, nobody has stepped in.
And this was not a minor event for now 27-year-old Kendra O’Sullivan, who was loving her work in sales and loving her life in Kansas City when this happened.
About a week later, she lost her job (and with it, her health insurance) because “I cried at my desk. They said I isolated myself from others, wasn’t being a team player and was behaving defensively.”
Then she couldn’t pay her rent, lost the apartment she loved in Union Hill and wound up couch surfing and living in her car for several months before finally moving back to Minnesota, where she’s from. For more than a year, she’s been getting treatment for PTSD.
“I hit a deer on my way from Kansas City. I started crying and I literally couldn’t stop, and that’s when I went to a doctor.”
O’Sullivan is better now, but for all of her follow-through, the system is as broken as ever. Most people would have long since given up on even the speck of justice to which authorities tell her she may be entitled.
Over and over, she’s been told that nothing is going to happen to either the suspect or his former employer. But something did happen to her, and may be happening still to women we don’t know about. If a case like this was just not worth pursuing, what does that tell other victims and victimizers?
What it has told O’Sullivan is how little it means that police and prosecutors have said all along that they believe her and would do something if they could. “If they had rats,” she said of Imperial Foot Care, “they would be shut down.”
This story was originally published February 16, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Assault victim on Westport massage business: ‘If they had rats, they’d be shut down’."
