Feds want 9 women to testify against ex-KCK cop Golubski to show alleged pattern of abuse
Prosecutors want to call additional women to the stand when they try former Kansas City, Kansas police detective Roger Golubski on accusations he kidnapped and raped a woman and a young teenager two decades ago.
Golubski, 70, faces two federal indictments that could send him to prison for life, one of which accuses him of the sexual assaults from 1998 to 2002. Golubski, who worked at the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department from 1975 to 2010, is alleged to have raped the girl, who told her grandmother she suffered a miscarriage while in middle school, more than 10 times.
At a hearing Tuesday at the federal courthouse in Topeka, Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Hunting said prosecutors are still seeking a spring trial, though no dates have been set. The trial against Golubski, he said, is expected to last four weeks.
When Golubski is tried, prosecutors want to introduce testimony from five additional Black women who allege they were sexually assaulted by the then-cop, who is white. They have also requested to call two women who say he attempted to assault them.
Calling the women’s accounts, spanning from 1983 to 2004, “strikingly similar,” prosecutors want to show Golubski’s pattern of allegedly targeting vulnerable Black women and girls.
Golubski’s lawyer has not yet responded to the prosecution’s motion seeking to include the testimony. If prosecutors prevail, they could call to the stand as many as nine women who say Golubski raped, stalked or attempted to assault them.
One of the women met Golubski, who was a longtime detective, when he was assigned to investigate her husband’s murder, according to prosecutors. He then allegedly raped her on three occasions.
Another of the women alleges Golubksi threatened to arrest her sons around 2004 unless she had sex with him, which she refused. She is a former law enforcement officer, prosecutors disclosed in a filing last week. When she tried to report Golubski to KCKPD’s Internal Affairs Unit, she was told it was her word against his, the U.S. Attorney’s Office wrote.
“When he talked to me like that, and him being in law enforcement ... it was really insulting, degrading,” prosecutors quoted the woman as saying. “You feel helpless ... less than a woman or like you’re nothing.”
Prosecutors want to call the seven other women to also “rebut a defense of fabrication or consent.”
“This trial will turn entirely on victim credibility,” prosecutors wrote in their motion Friday, “and the defendant chose his victims because he was confident that they would never be believed.”
In a separate pending case, Golubski is accused of having conspired to sex traffic underage girls between 1996 and 1998 with three men, including Cecil Brooks, a notorious drug kingpin. Prosecutors say Golubski protected criminals from police investigation as the girls were raped and trafficked at an apartment complex Brooks operated at Delavan Avenue and 26th Street in KCK.
The former detective and his three co-defendants, including Brooks, have pleaded not guilty. Golubski’s lawyer, Chris Joseph, has called the allegations “uncorroborated.”
Calls for more investigation
Earlier this month, several women who allege they were raped, stalked or propositioned by Golubski filed a federal lawsuit against him, former KCK police chiefs, the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, and others. They claim the UG gave a group of cops who operated like a criminal enterprise permission to “terrorize, abuse and violate” Black residents.
William Skepnek, one of the women’s lawyers, said Tuesday he hopes Golubski is tried in the spring but wondered why prosecutors did not request to include the testimony of the additional women sooner.
“I am frustrated with the unnecessary waste of time,” he said.
Civil rights groups last week renewed their calls for a Justice Department investigation into KCK police and the Wyandotte County District Attorney’s Office. They noted federal prosecutors say Brooks paid off “officers” who in turn warned him when police were about to “hit” the apartment unit where girls were allegedly forced into sex.
“A DOJ investigation could bring more than hope to a starving community — the DOJ could bring justice and peace,” wrote numerous groups, activists and lawyers, including renowned attorney and law professor Barry Scheck, who co-founded the New York-based Innocence Project. “This community deserves it after all it has been through.”
The DA’s office responded that it and police agencies have established reforms focused “on the equal and fair administration of justice,” leading to a reduction in violent crime. KCKPD has said today’s force is “not your great-grandfather’s” department.
The DOJ has declined to comment publicly on community leaders’ repeated pleas for a broader investigation in KCK.
Then late last week, Team Roc — the social justice arm of rapper Jay-Z’s entertainment company, which has called for a DOJ probe in KCK — and the Kansas City-based Midwest Innocence Project announced they had filed a wide-ranging records request for, among other things, any complaints against 30 current and former officers.
“Despite the growing mountain of evidence of officer misconduct, the Unified Government has yet to open its files and invite an independent and transparent review of these injustices,” Tricia Rojo Bushnell, the Midwest Innocence Project’s executive director, said in a statement Thursday, adding that what “the Unified Government will not give, we will continue to demand.”
This story was originally published November 22, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
