Is former KCK cop’s trial really happening? Yes, but that isn’t what’s had me worried | Opinion
People are still asking me whether the first federal trial of former Kansas City, Kansas, police detective Roger Golubski, scheduled to begin in Topeka on Dec. 2, is really going to happen. And I always say yes. Barring an act of God, or any of the more mundane sniffles and piffles that can delay a judicial proceeding, yes.
After all that the Black community in KCK has been through with 71-year-old Golubski and all of those who protected him, this is a perfectly rational question, though. The man spent 35 years on the force, is charged with routinely abusing his authority by repeatedly raping and violating the civil rights of Black women, and yet is still defended by a number of his former superiors.
Even now, some still worry that he’ll kill himself to avoid trial. I never believed that would happen, and don’t know why it would now, when Golubski, who has denied all allegations, has excellent legal representation and a chance of walking away. Defense attorneys smear victims because doing so often works, and it could here, too. As always, the burden is on prosecutors to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
I also disagree with those who still think maybe he’ll be “Epsteined” — murdered, as many believe the prolific upscale predator Jeffrey Epstein was — to make sure he takes no one more important down with him.
Unlike Epstein, of course, Roger Golubski is not in custody, having been on lightly supervised home detention for the more than two years since the morning he was put in handcuffs.
Golubski told victims no one would believe them
I’m not sure how much will come out at trial about his enablers at the KCKPD, though there is plenty of evidence that his superiors knew about his wrongdoing and protected and promoted him anyway because he cleared so many cases. But if any harm did come to him, it would only bring more attention to them.
This entire case is going to hang on the credibility of a bunch of terrified women who I have always believed were telling the truth. Panic attacks are not that easy to fake.
They are also women who say Golubski told them all along that no one would ever believe them. One of the two main victims in this case, identified in court documents as S.K., was 13 when prosecutors say his attacks on her began in 1997. The other, Ophelia Williams, met him when he came to her house to arrest her 14-year-old twins for a double homicide in 1999. When he returned later to rape her, she has always said, he promised to help her with their case.
Seven other women, whose testimony the judge has ruled that he’ll allow, will say that he assaulted or attempted to assault them, too. Prosecutors believe that these witnesses will establish a pattern of abusive behavior during Golubski’s time on the force, from 1975 until 2010. That is a long time to fool your bosses.
These are women who had no money, no standing and in most cases were people he’d met because they had a family member in legal trouble or were in trouble themselves. No one, he said, would ever listen to them over upstanding him.
The years of waiting are over for victims
In my early days of reporting this story, in 2020, women told me that I was naive to think that anything could ever happen to Roger Golubski legally. He was immune from arrest, they said, while they could so easily wind up dead, as he warned them they would if they ever talked. No one would ever find their remains and no one would ever know what had happened, he said. Because after all, they were nobody.
The defense team has said these women are in this for the money, and only cooked up these stories after watching Lamonte McIntyre be awarded a $12.5 million settlement from the Unified Government in 2022. The civil suit from McIntyre, who served 23 years for a double murder he did not commit, alleged that Golubski had framed him and raped his mother. Of course, his other victims had been telling loved ones what happened to them long before 2022, and before McIntyre was released from prison in 2017.
The day Golubski was finally arrested, in September of 2022, was not just a hopeful day for them, but one they’d believed would never come. But then came two years of wondering, as more and more time passed, if prosecutors were maybe just waiting for Golubski, who is in kidney failure and was hospitalized last year, to die and thus relieve them of having to prosecute a former law enforcement officer.
“It’s like they’re playing games with us,” Ophelia Williams told me 17 months after his arrest, with no trial date yet in sight. Well, it’s in sight now, and Golubski is still with us. Williams, who herself has been hospitalized multiple times this year, is too.
At the last pretrial hearing, on Nov. 18, the lawyers who will try this case seemed ready and well-matched. For the defense, that’s Chris Joseph, and for the prosecution, Tara Allison, a trial attorney from the criminal section of the DOJ’s civil rights division in Washington, D.C.
At that hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Toby Crouse ruled on a number of motions that will shape this first Golubski trial. Another fear of victims has been that Golubski would be offered a plea deal, but attorneys in the case told the judge that that didn’t happen.
Crouse said he would not allow testimony about an armed criminal action conviction for one of the 7 additional victims who will testify. “It’s essentially to smear the victim,” Allison argued, and does not “speak to her truthfulness,” which is what’s relevant.
“Somebody with a felony conviction has an issue the jury needs to hear about,” Joseph countered. “It’s just relevant.”
Crouse said that “the crime itself needs to address truthfulness,” and ruled to exclude that testimony.
In trafficking case, will Trump DOJ prosecute ex-cop?
Anything can happen in a courtroom, and I won’t pretend to know what will happen over the five or so weeks that this first trial is expected to last.
But what I’ve been more worried about, vis-à-vis these two federal cases against Golubski, since Donald Trump was elected, is that the second, sex trafficking conspiracy case against him, which is considered the easier case to win, might not happen. In that case, Golubski and three other men allegedly held girls as young as 13 in “involuntary servitude.”
The president-elect has signaled that the Department of Justice should focus on prosecuting those Trump considers his enemies, and his DOJ will not be pursuing patterns and practices cases against police departments for systematic civil rights violations. Activists in KCK have been begging for a probe like that for quite some time. That won’t happen now, at least for the forseeable future.
A DOJ investigation into the KCPD, launched in 2022, didn’t seem to have gotten very far as of two months ago, and now Biden’s DOJ is reportedly hustling to finish as much as it can of all such work before the lights go out. So how interested, once Trump takes office, will the DOJ that he wanted Matt Gaetz to run be in taking on a Roger Golubski?
Would a president who has said that we need “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation to end crime “immediately” really let the Justice Department that he wants to populate with loyalists pursue a case against a cop who is charged with having many real rough, nasty and violent days?
’I don’t think it will really be on Washington’s radar’
Former Kansas U.S. Attorney Steve McAllister, the Trump appointee who actually launched this federal investigation into Golubski, and whose integrity I very much appreciate, told me not to worry about the trafficking case, if only because “I don’t think it will really be on Washington’s radar.”
Patterns and practices investigations into police departments aren’t going to go forward, he said, but the trafficking conspiracy case against Golubski case in his view will. The “vast majority of prosecutions are not going to be on the radar because they’re within the mainstream of what gets prosecuted no matter who is in charge. And in the second case, he’s got co-defendants.”
What McAllister didn’t say, but I will: Golubski has three Black co-defendants in that second federal case. One is Cecil Brooks, a drug kingpin with a long history of violence. At the hearing on whether he should be released pending trial, a prosecutor told the court that, “People are terrified because of the defendant,” to the point that “it’s not uncommon for them to be physically ill” while giving a statement” about him.
It’s that Brooks and his two underlings were charged in the sex trafficking conspiracy along with Golubski that makes me much more confident that the second case will go forward.
