It’s a familiar tale. A man in power, sworn to protect the public from deviant monsters ends up exposed as a monster themselves. This all-too-common tragedy is exactly what happened with police officer, then FBI Agent, then State Trooper, Christopher Bauer. His monstrous deeds? Sexually assaulting a woman and two kids.
For most of his adult life, Bauer, 45, was in a position of authority over the general population. While he would commit unspeakable acts to an underage girl from the age of 5 to 11, his own childhood was reportedly also a nightmare. He was removed from his own abusive household at the age of 5 and forced to grow up in foster homes and orphanages. He was also diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder, a condition characterized by defiance, vindictiveness and violence. “Several instances stick out to Mr. Bauer, including once when he was pushed out of the third floor of a building and another when he was left in a burning apartment,” his attorneys wrote in a court filing.
That troubled beginning didn’t affect his ambition and he enlisted in the Air Force as an adult. After he left that outfit he joined the Montgomery, Alabama police department. His upward trajectory continued in 2009 when he joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). There, he had the opportunity to work on numerous high-profile investigations.
While he worked for the bureau, one of his co-workers claimed he sexually assaulted her. In an application for a restraining order, she said Bauer choked her, raped her at knifepoint, and made her “scared for my life.”
“I couldn’t see any more and felt my legs go out from under me,” the woman wrote. “He told me many times if I went to war with him I would lose. He told me many times he would destroy me.”
“It was a year of torture,” she told the AP. “He quite literally would keep me awake for days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, and in six months I went from 150 pounds to 92 pounds. I was physically dying from what he was doing to me.” She said he raped her so often that her hair started to fall out.
When confronted with these claims, Bauer reportedly said they were consensual. The FBI didn’t agree. The top of the bureau’s food chain considered his behavior in relation to his co-worker to be “egregious.” After they interviewed several female employees, however, an unnamed senior FBI agent told the AP that they decided that the truth of what happened was “somewhere in the middle” of both accounts.
In an internal investigation, they found he violated quite a few FBI policies, including having sex in an FBI car. He should have lost his job and really should have been charged criminally,” the anonymous agent said.
In late 2018, Bauer’s security clearance was revoked and he was suspended without pay, effectively ending his FBI career. That should’ve been the end of it, but Bauer is smart and knows the system, so there is a lot more to this story.
The next year, Bauer applied for a job with the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency using a forged letter from the FBI and was hired. We’ll get to that in a sec. Around this time, Bauer was actively raping a five-year-old girl, and he would continue to do so for years.
On April 23, 2021, when the victim was 11 years old, she confided in a friend about Bauer and his constant sexual assaults. A few days later the girl told her mother, who contacted the school. Bauer was arrested that same day. After his arrest, Bauer resigned from the state troopers, citing personal reasons. That’s when authorities found out his letter was a forgery.
On his application to be a trooper, Bauer said he’d never been dismissed or forced to resign from any job because of disciplinary issues, and that he was still employed by the FBI. The letter claimed to be from FBI headquarters in Washington D.C. and said Bauer had ten years of “creditable service” and that he was “eligible for rehire.”
In a big oops, the state troopers apparently never called the FBI to check if the letter was legitimate or not. “You have to ask yourself why an agent from the FBI would want to leave after 10 years,” said Lou Reiter, a law enforcement consultant and former top brass with the Los Angeles Police Department. “They obviously didn’t do any kind of due diligence with their background check.”
When confronted by the AP, the state police said it did a “full and thorough” background check on Bauer and “no derogatory comments were uncovered by former employers.”
That restraining order, by the way, was public record and out for a year when the state police did its “thorough” investigation. Bauer also has similar child sex abuse charges in Louisiana, and the Louisiana State Police said it will extradite him to face those charges.
His official charges were sodomy and sexual abuse of a child under 12. For some reason, he decided to testify in court. So did his victim. The teen testified with tears streaming down her face, per the AP, that she was too afraid to say no to Bauer or tell anyone what was going on.
When Bauer took the stand, he said “no, never” when asked about the allegations against him and said, “if she said I did something to her, then yes that’s a lie.”
A jury of his peers convicted him in June of 2024 and on Aug. 1 he appeared before Montgomery Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool shackled and in a prison-issue orange jumpsuit for his sentencing. He told Judge Pool that he never thought he would end up on the wrong side of a prison cell, and that juries get things wrong sometimes.
“It seems no matter what I say, no one wants to believe I’m innocent,” he said. “All it took was an accusation to strip me of everything.”
The girl’s mother spoke at the hearing and called Bauer a “monster” who used his authority as law enforcement to convey an “image of a good person” who “had everyone fooled.”
Judge Pool said he “believed every single word” the girl had said and sentenced Bauer to life in prison. Because the victim was younger than 11 when the assault occurred, he will not be eligible for parole.
District Attorney Daryl Bailey, who prosecuted Bauer, said that it was “always extremely disappointing when someone who is supposed to enforce and uphold the law commits a crime against the people they have sworn to protect.” He said the victim can “take solace in knowing Christopher Bauer will never harm her nor anyone else ever again. … I extend my gratitude to Judge Jimmy Pool for sentencing this sexual predator to life in prison as that is where he deserves to die.”
Published: Aug 13, 2024 05:48 am