US Navy drops charges against SEAL accused of sexual assault

SAN DIEGO ( AP) — The U.S. Navy on Tuesday dropped sexual assault charges against an enlisted SEAL in a case involving a female sailor at a Fourth of July party in Iraq that had prompted the rare withdrawal of the special operations unit from the Middle East in 2019.

Under an agreement accepted by the military court at Navy Base San Diego, Adel A. Enayat pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of assault consummated by battery for biting the sailor’s face and grabbing her neck during what his lawyer described as rough, consensual sex. He will immediately serve up to 90 days in the brig.

At the special court martial, the judge also reduced his rank of special warfare operator first class by five levels, drastically cutting his pay and benefits, after the masked Enayat wearing his Navy dress uniform said without emotion that he was guilty.

He told the judge he did not have a “solid memory” of what happened in his room at the Al Assad Air Base in Iraq because of the “copious amounts of alcohol I’d consumed.”

Still, he said after reviewing the evidence he agreed that he grabbed the sailor by the neck and bit her on her face, ignoring her pleas for him to stop. He agreed with the facts read by the judge that he “applied pressure to her neck that caused her to have difficulty breathing.”

When asked by the judge why he did not stop when she asked him, Enayat said it was not an excuse for the crime but he was intoxicated.

Per the agreement, Navy prosecutors stipulated that there was no sexual assault. Enayat was originally charged in December 2019 with sexual assault, aggravated assault via strangulation and assault by battery for allegedly biting the victim on the face, according to his charge sheet.

It was an abrupt end to a case that had prompted the entire Foxtrot platoon of SEAL Team 7, known as Trident 1726, to be sent home early to San Diego. The withdrawal marked an extremely rare move that cut short the mission of a unit that was in Iraq to combat remnants of the Islamic State.

The Navy fired three SEAL leaders in the aftermath of the sexual assault allegation.

Enayat plans to leave the Navy with a general discharge under honorable conditions per the plea agreement. That discharge also means he will lose some of his veteran’s benefits.

“It’s hard to recover from this in your career,” Enayat’s lawyer Jeremiah Sullivan said. “He’s going to move on with his life. But many people lost their jobs and careers over a sexual assault that never occurred.”