Assault trial starts for former federal agent
Suspect accused of sex crimes against 3 women
WAUKESHA – A former federal agent used his badge and authority to help him sexually assault three women over several years, a prosecutor said Monday.
The three women did not know each other, “yet each will paint a picture of a sexual predator who used their bodies for his own sexual purpose,” Assistant District Attorney Melissa Zilavy said in her opening statement to jurors in the long-delayed trial of David Scharlat. “It was all about him,” she said. Scharlat, 55, of Oconomowoc is facing five counts — one of first-degree sexual assault, causing great bodily harm, three of second-degree sexual assault and one of third-degree sexual assault.
He was charged in March 2018, months after one of the victims went to police in the fall of 2017.
His attorney, Paul Bucher, told the jurors his client admits having sex dozens of times with the three women, all of it consensually. He suggested that they were upset to learn later that none of them was Scharlat’s exclusive partner.
He told jurors they might find much of what they’ll hear offensive — the levels of drinking, the kinds of sex and the language used to describe it. “That was their lifestyle,” he said, referring to his client and the three women.
Bucher said one of the women moved to Waukesha County to be closer to Scharlat after a time prosecutors say he sexually assaulted her, and that the woman who prosecutors say suffered great bodily injury was, in fact, suffering from an existing condition.
Zilavy told jurors the women will testify about how Scharlat said he could push them off a cliff and make it look like an accident, and that one feared he might use his ever-present gun on her.
Jurors will also hear from an expert who will explain why and how abused women stay with their abusers, to counter Bucher’s claim that “common sense” says someone who was being victimized the way prosecutors allege would never choose to keep dating their attacker.
Zilavy also said that in each of the charged incidents the women had protested or had been too intoxicated to consent.
And jurors will see Scharlat’s recorded interview with a detective, Zilavy said, revealing the same arrogance and intimidation he employed against the women.
The women who spoke with investigators said they had relationships with Scharlat at different points in time. All described a pattern of abusive behavior, including steady reminders of Scharlat’s powers as a federal agent,
One woman told police she was assaulted by him twice in 2017, resulting in injuries that required multiple surgeries. Another woman said he threatened her many times over the years, including that he would kill her, sometimes while wearing his badge.
The investigation began in October 2017 when one of the women, who admitted having an earlier consensual relationship with Scharlat, went to police to report two assaults.
She also told the Milwaukee Journal
Sentinel that federal investigators had approached her in 2015 while investigating complaints of domestic abuse about Scharlat by another woman.
Two counts relate to the most injured woman, on two days in October 2017.
Two counts of second-degree sexual assault are from assaults on a different woman, once in the summer of 2012 and again in February 2013, at two different addresses in Oconomowoc.
Another count charges second-degree sexual assault involving a third woman, in August 2013, at Scharlat’s residence in Oconomowoc.
Scharlat joined the Diplomatic Security Service of the U.S. State Department in 2001 and was fired in April 2015. Before that, he was a Brookfield police officer. Bucher told the jury Monday that Scharlat is now on disability.
Diplomatic security special agents investigate passport and visa fraud, human smuggling and trafficking, sexual assault of department personnel overseas, foreign intelligence directed at State employees and other matters.
The trial, before Waukesha County Circuit Judge Maria Lazar, is expected to last up to 12 days.