Felony charges for ex-prosecutor
The assistant attorney general who prosecuted a high-profile rape case in Isabella County will face two charges of misconduct in office.
Chris Becker, Kent County prosecutor, announced Thursday afternoon that he plans to file the two five-year felony charges sometime soon against Brian Kolodziej for his conduct prosecuting Ian Elliott in the Rachel Wilson case.
Elliott was accused of raping Wilson at his apartment shortly after the two met at The Cabin on Aug. 31, 2016.
Becker spoke in the vaguest terms about what specifically Kolodziej did, and said he didn’t know when formal charges would be filed. He did say that the case will go through the same Isabella County courts where first the county and then the state prosecuted Elliott.
Less than a month after after Elliott pleaded guilty to one count of third- degree criminal sexual conduct on Aug. 3, 2019, Kolodziej abruptly resigned from the office of the attorney general amid revelations that he had a sexual relationship with Wilson.
Attorney General Dana Nessel, at a press conference, said she’d give him a simple choice: Quit or be fired. She also launched an in
ternal investigation and asked the state police to investigate Kolodziej’s conduct.
Nessel’s office declined to release a copy of the investigation Thursday, citing the ongoing criminal prosecution.
Kent County is prosecuting the case because Kolodziej prosecuted cases for as an assistant attorney general in Oakland and Wayne counties. He prosecuted sex crime cases for the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office right before joining the Office of the Attorney General in September 2018.
Kolodziej charged Elliott with two counts of CSC-3 and one count of assault with intent to commit sexual assault. He charged him with one count of CSC-3 involving a second woman who came forward to testify at Elliott’s preliminary exam in February 2019.
Elliott was incarcerated for approximately 11 months, starting in prison. After a plea deal was hatched between Nessel and Joe Barberi, Elliott’s attorney, the charge was reduced to fourth- degree criminal sexual conduct, a misdemeanor, and he finished his sentence at the Isabella County Jail.
The case was originally handled by the Isabella County Prosecutor’s Office, which took it through the preliminary exam, where it was bound over for trial in late winter, 2018. On Thursday, Barberi described the bind over as based on thin premises.
In the spring, then-interim County Prosecutor Robert Holmes dropped the charges.
Wilson took her story to Central Michigan LIFE, which published a victim account story in early October 2018 in which Wilson said the case was mishandled.
On Halloween, thenAttorney General Bill Schuette announced his office would take up the case. Kolodziej, who’d recently joined the case from the Macomb County Prosecutor’s Office, was assigned.
At first, Kolodziej tried to get the county’s charges reinstated so he could just proceed to trial. Barberi objected, but at the case’s first hearing, every Isabella County judge recused themselves from the case. That included then- Circuit Court Judge Paul Chamberlain, who retired at the end of July, 2019, and was replaced by current- Circuit Court Judge Sara SpencerNoggle.
A visiting judge ruled in Barberi’s favor, and new charges were filed shortly before Christmas, 2018.
At a February preliminary hearing, at which Isabella County Chief Judge Eric Janes bound Elliott over for trial on the state’s charges, one of Kolodziej’s witnesses said that Elliott had raped her at a fraternity party in 2014.
A new charge in a separate case was filed against Elliott in March based on that testimony.
On April 1, 2019, Barberi asked Janes to drop the charges against Elliott and sanction Kolodziej for his conduct. At the time, Barberi accused Kolodziej of improperly coaching his witnesses and acting as both investigator and prosecutor.
Janes denied his motions, saying that Kolodziej had erred in trying to amend a filing rather than filing a new one. Without evidence of purposeful misconduct, Janes said he accepted that it was an honest error.
Late Thursday afternoon, Barberi described Kolodziej as “out of control” and “unethical” while prosecuting Elliott. He said that Nessel’s internal investigation produced evidence that while there people in the office aware that Kolodziej was acting unethically, that the only person who tried to step up was Karen Farley, assigned to investigate the case for Kolodziej.
Farley disappeared from the case in the spring of 2019. Barberi repeatedly told Janes that Kolodziej refused to make her available to him for an interview.
As for his client, Barberi said, “He got railroaded.”
He said that Elliott’s nightmare started when Kolodziej took the case.
“We had an opportunity,” Barberi said about what he described as a bright future for Elliott. Now, he has no college degree, is working a food service job and his reputation is “trashed.”