The Nebraska-based lesbian woman who shockingly staged an anti-gay hate crime has been sentenced to a week in jail.
The Lincoln Journal-Star reports that Charlie Rogers, 34, will also spend the next two years on probation and be required to undergo a psychological evaluation and complete 250 hours of community hours for lying to investigators in July 2012.
Lancaster County Judge Gale Pokorny called Rogers' original claim "an incredible and outrageous lie," according to the Omaha World-Herald. He also pointed to the "disservice" Rogers had committed to the area's lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community.
“For a long, long time to come, when a gay makes a legitimate complaint about unequal treatment or discrimination, there’s going to be a knee-jerk reaction among many: ‘Yeah, well, Charlie Rogers said the same thing,’” he is quoted by the Journal-Star as saying.
Rogers' attorney Brett McArthur told local ABC news affilate KLKN-TV that he and his client were satisfied with the sentence.
A small business owner who lives openly as a lesbian, Rogers originally told police she was attacked by three masked men who broke into her home and bound her with zip ties before carving homophobic slurs into her skin, dumping gasoline on her floor and lighting it with a match, on July 22. At the time, witnesses also said that anti-gay slurs were also found spraypainted throughout Rogers' basement.
Just days after the alleged attack, however, investigators told the Journal Star they had no suspects and "hadn't ruled out the possibility" that Rogers herself had somehow staged the incident.
In an emotional interview with KETV-TV, Rogers responded to those doubts, arguing that her "world had been changed forever" by the alleged attack. "The idea that people think it's a lie is so hurtful," she said at the time. "For people to think this doesn't happen here, it does. It did."