A former Democratic congressional aide received no jail time after pleading guilty to the sexual assault of two women.
Donny Ray Williams, Jr., a former staff director for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee, admitted drugging and sexually abusing two female colleagues in December. He also pleaded guilty to making threats.
The assaults themselves took place years before. In a letter read in court at his sentencing April 3, one of Williams' victims told how she met the defendant when she was an intern in 2010, and thought he would help her advance her career on the Hill.
Instead, the woman wrote, "He gave me a random dose of drugs and risked my life," according to the Washington Post. The accuser moved away after the attack but she said Williams continued to harass her. Williams initially denied the allegations and insisted the relationships were consensual.
As part of his plea deal, prosecutors asked a judge to approve a 4-and-a-half year suspended sentence. Williams will remain a free man as long as he stays out of trouble. He also got five years of supervised probation, will have to register as a sex offender for 10 years and undergo counseling.
Prosecutors agreed to give Williams a plea deal in part because they feel he has suffered as a result of a vicious -- though unrelated -- acid attack that ran him into debt and ended his political career.
About a year after his arrest, a man who Williams believes was the ex-boyfriend of a woman he was seeing threw a brown liquid in his face.
Williams said he initially thought it was coffee. But then he felt pain as if his body were on fire. “I thought I was going to die,” he said in an interview earlier this year.
The substance turned out to be acid. In court, his lawyers said he spent a month in the hospital, is blind in one eye, and had to undergo several life-threatening surgeries to correct the damage from the disfiguring attack. Williams still has burns on his face and a large protrusion on his head where doctors surgically inserted a rod to stretch his skin.
Authorities are still investigating the attack, and no arrests have been made, according to the Post.
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