Five women sue KCK for allegedly allowing cops to rape and terrorize Black residents
Women who allege they were raped or sexually harassed by indicted former Kansas City, Kansas, detective Roger Golubski filed a lawsuit Friday against him, former police chiefs, Wyandotte County and others.
The lawsuit, filed in the federal District of Kansas, alleges the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kansas, allowed its officers to “terrorize, abuse and violate” Black residents in “protected police hunting grounds.” Detectives who were known to commit misconduct, including sexual violence, were not disciplined or investigated, the suit claims.
“The monumental issue concerns the responsibility public officials must bear for enabling and fostering a well-known, decades-long terrorization of the Black community,” the women’s attorneys wrote.
A lawyer for Golubski, who remains on house arrest in Edwardsville as he awaits two criminal trials, said he was not in a position to comment because he had not yet read the lawsuit. The UG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One of the five plaintiffs, Ophelia Williams, is one of nine women who federal prosecutors say Golubski raped or terrorized when he worked at the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department from 1975 to 2010. He then spent six years as a detective in Edwardsville.
Golubski is accused in one indictment of sexually abusing and kidnapping Williams and a teenage girl from 1998 to 2002.
In the second case, Golubski is accused of conspiring to sex traffic underage girls between 1996 and 1998 with three other men, including a feared drug kingpin, Cecil Brooks. As a veteran cop, Golubski allegedly protected criminals from police investigation as the girls were raped and trafficked at an apartment complex Brooks operated at Delavan Avenue and 26th Street in KCK.
No trial date has been set in either case, which has frustrated women who want to see Golubski, now 70, held accountable. The former detective has pleaded not guilty.
The five women in the new lawsuit represent a sample of “the wrongs inflicted upon hundreds of unnamed victims, living and dead,” the women’s attorneys wrote.
Four of the five plaintiffs allege Golubski sexually assaulted or stalked them. One said the detective raped her in 1992 in the back seat of his “Unified Government-issued unmarked police car.”
One of those plaintiffs is Saundra Newsom, whose son, Doniel Quinn, was killed in a 1994 double murder that sent an innocent man named Lamonte McIntyre to prison for 23 years. Newsom’s attorneys say she was “stalked and propositioned” by Golubski under the guise of investigating her son’s killing.
McIntyre was exonerated in 2017. Last year, the Unified Government agreed to pay him and his mother, who also said she was abused by Golubski, $12.5 million.
Despite the settlement, the new lawsuit says, the defendants “have yet to admit their wrongdoing” or bring the real killers to justice.
A fifth woman claims she was falsely arrested and interrogated in 2002 for 19 hours by two other KCK detectives after her father was killed. One of them demanded sex, according to the lawsuit, telling her: “I can turn off this camera, pull down my pants and we can do what we need to do.”
Speaking publicly for the first time last year, Williams told The Star she awoke early on an August 1999 morning as officers, looking for her teenage sons, banged on the front door of her KCK home. When she let them in, the officers arrested her twins, who were 14. It was then, as she stood in her living room in a nightgown, that Golubski introduced himself and stared at her, she said.
Days later, Golubski came back. Williams assumed he was there to talk about her sons, who were in custody. Instead, he pushed her onto a couch and sexually assaulted her, she told The Star and also alleged under oath during a deposition in 2020.
Williams told Golubski she was going to file a complaint against him, her attorneys wrote.
“Report me to who, the police?” Golubski asked, according to the new lawsuit. “I am the police.”
The abuse, Williams has testified, continued several times throughout her sons’ cases, likely for more than a year.
“I cried every day, all day long, for years and years and years,” she told The Star.
The next hearing in the criminal cases against Golubski is set for Nov. 21.
