Sordid details spill out in rare court-martial of a general on sex charges
By Craig Whitlock
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — It was an illicit and volatile love affair that spanned two war zones and four countries. The married general couldn’t stay away from a captain on his staff. She fell hard for her boss and called him “Poppa Panda Sexy Pants.” The three-year entanglement ended disastrously for both, at a time that could not be worse for the Army.
All the raw and sordid details are spilling out in an austere military courthouse here, where the Army is girding — for only the third time in half a century — to court-martial one of its generals.
It gets worse. . .
During a pretrial hearing last year, the woman testified that the pair had sex in the general’s quarters in Iraq, in her car in a German parking lot, in plain sight on a hotel balcony in Arizona and in her cramped office in Afghanistan, among other places. Some soldiers wondered and snickered about their relationship, but nobody reported it.
The depth of their passion might have remained hidden if the general and the captain hadn’t bombarded each other with explicit text messages. Defense attorneys have read many out loud in court.
“You are my heart and world you beautiful magnificent man,” the captain texted the general in September 2011, during one of their tamer exchanges. “I need you and I mean really deeply profusely need you.”
Then teh crazee kicked in. . .
The final straw came in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in March 2012. The captain was snooping through Sinclair’s e-mail in his office and discovered tender messages to his wife, as well as love notes to another female Army officer.
“I felt so stupid,” the captain testified. “I finally had something to slap me in the face and say, ‘See, he never loved you. He was just using you for sex.’ ”
By her own admission, she flew into a jealous rage. First, she fired off an e-mail to the other female officer, saying, “I hope you don’t think you’re the only girl that he’s sleeping with.”
Later that night, she burst into the office of Maj. Gen. James L. Huggins, then the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and leader of all U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan. Tears streaming down her face, she spent two hours confessing to the affair, according to court testimony.
Dawn breaks over Marblehead. . .
During an evidentiary hearing in November, she said that she still had feelings for Sinclair and that she had not wanted the Army to charge him with forcible sodomy or a violent crime.
“It’s tearing me up, and in a [expletive] way I still love him, and I don’t want him to be upset with me,” she said. “I know it’s very messed up, but there’s a part of me that wants to believe that he really did love me and that I just misinterpreted his actions.”
Defense attorneys have accused her of making up the assault allegations to save her Army career. They said she first told one confidant that the relationship was entirely consensual but gave investigators a different version after she realized that she, too, could be kicked out of the Army for adultery.
Richard L. Scheff, an attorney for Sinclair, noted that the woman has since been granted immunity by the prosecution. “The evidence in this case is paper-thin,” he said. The captain, he said, has “changed her story again and again.”
Full story at link: Sordid details spill out in rare court-martial of a general - The Washington Post
Even though he's a bit of a chump, I have no sympathy for the general. He violated the Prime Directive.
By Craig Whitlock
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — It was an illicit and volatile love affair that spanned two war zones and four countries. The married general couldn’t stay away from a captain on his staff. She fell hard for her boss and called him “Poppa Panda Sexy Pants.” The three-year entanglement ended disastrously for both, at a time that could not be worse for the Army.
All the raw and sordid details are spilling out in an austere military courthouse here, where the Army is girding — for only the third time in half a century — to court-martial one of its generals.
It gets worse. . .
During a pretrial hearing last year, the woman testified that the pair had sex in the general’s quarters in Iraq, in her car in a German parking lot, in plain sight on a hotel balcony in Arizona and in her cramped office in Afghanistan, among other places. Some soldiers wondered and snickered about their relationship, but nobody reported it.
The depth of their passion might have remained hidden if the general and the captain hadn’t bombarded each other with explicit text messages. Defense attorneys have read many out loud in court.
“You are my heart and world you beautiful magnificent man,” the captain texted the general in September 2011, during one of their tamer exchanges. “I need you and I mean really deeply profusely need you.”
Then teh crazee kicked in. . .
The final straw came in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in March 2012. The captain was snooping through Sinclair’s e-mail in his office and discovered tender messages to his wife, as well as love notes to another female Army officer.
“I felt so stupid,” the captain testified. “I finally had something to slap me in the face and say, ‘See, he never loved you. He was just using you for sex.’ ”
By her own admission, she flew into a jealous rage. First, she fired off an e-mail to the other female officer, saying, “I hope you don’t think you’re the only girl that he’s sleeping with.”
Later that night, she burst into the office of Maj. Gen. James L. Huggins, then the commander of the 82nd Airborne Division and leader of all U.S. forces in southern Afghanistan. Tears streaming down her face, she spent two hours confessing to the affair, according to court testimony.
Dawn breaks over Marblehead. . .
During an evidentiary hearing in November, she said that she still had feelings for Sinclair and that she had not wanted the Army to charge him with forcible sodomy or a violent crime.
“It’s tearing me up, and in a [expletive] way I still love him, and I don’t want him to be upset with me,” she said. “I know it’s very messed up, but there’s a part of me that wants to believe that he really did love me and that I just misinterpreted his actions.”
Defense attorneys have accused her of making up the assault allegations to save her Army career. They said she first told one confidant that the relationship was entirely consensual but gave investigators a different version after she realized that she, too, could be kicked out of the Army for adultery.
Richard L. Scheff, an attorney for Sinclair, noted that the woman has since been granted immunity by the prosecution. “The evidence in this case is paper-thin,” he said. The captain, he said, has “changed her story again and again.”
Full story at link: Sordid details spill out in rare court-martial of a general - The Washington Post
Even though he's a bit of a chump, I have no sympathy for the general. He violated the Prime Directive.