Originally published August 10, 2018 at 6:38 pm Updated August 10, 2018 at 10:03 pm
By Lewis Kamb lkamb@seattletimes.com @lewiskamb
Seattle Times staff reporter
Redwolf Pope, 41, was charged Friday in King County Superior Court with two counts of second-degree rape of a yet-to-be-identified woman and a 33-year-old woman in 2016 and 2017.
A purported Native-American activist and entrepreneur arrested in Arizona last month for allegedly drugging and raping a Washington woman in New Mexico in 2017 now faces more rape charges in King County, where authorities contend he raped at least two more women in his Seattle apartment.
Redwolf Pope, 41, was charged Friday in King County Superior Court with two counts of second-degree rape of a yet-to-be-identified woman and a 33-year-old woman in 2016 and 2017.
Videotapes recovered in June from Pope’s computer at an apartment where he sometimes resided in Santa Fe, New Mexico, allegedly show him separately raping several women who appear to be unconscious.
One of those women later was identified as a Washington resident, 34, who told police in June she suspected Pope drugged and raped her during her visit to New Mexico in the summer of 2017. Pope was arrested in Arizona on a warrant in late July on suspicion of that alleged rape and related charges.
This week, Seattle police alleged in a probable-cause affidavit that Pope also videotaped himself raping the two other women in his Capitol Hill apartment. Police linked images from time-stamped videos and photographs with pictures confiscated during a June 14 search of his Seattle apartment to help establish when and where the alleged rapes occurred, according to the affidavit.
Pope’s bond has been set at $500,000 in King County, where arraignment has been set for Aug. 23.
In a court filing, Pope, who remains jailed in Arizona, claimed the woman he is charging with raping in New Mexico was a former girlfriend whom he’d had consensual sex with after she’d been drinking.
But a judge in Santa Fe County this week denied Pope’s motion to be released pending trial, and instead ordered Pope to be extradited to New Mexico by Aug. 24 to face charges there.
Stephen D. Aarons, Pope’s Santa Fe attorney, said in a voice message late Friday he had just learned of the Seattle charges and could only speak to Pope’s denials filed in court in connection with the New Mexico charges.
Pope, who has claimed Western Shoshone and Tlingit heritage, is an activist who has appeared as a spokesman for the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation on Fox News’ “The O’Reilly Factor” to discuss Native-American perspectives on Thanksgiving. Last year, he gave a TEDx Talk in Seattle about taking part in oil-pipeline protests at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota.
Pope’s LinkedIn page also describes him as a co-founder and chief executive for several tech startups, and it lists Pope as an attorney who has worked for the Tulalip Tribal Court since February 2012.
But since his arrest last month, Pope’s heritage and resume have come under dispute. While Pope received a law degree from Seattle University, the Washington State Bar Association has confirmed he is not a licensed lawyer, and the Tulalip Tribes said he never worked as an attorney there.
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Several tribes with Tlingit and Shoshone members also have said they’ve found no record of Pope’s enrollment, though it’s unclear whether he has claimed membership to any particular tribe.
The sexual assault investigation of Pope emerged in early June, when a houseguest contacted Santa Fe police. The houseguest, a woman who sometimes stays at Pope’s apartments in Seattle and Santa Fe, said she and Pope’s roommate discovered a hidden camera in the bathroom of Pope’s Capitol Hill apartment. They took the device with them to Santa Fe, discovering that it contained multiple videos of the houseguest showering, according to court records.
The woman later accessed Pope’s iPad, finding photographs of women and video files of Pope allegedly sexually assaulting several unconscious women, including a Washington woman she recognized.
That 34-year-old woman, who had known and trusted Pope for years, later told a Seattle police detective she lost memory after Pope gave her a drink while giving her a ride in Santa Fe in 2017. She woke up the next morning in a hotel bed with Pope with her nylons missing, the charging records say.
The detective’s affidavit filed in King County this week says the alleged victim told police Pope had given her a drink after giving her a ride from a party to his Seattle apartment in July 2017 — “the last thing she remembered” before waking up the next morning in Pope’s bed.
The woman did not realize she had been raped until last month, when Seattle police showed her a photograph taken from Pope’s computer. The woman recognized herself, curled up into a ball and “immediately started to wail and cry,” the affidavit states.
The affidavit said police have yet to identify Pope’s third alleged victim, who is identified only as “Jane Doe.” The records noted that “based on the bedding and the room” in the time-stamped video from November 2016 that depicts the woman’s sexual assault, the alleged crime also took place in Pope’s Seattle apartment.
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