A retired United States Navy captain was found guilty of raping young Cambodian women, for which he was sentenced to 210 years in federal prison after being tried and convicted a second time for new charges.
Michael Joseph Pepe, of 68 years old, has been in federal custody since 2007, but was sentenced this Monday for sexually assaulting and drugging his victims, who were between 9 and years at the time of the abuse.
United States District Judge Dale S. Fisher ruled on Monday Pepe’s actions as “monstrous” and “horrible”, adding that what he did to the pre-adolescent girls was “torture”.
Pepe was initially arrested originally in Cambodia at 2006 and was found guilty two years after a federal statute that punishes US citizens who travel abroad to have sex with minors.
The young victims were flown to the United States and testified with the help of an interpreter.
Pepe, who lived in Oxnard, California, was working part-time as a professor at a Cambodian university when he was arrested by local officials in June 2006, prosecutors said.
Although he was sentenced in 2014, Pepe was not sentenced until 2014 for a controversy that was revealed by the prosecution .
After Pepe was convicted in the first case, prosecutors discovered and disclosed to the judge that interpreter Ann Luong Spiratos and Gary J. Phillips, a special agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, were in a relationship, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The controversy postponed Pepe’s sentence after defense lawyers questioned whether Spiratos provided a biased interpretation of the victim’s testimonies to help the prosecution.
Finally , a judge determined that although the sexual relationship between the interpreter and the ICE agent was inappropriate, the trial was conducted fairly.
Pepe’s case took another turn in 2007 when the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed his conviction after a divided panel found that prosecutors failed to show that the former Marine was “travelling” when he assaulted the girls. Pepe stated that he had been living in Cambodia since 2003.
Prosecutors decided to retry the case in August 2022 and this time the former Marine was charged with two counts of traveling to a foreign country with the intent to engage in unlawful sexual conduct and two counts of aggravated sexual abuse of a child.
During the seven-day trial, the eight victims testified for the second time about how Pepe raped and drugged them in his compound in Phnom Penh when they were minors.
Prosecutors also presented evidence that Pepe had “homemade” child pornography in his possession.
In Monday’s ruling, the judge US District Attorney Dale S. Fisher said “there was no justification for a sentence that would allow (Pepe) to get out of prison.”
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