She was raped and relentlessly demanded answers—until the city took her to court for harassment

This story was originally published by InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom based in the Pacific Northwest.

This wasn’t the day in court that Sharilyn Lux had envisioned.

For one, she was sitting at her friend’s dining room table, staring at a judge through a little box on Zoom, without a lawyer beside her.

More importantly, the hearing wasn’t about the rape that she had reported five years earlier. There would be no verdict for her rapist, no consequences for the police who’d failed to find a suspect, no accountability for the city officials seemingly more motivated to shut her up than to find answers.

Instead, it was Lux being punished.

Lux, a 49-year-old middle school Spanish teacher, had sent thousands of emails to city staff in Snoqualmie, a small suburb of Seattle, accusing them of being liars, frauds and criminals. She’d called the mayor a “dumb bitch,” the police chief a “fucking loser,” the city clerk a “political puppet” and “minion” for the mayor. The volume of Lux’s communications was so overwhelming that the police chief had started keeping count dating back to 2019, the year she reported being raped: 17,617 emails, 110 public records requests, and 93 calls to the city’s emergency and nonemergency lines.

Finally, in February 2024, the city clerk petitioned King County District Court to stop Lux from contacting her. Mayor Katherine Ross and Police Chief Brian Lynch were both there at the hearing, supporting the clerk. Ross, Lynch and the clerk declined to comment for this article, citing ongoing litigation with Lux.

“This is the level of harassment that the respondent is kind of scattershot approaching all over the city,” said the clerk’s attorney, Sean Dwyer, at the court hearing in March. “We are at a point where judicial intervention is necessary.”

For Lux, the constant stream of messages was necessary to get someone—anyone—to dig more deeply into her case. Snoqualmie police say they’ve already investigated, and even had an outside agency review the case to double check their work. But Lux believes police botched the investigation, pointing to lost evidence, unpursued leads, and the involvement of an officer who’d been suspended for shoddy follow-through on sexual assault cases.

“I’m looking for justice,” Lux told the judge on her laptop screen.

The hearing was just one chapter in an escalating small-town saga, one that eventually led to the city taking the rare step of pursuing criminal charges against a rape victim over her fight for transparency. Like other women across the nation rallying to defend their autonomy among a surge of online misogynistic phrases like “Your body, my choice”—spurred by the presidential reelection of a man with numerous allegations of sexual misconduct—Lux is screaming to be heard. 

But while Snoqualmie has pushed back harder than most cities would dare, taking measures that some attorneys argue violate Lux’s First Amendment rights, her story is also a familiar one for many sexual assault survivors across America. A rape gone unsolved. Evidence resulting in no suspects and no arrests. Police and attorneys telling her that there’s nothing else to be done, then dismissing her when she asks for more, and even turning the law against her.

In the March hearing, the judge listened to testimony from both parties, took a few minutes to review the case, and came back with a decision.

“I found Ms. Lux’s testimony to lack credibility,” she said. “The court was not persuaded by the emotions that she showed.”

The judge approved the protection order, effective for 15 years. It makes it illegal for Lux to contact the city clerk or to email public records requests to the city. She can’t come within 500 feet of City Hall, except for City Council meetings and “legitimate governmental business,” a term that’s not defined in the order. And if she needs to go to the post office? She should be “prompt,” the judge ruled.

Lux didn’t stop.

When Lux woke up that cold February morning in 2019, she remembers reflexively rubbing her hands over her thighs. It was wet, she realized as she lay in bed. Like fluid was coming out of her.

She opened her eyes and took in the pastel yellow curtains and teal walls surrounding her. Her bedroom.

The red pants she’d worn the night before were turned inside out on the floor, her underwear still inside them. What looked to her like blood and feces coated her naked body, her sheets, the floor, her pants, her jacket.

She slowly crawled out of bed. Pain seized her ribs and shot through her knee. Her mind felt clouded in a thick fog.

“It took everything in me to get out of the bed and down the stairs,” Lux said. “There’s nothing to compare to the pain I was in all over my body.”

When she looked in her bathroom mirror, she saw a black eye and swollen lip, later shown in photos submitted to court. Deep purple bruises bloomed across her legs and back.

Did I fall down the stairs? she wondered.

She tried to work backwards. The night before, she went to Smokey Joe’s Tavern, a local dive tucked off of Snoqualmie’s main strip just a short walk from her house. She’d been sipping a beer in a tall wooden booth grading Spanish papers, she said. She was joined briefly by her friends. She went to the bathroom, spoke to some men at the bar, and then her memory went black.

How had she gotten home?

She called a friend for help. The friend took her to a hospital in Issaquah, where Lux says medical staff told her that she’d likely been gang-raped. A nurse in Seattle helped her complete a sexual assault kit, swabbing parts of her body to test for traces of semen and DNA.

Scott Bruton, then a Snoqualmie detective, was assigned to the case. Bruton, who left the department in 2023, declined to talk to InvestigateWest.

In the following weeks, police collected bags of evidence from the crime scene, according to Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory and Snoqualmie police reports. They talked to Lux, her friends, her ex-husband, neighbors, and employees at Smokey Joe’s. They tracked down video surveillance from the bar and watched hours of footage. And they stitched together the forgotten night in a 41-page police report.

The police report said that Lux had seemed “oddly intoxicated” a few hours after she arrived at the bar around 6 p.m., considering the amount of alcohol she’d had. A friend and a bartender told police that Lux kept losing her train of thought and repeating herself.

She left the bar on foot, alone, around 11, according to video footage reviewed by police. A neighbor remembered seeing a woman arrive at Lux’s house, staggering and seeming “off,” but without any noticeable injuries. Two days later, police met with Lux and noted the bruise around her eye, as if she’d been struck, the police report says. Bruton found brown stains throughout her house, amid an “obvious odor of feces” in the upstairs bedroom.

The investigation hadn’t yielded any clear suspects. But Bruton was still waiting on DNA results from Lux’s sexual assault kit—ideally, the smoking gun that could lead to her attacker.

He’d submitted the kit to the Washington State Patrol Crime Laboratory in March 2019, according to the crime lab report. Lux began emailing Bruton as early as that July demanding answers and accusing police officers of lying to her. Bruton replied that the results could take anywhere from six to nine months on average to come back. He’d also asked Lux to turn in her cellphone for analysis, but she refused to give it to him, convinced that the police’s only goal was to prove that there was something wrong with her.

In January 2020, Snoqualmie police got toxicology results from the state patrol, according to the police report. “I reviewed the results but did not see anything of concern,” Bruton wrote in the police report, without noting what drugs were tested or if any came back positive.

Bruton got the DNA report from the crime lab in June 2020, nearly a year and a half after the assault. One of Lux’s swab samples had indications of semen, but no male DNA was detected, the report shows. This can happen for several reasons, according to the Washington State Patrol, like if a man has had a vasectomy—his semen wouldn’t contain sperm cells, the primary source of DNA in seminal fluid. It’s also possible, though rare, that females test positive for the protein found in seminal fluid. Lux demanded that police run more tests to check again for DNA, but the state patrol told police that they’d already run the most sensitive test they have, according to the police report.

Without a suspect, the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office declined to take Lux’s case.

It was an ending Lux refused to accept. She typed out an email to the prosecutor’s office with a list of questions and reasons why her case shouldn’t be closed.

A prosecutor replied the next day.

“While your injuries are obvious, the nature and circumstances of the assault are not. We simply have insufficient evidence at this time to file a criminal charge,” the prosecutor wrote. She added that she was sorry for the pain that Lux experienced. “I know that this process has been long and frustrating to say the least.”

Tucked in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains a half hour drive from Seattle, Snoqualmie takes pride in being one of the safest cities in Washington. The Snoqualmie Police Department recorded a total of only three sexual assault calls for service in 2022 and 2023, according to the department’s 2023 annual report. Its low crime rate is due in part to the police department’s long-standing motto, “No call too small,” the city’s website says.

But crime rates don’t capture the reality once sexual assaults are reported in Snoqualmie. Of at least 16 people who have submitted sexual assault kits to the Snoqualmie Police Department since 2009, most remain unsolved and without a suspect. One led to the arrest of the wrong man, while the real perpetrator was never caught. And while three cases ended in convictions for child molestation or third-degree rape, another three, including Lux’s, resulted in police requesting that prosecutors criminally charge the women who reported being assaulted—one in 2014 for false reporting, and one in 2022 for making false statements to a public servant.

The town of about 13,500 people has also seen a recent exodus of leaders tasked with preserving public safety. In 2023, the police chief resigned at the mayor’s request, the city administrator was fired without cause, the city’s longtime fire chief announced his resignation, and the city attorney left after nearly a decade of work.

The city won’t say why. Nor will they discuss Lux’s case with reporters. In response to InvestigateWest’s interview requests to the city, Dwyer—the attorney for Snoqualmie who represented the clerk—wrote back asking a reporter to stop emailing “on behalf of Ms. Lux,” adding that the city does not comment while criminal matters are pending. He also declined to provide any information about last year’s resignations, instead directing the reporter to submit public records requests.

“The Mayor and the Chief of Police are public servants, not pen pals,” he wrote to a reporter.

That response doesn’t surprise Lux, who has long been critical of Snoqualmie’s lack of transparency. Even before Snoqualmie police investigated her rape, she didn’t trust them. Around 2017, she began voicing concerns about corruption to the mayor and City Council. She’d point out past issues with police, like when Snoqualmie in 2014 hired a police officer named Nicholas Hogan knowing that his former employer, the Tukwila Police Department, had fired him after multiple claims of excessive use of force, including striking and pepper-spraying a man on a gurney—which later earned Hogan a nine-month prison sentence.

When Lux would bring her corruption allegations to the City Council, only one councilmember, Peggy Shepard, took her concerns seriously, Lux says.

“The other councilmembers, when they’d hear her talk, they’d just hear the tone and the extreme-sounding things, and they would tune out,” Shepard said. “Today, the city treats her as crazy. And I’ve actually gone to bat to try to stand by her and let her know that there’s somebody who does believe her.”

Matt Larson, Snoqualmie’s mayor from 2006 to 2021, however, said that Lux’s and Shepard’s behavior weighed heavily on city staff’s morale. Although the city never took legal action against Lux while Larson was mayor, he noted that staff spent “hundreds, if not thousands, of hours” on “frivolous” public records requests. The two women would attack his and other public officials’ character when officials disagreed with their corruption allegations, which Larson described as conspiracies. 

There were times Larson felt threatened, like when—on a day that Lux had come into City Hall upset about a property dispute—he left City Hall to find that the side of his car had been keyed, he said. (Lux denies she had anything to do with this incident, saying she’s never heard anything about Larson’s car being keyed.)

“It was such a distasteful, egregious environment for which there’s little protections for public servants from that sort of outrageous behavior,” Larson said. “If anything, I regret that I probably did not do more to protect them, or frankly, even myself.”

By the time she was assaulted, Lux worried that the city was biased against her. The darkest parts of her mind feared it could have even been a hit job by powerful leaders angered by her whistleblowing.

“And so when I was raped, I refused to call the Snoqualmie PD,” Lux said. Instead, she called a Washington State Patrol trooper, and the trooper reported it to Snoqualmie police.

To this day, Larson remains skeptical that Lux was raped. While talking to InvestigateWest, he repeatedly pointed out that it was an “alleged” rape. “It could be she fell down the stairs for all you know, and she was drunk and doesn’t remember any of it,” he said. “The semen’s another thing, but then I don’t put it past Peggy Shepard and some of those other ones to maybe fabricate that—well, I don’t know how you fabricate semen.”

For Lux, Larson’s perspective has only further convinced her that the city didn’t take her case seriously. “This is exactly what they’ve been trying to do to me all along,” she said. “They have been trying, since I was raped, to claim that I was crazy and some alcoholic.”

As Lux tried to cope with the lack of closure in her case, she raised question after question about how law enforcement handled the investigation. Her red pants, bed sheets and mattress top, for example, had never been turned into the crime lab for analysis, according to the timeline compiled by police. Officers had instead turned in underwear and jeans that Lux says she hadn’t been wearing.

“They turned in everything that would turn up nothing,” Lux said. “What about the red pants? What about the mattress top? Why would you not turn that in first?”

The red pants and bed sheets had come to the police department wet, soaking through the paper bags that the hospital had put them in, the police report says. Bruton hung them up on a drying rack to preserve the evidence items. “The items were then secured in a closet located within the police department,” he wrote about two weeks after the assault.

It wasn’t until over a year later, when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, that Bruton entered the closet again, according to the police report. He had to move the pants and sheets, since staff now needed the room to shower and decontaminate.

“The items appeared undisturbed and dry,” he wrote.

The items still haven’t been tested. Police told Lux that they were never accepted by the crime lab because the sexual assault kit had already been analyzed, and examination of additional items wasn’t warranted, according to the police’s timeline.

Two pairs of Lux’s underwear later went missing from the police department’s evidence inventory, the police’s timeline shows. The department hasn’t told Lux how the evidence disappeared, she said.

“Go find them,” Lux emailed Mayor Ross. “Your Chief is refusing to do his job. And you are too.” The email later appeared in court, used as evidence that the city clerk needed a protection order against Lux.

Lux soon discovered that she wasn’t alone. A decade before her assault, another woman had gone to Smokey Joe’s one night with no memory of leaving. Police have not found any other link between Smokey Joe’s and either woman’s rape case.

Sara, then a Snoqualmie resident in her late 20s, had seemed “very intoxicated” after a few hours at the bar, stumbling and slurring her words like she’d been affected by more than just alcohol, the bartender told police, according to the police report. The bartender had seen her leave alone with her dog that night, walking toward her house.

Sara woke up the next morning in a local Montessori classroom, her clothing removed and bruises on her knees and thighs. The red pants that she’d worn the night before were thrown on the floor next to her. She found her dog behind a closed door, unharmed.

“I freaked out and left,” said Sara, who asked to go by her first name for this article. “When I got outside, I didn’t even know what town I was in, because it’s on the edge of town and I didn’t really know that road. And I just started walking.” 

She told her roommate that she might’ve been raped, and her roommate reported it to the police a few days later. Snoqualmie police officer Kim Stonebraker-Weiss took on the case. 

An officer sent Sara’s clothing to the crime lab for testing, and Sara went to the hospital to complete a toxicology test and a sexual assault kit, according to the police report. But by then, days had already gone by since the assault. The toxicology test came back negative for ethanol and positive for cannabinoids. The police report doesn’t mention if any other drugs were tested.

The sexual assault kit, however, did turn up evidence of male DNA. Stonebraker-Weiss entered the DNA profile into a national database to search for matches. None were found.

Sara eventually moved away from Snoqualmie and carried on with her life. Then, around the beginning of 2022, a friend told her that he’d met another woman with a story like hers. He offered to connect Sara with Lux.

“It kept me up at night. Every night for months,” Sara said. “I was like, ‘This is happening to other women, still?’”

As soon as the two women started talking, they pieced together similarities in their cases: Smokey Joe’s, red pants, memory loss, signs of being anally raped, no suspects. Cases closed.

They also discovered that Stonebraker-Weiss had been involved in both investigations. The officer had responded to Lux’s rape report while serving a 30-day suspension—applied about one day a week over a period of seven months— for her repeated failure to investigate, document, and follow up on potential felony-level crimes, including sexual assault and domestic violence cases, according to an internal police department investigation. A disciplinary letter signed by then-mayor Larson in October 2018 called her conduct “unacceptable,” adding that her behavior “fails to meet the basic responsibilities that are required of a commissioned police officer.”

Stonebraker-Weiss, who retired in January 2024 after nearly 27 years with Snoqualmie, said she takes full accountability for the reprimands that she received. Although as the department’s only female officer for her entire career, she could have been better supported, she said. Many of the city’s sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse cases fell to her, on top of her general patrol work. While she welcomed the cases, they became difficult to manage.

“I admit, I fell behind. I got overwhelmed,” Stonebraker-Weiss said. “Being the only female, it presented obvious challenges. I felt isolated a lot.”

The officer’s involvement in Lux’s case refueled Lux’s skepticism about how the department handled her evidence. Stonebraker-Weiss, however, said that her brief involvement didn’t have any tie to her investigation of Sara’s case. She thinks both investigations were done well.

Since leaving the department, Stonebraker-Weiss has worked hard to overcome the shame of being written up by the city, she said.

“They did their job, what they felt like they had to do. And I just accepted it.”

In July 2022, Lux got a letter from Mayor Ross. Lux had emailed city staff and officials more than 500 times in the last year and a half, using an increasingly hostile and accusatory tone, Ross wrote.

The mayor directed staff not to engage with Lux and to forward any of her communications to the city attorney. She told Lux that if the harassing emails persisted, the city “reserves the right to take all appropriate legal actions.”

Lux kept emailing.

Then, in September 2023, about two months after the city’s police chief resigned and Lynch took over as interim chief, Snoqualmie police agreed to take another look at her case.

Lynch requested an external agency review by a major crimes task force made up of small police agencies in King County. A detective in Clyde Hill, west of Snoqualmie, reviewed police reports, witness statements, medical records, crime lab reports, photos, and security footage. He concluded in October 2023 that the sexual assault was “meticulously investigated and comprehensively documented.”

Again, Lux wasn’t convinced. The task force in charge of the external review still had too many connections to Snoqualmie for her comfort—Lynch had led it for several years, and had only stepped down from the task force when he became interim police chief. Gary Horejsi, then a sergeant at the Enumclaw Police Department, took over as head of the task force after Lynch, according to an email from Lynch. Horejsi is now Snoqualmie’s police captain, sworn in last March.

Lux fired off more emails.

“Misusing other agencies to hide the crimes in your agency. Organized criminal. Like Clyde Hill,” she emailed Lynch.

By 2024, Snoqualmie’s 911 dispatchers recognized Lux’s voice.

She frequently called the dispatch center’s nonemergency line, as it was one of the only ways she could get someone to talk to her. The protection order restricted what emails she could legally send to city staff, and the city had largely stopped responding to her emails anyway.

“Hi there, I’m trying to get hold of Brian Lynch about some records,” Lux said to a dispatcher in June 2024. “I need to talk to an officer. It’s about the internal investigation,” she added, referencing complaints she’d made about the handling of her case.

“Okay Ms. Lux—” the dispatcher said.

“And I need—”

“It sounds like you don’t have an active emergency or it seems like you’re in crisis, please dial 988 for the crisis line. I’m going to release the line now.”

The dispatcher hung up. Lux called back a few minutes later.

“Hi. You just hung up on me. You’re a criminal. You’re on a recorded line and this call is produced for the media, this investigating Brian Lynch—”

“It sounds like you don’t have an active emergency and it appears you’re in crisis,” the dispatcher said again. “Please dial 988 for the crisis line.”

“No it sounds like you’re a liar—”

The dispatcher hung up.

Lux called 11 more times. Each time, she criticized the dispatcher for hanging up on her, and the dispatcher told her she was in crisis before releasing the line again.

While the Constitution protects Lux’s right to use vulgar and disrespectful language, her First Amendment protections aren’t unlimited. If Lux abuses her rights to free speech and to request public records, those rights can be restrained, said Joan Mell, an attorney on the board of the Washington Coalition of Open Government, a nonprofit that defends the state’s open government laws. Harassment—defined as conduct that “seriously alarms, annoys, harasses, or is detrimental” to a specific person and that “serves no legitimate or lawful purpose”—isn’t allowed under Washington state law.

But the 15-year protection order against Lux seems “way abusive,” Mell said after reviewing the order.

“I think this protective order is unconstitutional. I certainly have no problem arguing that,” Mell said. “It so far exceeds the necessary court intervention to ensure that this public worker does not receive any more public disclosure requests than can possibly be justified.”

Dwyer, the clerk’s attorney, told InvestigateWest that he is “confident that the protection order is constitutional” and that Lux received due process throughout the proceedings.

“The City takes seriously the duty to protect its employees from unlawful harassment, and this duty extends to third party harassment. Further, the First Amendment does not protect all speech directed towards governmental officials,” Dwyer wrote in an email response to InvestigateWest.

Riddhi Mukhopadhyay, director of the Washington nonprofit Sexual Violence Law Center, however, agrees that the city’s attempted silencing of Lux likely went too far. “A survivor felt like the system failed her, and that a specific department failed her, and they got sick of her criticism, and then essentially decided that they would use the law to place a gag order on her,” Mukhopadhyay said. “The system gets to decide what is an appropriate means for your criticism. And that is really disturbing.”

In late June, Lux got an email from Dwyer accusing her of violating the clerk’s protection order.

But the alleged violation wasn’t for contacting the clerk. It addressed Lux’s “frequent lewd” emails to Mayor Ross, Lynch, and the city administrator, in which she’d called city officials “dirty bitches” and “fucking losers who kill and rape,” and told them to “eat the shit they are hiding on my crime,” among many other vulgar phrases. Some of those emails contained public records requests—which is not allowed under the order.

Afew weeks later, Lux got a criminal citation in the mail. The city had now accused her of misusing the 911 emergency response system, a misdemeanor crime punishable by up to 90 days in jail. The charges were based on her calls from June, when she’d dialed the city’s dispatch center 13 times over 37 minutes. For those 37 minutes, she’d tied up the emergency line and the on-duty dispatcher without reporting an emergency, the city alleged. Although Lux would often call the nonemergency line, her calls were answered by the same personnel who answer 911 calls, making it a “distinction without a functional difference,” the city noted in a court filing.

Snoqualmie had created the crime just a few months before, after Lynch presented the ordinance to the City Council. He’d shown statistics on “one prolific caller” who contacted the Issaquah 911 Dispatch Center—which handles Snoqualmie’s emergency and nonemergency service calls—over 260 times since 2023.

Though Lynch didn’t identify Lux by name, he shared audio recordings with KOMO News to demonstrate the person’s calls. The news segment reveals Lux’s voice telling a dispatcher, “We don’t pay you for nothing,” and “Quit acting like a child right now.”

This time, Lux hired a lawyer to defend herself.

“The City has drafted an unconstitutional ordinance prohibiting core First Amendment activity because it has grown tired of taking Ms. Lux’s calls,” argued her lawyer, Isham Reavis, in a motion to dismiss the charges.

On a sunny August morning last year, Lux arrived early for her 9 a.m. hearing at the Issaquah Municipal Court building, a paper coffee cup clutched in her hands. She huddled close to Reavis as they talked in low voices about what to expect.

Lux was quiet when she entered the courtroom. Shepard and another friend of Lux’s filed in behind her and took seats in the back. Lux thought her friends’ presence might help if the mayor and police chief showed up again. But the city officials didn’t come this time.

The judge read out the charges. Her attorney replied that Lux was pleading not guilty, and the judge set her next court date. Then he warned Lux that if she called 911 or a city’s nonemergency line without reporting a crime or providing new information, she could be taken into custody.

“If I find out about it, it’ll be a violation,” he said. “Any questions now, Ms. Lux?”

Lux stood before him, silently looking to the judge and her attorney for permission to speak. No one had mentioned the rape. There was only one thing left for Lux to say.

“No, your honor.”

Five months later, days before the case was set to go to trial in late January, the city asked a judge to dismiss the criminal charges. But the city made it clear that if her behavior continues, they could charge her again.

“This matter is still ongoing,” Dwyer wrote in an email after the charges were dismissed. “The City reserves the right to take all appropriate legal action going forward.”

InvestigateWest (investigatewest.org) is an independent news nonprofit dedicated to investigative journalism in the Pacific Northwest. Reporter Kelsey Turner can be reached at kelsey@investigatewest.org.