A 25-year-old Stanford employee was arrested Wednesday and charged with perjury for allegedly lying about being raped twice on campus last year, authorities said.
Jennifer Ann Gries of Santa Clara first reported the fake sexual assault in August, when she told a nurse at Valley Medical Center in San Jose that a man grabbed her while she was in a campus parking lot, dragged her to the restroom, and sexually assaulted her, the district attorney’s office said. Santa Clara County.
In October, she went to Stanford Hospital for another rape examination and told the examining nurse that she was returning to her office from lunch when the man grabbed her arm, pushed her into the basement and raped her, prosecutors said. She once again refused to speak to the police, they said.
Both Gries sexual assault kits were quickly reviewed “given the extreme risk to the public safety of a potential sex offender,” prosecutors said, adding that the lab results “were not consistent with her story.”
In both cases, she signed a consent form acknowledging that the nurse was an authorized reporter who must inform law enforcement of the attack and signed the forms to obtain public funding, prosecutors said.
In January, during an interview with a District Attorney’s Office investigator, Gries admitted to lying about the rapes and wrote a letter of apology to the man who was the target of her allegations.
“She stated that she was upset with the victim because she felt he had given her ‘false intent’ and turned her friends against her,” prosecutors said.
Gries was charged with two counts of perjury and two misdemeanors of making a false report of a crime to nurses at two different hospitals, prosecutors said. It was not immediately clear whether she had an attorney to speak on her behalf.
In a statement, Stanford said Gries had been placed on leave and the university would “review her employment.”
“These false reports are damaging to both real victims of sexual assault and members of our community who have experienced fear and anxiety about the reports,” the university said, adding that false reports of sexual assault cases are rare.
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen called the alleged false reports of rape a “rare and deeply destructive crime” and said he felt sorry for those who were falsely accused, students who had to look over their shoulder and “legitimate victims of sexual assault “. who wonder if they will believe them.”
Reports of rape prompted Stanford University police to issue electronic alerts across campus, sparking widespread fear and protests in October from hundreds of students who marched to demand that university authorities do more to protect students.
Investigators also determined that Gries filed a sexual harassment complaint in March 2022 against a colleague in the university’s human resources department, who said the allegation was baseless, prosecutors said. The associate matched the description Gries had given to the nurses she reported the rapes to.
Gries is listed on the university’s website as a housing service center supervisor.
In 2016, the university was in the national spotlight after a statement about the emotional impact of victim Chanel Miller, who was sexually assaulted on campus by Stanford athlete Brock Turner, went viral. Turner, a swimming star, infamously received a six-month sentence for sexually assaulting an unconscious Miller the previous year.
Judge Aaron Persky, who delivered the sentence, was impeached by voters in 2018, the first judge to be impeached in California since 1932.
