A former congressional aide and Obama staffer dodged jail time Friday after he pleaded guilty to drugging and sexually assaulting a former intern and another woman.
According to The Washington Post, the former intern said during the trial that Donny Ray Williams Jr. invited her to his Capitol Hill apartment one night after work where he promised to introduce her to other employees in the Senate. Instead, Williams slipped some Ambien sleep aids into her drink, and then raped her after she fell into a deep sleep.
A month later, prosecutors said Williams invited another woman to his house where they drank alcoholic beverages until the woman was too intoxicated to give her consent, at which point Williams had sex with her.
Prosecutors asked the judge to suspend Williams’s four and a half-year prison sentence, because even though he committed multiple heinous crimes, Williams later became a victim himself, in an unrelated crime.
In July of 2013, about a year after he was arrested for the sexual assaults, Williams was walking down a Washington, D.C. street when a man approached him and threw acid in his face before running away. Williams said at first he thought the liquid was coffee, but then he felt pain like he was on fire.
The now unemployed Williams, who said he thinks a jealous ex-boyfriend of a woman he was dating is responsible for the attack, received second- and third-degree burns to his face, is blind in one eye and nearly blind in the other, and has racked up more than $1 million in hospital bills.
Noting the more than 20 surgeries Williams has undergone since the acid attack and the additional life-threatening surgeries he still faces, the judge in the case suspended Williams’s prison term, saying the government’s reasoning in asking for the suspension was “practical and reasonable,” the Post reported.
In lieu of jail time, Williams was sentenced to five years of supervised probation and was ordered to register as a sex offender for 10 years.
Williams began working on the hill in 1999 for Rep. Elijah Cummings before he moved on to work on the Homeland Security Act of 2002, after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In 2009, he started working in the White House as the Obama administration’s congressional liaison for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development until he began working as a staff director for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs subcommittee in the Senate.
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