Man films as he sexually assaults woman he met on dating app, Georgia officials say
A Georgia man filmed as he sexually assaulted a woman he met on a dating app, officials say.
The man, who threatened to share the video if his accuser reported the attack to police, is now going to prison for 50 years, the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office said Thursday.
Darryl Joseph Clark, 38, was using the dating website Plenty of Fish when he and a woman became a match, according to prosecutors. The two met in person in July 2017, and the woman visited his apartment the next day, officials say.
But when Clark “initiated physical contact, she got up to leave,” the district attorney’s office wrote on Facebook.
He pushed the woman, choked her and forced her to perform a sex act, which he caught on video, according to the post.
Clark told the woman he would release the footage “to ruin her career” if she spoke out, prosecutors say.
But she ended up reporting the incident to police in Acworth, a city roughly 30 miles northwest of Atlanta, according to Cobb County officials.
During trial, she “testified about the lasting effects of the assault, including having to take a year off work, nightmares, and flashbacks,” according to prosecutors. Nurses also told the court the woman’s injuries indicated she was choked “with significant force,” officials say.
Another woman who had a relationship with Clark testified about having an experience similar to the reported encounter from July 2017, according to the Facebook post.
“This Defendant viewed women as objects, expected them to give him sex, and was willing to use threats and violence to get what he wanted,” Drew Healy, assistant district attorney, said in the post.
Now, Clark has been convicted of aggravated sodomy and aggravated assault, prosecutors say.
He was ordered to serve a 50-year sentence, with credit for time served since 2017, officials say. If he gets out of prison, he will be on probation for the rest of his life and forced to register as a sex offender, according to the district attorney’s office.
“Thanks to his victims being willing to come forward, this repeated predator will not be able to victimize any other women,” Healy said in the Facebook post.
The case wasn’t the only alleged sex crime caught on camera.
In North Carolina, a woman sued Tinder and Snapchat this month after she said footage of her reported rape spread online, The News & Observer reported.
And in South Carolina, an attacker took a picture during a sexual assault at a college library last year, The State reported.
This story was originally published January 31, 2020 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Man films as he sexually assaults woman he met on dating app, Georgia officials say."
