FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 25, 2025

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Alexis Posel, [email protected]  

Former Prosecutor and Whistleblower Calls for Reform of Corrupt Police Department and Justice for Victims of Sex Crimes

A new New Yorker exposé shines a light on Whistleblower Aid client Kateri Dahl’s fight to bring a serial rapist of historic proportions and the department that failed his victims to justice 

Washington, D.C., March 25, 2025 – Former Special Assistant United States Attorney Kateri (Kat) Dahl has spent the last five years pursuing justice for the victims of sex crimes in Johnson City, TN. Her determination to not give up on these victims, including over 60 victims of a single serial rapist, is detailed in a major investigative story published by Ronan Farrow in the New Yorker. 

Kateri Dahl was a prosecutor in Johnson City, Tennessee who urged the department to arrest suspected (now convicted) serial rapist Sean Williams and more diligently investigate other sex crimes. Her efforts eventually forced the department to attempt to arrest Williams in 2021, who fled and remained at large before eventually being arrested in April 2023. After briefly escaping police custody and being recaptured, he has recently been sentenced to 95 years in prison while he awaits other trials. 

A 2023 city-commissioned independent audit of the police department, spurred by Dahl’s whistleblowing and subsequent litigation, found systemic police mishandling of sex crimes consistent with Dahl’s claims. For her role in exposing the mass crimes of Williams and the rampant police failures in prosecuting him and others, Dahl faced retaliation leading to her dismissal from working with the Johnson City Police Department (JCPD). 

“I greatly appreciate Ronan Farrow’s relentless reporting on this important story, and I am grateful for Whistleblower Aid’s support in helping me to call out those who gravely mishandled this case. It is my deepest wish that this story leads to answers about who enabled Sean Williams to terrorize the Johnson City community for over a decade,” said Kat Dahl. “The Tri-Cities area has always been close to my heart and the people there deserve to know why this tragedy was allowed to happen. There are still many questions which the Johnson City Police Department and the city of Johnson City need to answer. Ronan’s story also shines a light on a broader issue at the heart of the Sean Williams case: how we treat sexual assault in our criminal justice system, and how law enforcement fails too many survivors. I am not the first nor will I be the last to call out how our justice system responds to survivors, but hopefully this case will serve as both a wake up call and a roadmap to better practices, both in Johnson City and elsewhere.”

Dahl’s courageous and tireless pursuit of justice continues to impact the Johnson City community to this day. The City recently settled a civil suit with some of Sean William’s victims for $28 million. The City continues to litigate in the matter of unlawful employment retaliation against Dahl, as the community reckons with the catastrophic failures of their police department that continue to be brought to light. 

“Kat Dahl never stopped pursuing justice for the victims of sex crimes in Johnson City, and at great personal cost to her career and life has managed to put one of the most prolific sexual predators in our nation’s history behind bars,” said Andrew Bakaj, Chief Legal Counsel for Whistleblower Aid. “The systemic failure to protect victims and rigorously pursue perpetrators of sex crimes is not unique to Johnson City. I join Kat Dahl in calling for a robust and transparent reform of the Johnson City Police Department and I hope her story inspires those in law enforcement everywhere to call out and redress shortcomings in their own department’s sex crimes prosecutions.”

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Whistleblower Aid provides pro bono legal, advocacy, and communications support to government and private sector whistleblowers acting in the public interest. The organization’s lawyers have represented some of the most consequential national security and Big Tech whistleblowers in history, including the Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen, the anonymous intelligence community whistleblower whose disclosures led to the first impeachment of President Trump, and others.

Whistleblower Aid is a 501(c)(3) organization.