Veronika Rodriguez (Lebanon County District Attorney”s Office).
A Pennsylvania woman will spend time behind bars after falsely reporting a rape to law enforcement and illegally recording the man she accused without his consent.
In May, Veronika Rodriguez, 27, was found guilty by a Lebanon County jury on one count each of false reporting, intercepting communications, and disclosing intercepted communications.
On Wednesday morning, the defendant was sentenced to 30 days in jail – she will spend roughly 22 additional months on probation, the Lebanon County District Attorney’s Office announced.
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In January 2023, Rodriguez, then a member of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, went on a date with a military doctor.
The pair drank alcohol and had sex in the man’s car while parked at the Keystone Conference Center in Fort Indiantown Gap – a sparsely populated census-designated place located some 30 miles northwest of Harrisburg.
Police approached the car for being parked after-hours and the incident later appeared on a police blotter, the prosecutor noted.
Rodriguez later claimed the sexual encounter was not consensual and that the man took her glasses so she could not see clearly, according to York-based Fox affiliate WPMT.
But timing was key. The woman only leveled the sexual assault claim after both she and the doctor were confronted by National Guard officials about fraternizing, according to authorities.
The recordings told a different story.
Rodriguez told local police her phone had recorded part of the alleged sexual assault. Police seized the phone, which contained both a conversation between the pair and part of their sexual encounter.
The ensuing investigation into the phone’s contents contradicted some of the woman’s claims, authorities claimed. Detectives discovered a later text message back-and-forth where they set up another date. Investigators also found that Rodriguez had sent video and audio to another contact after describing her night with the doctor.
“The Defendant had consensual sex that she secretly recorded and bragged about to a multitude of friends. She falsely cried rape only when confronted about fraternization with the victim by her military superior,” Lebanon County District Attorney Pier Hess Graf wrote in a statement after the verdict. “She then manipulated the secret recording to try and make it appear as a rape. A full review of the Defendant’s cell phone’s evidence was damning and proved otherwise.”
The prosecutor elaborated on the evidence against Rodriguez during a press conference after the verdict, NBC affiliate WGAL reported. The case had drawn local and national attention over how the state handled the incident.
“Every step of the way, this was consensual,” Graf said. “Not only do you have those messages between the two parties, but you also have the way she described it to her friends and in every text, in every message, it was consensual.”
The district attorney took her critics to task in a post-sentencing statement obtained by WPMT.
“It is no coincidence that all of the members of law enforcement and the public who actually saw the evidence, who actually heard the testimony, and who actually had to endure listening to 60 minutes of a sexual encounter all came to the same conclusion — that Veronika Rodriguez was not sexually assaulted, that Veronika Rodriguez had lied to law enforcement,” Graf said.
The prosecutor also addressed the convicted woman for the role she played in the doctor’s forced resignation from his military career.
“With her heinous and wholly false report of rape, (Rodriguez) stole his career and his future,” Graf went on. “He resigned from the military, lost his military pension, and still receives continued harassment to this day.”
