Ex-Asst. Wash. AG Pleads Guilty in Phone Harassment of Former Neighbor
An assistant Washington state attorney general has resigned from his job and pleaded guilty to telephone harassment after reportedly impersonating a former neighbor on adult websites and telling strangers she was interested in having sex with them.
The unidentified victim, who is also a former co-worker of attorney Jonathan Milstein’s wife, received dozens of phone calls from individuals who attempted, she said in a letter to the court, to talk with her about “pornographic, disgusting acts he told them I wanted to engage in,” according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times.
These calls were “very scary,” the victim says, especially since they often were made when she was home alone with two small children, and she feared that some of the strangers seeking sex might someday show up on her doorstep, according to Senior Deputy Prosecutor Ivan Orton.
Agents from the FBI interviewed some of the individuals who contacted the victim, obtaining information from them that led authorities to Milstein’s computer.
Milstein, who is 41, could have faced up to a year in jail after being convicted of the gross misdemeanor in the King County District Court case. However, he was sentenced yesterday under a plea bargain to 240 hours of community service, the newspapers report. He apologized to the victim and her family in court and has been seeing a therapist, his lawyer says.
He formerly worked for the state attorney general’s office, handling child protection cases for the state Department of Social and Health Services.
Orton says his office wanted to send a message to others by prosecuting Milstein that such conduct is not a prank, reports the Post-Intelligencer. “It is criminal behavior, and it will be treated as criminal behavior as we did in this case,” he states.
