Lawyer arrested in alleged assault of golf club employee; club didn't call cops, offered her $500
A 59-year-old Wisconsin lawyer was arrested Monday in the claimed sexual groping of an employee at a golf club.
However, Christopher Hale has not been charged in the Aug. 16 incident at the River Club of Mequon, and his attorney points out that the standard for an arrest is lower than the standard for bringing a criminal case, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports.
“Once the case is reviewed, we’ll get an opportunity to refute what are clearly spurious claims,” Hale’s attorney, Michael Hart, told the newspaper. Hale spent a night in jail before he was freed Tuesday on $10,000 bail.
Hale, who is both a member of the club and does occasional legal work for the club, groped the woman, over and under her clothing, after she drove up in a beer cart as he was playing golf at the club’s eighth hole, she said.
The woman, who is in her 20s, was a college student working part-time at the club for the summer. She has not returned to work since the incident.
Although she told her supervisor about the claimed assault, the club did not call police, general manager John Haines told the newspaper.
Club owner Tom Weickardt called the incident a “he said-she said” matter, and Haines said he had informally consulted a retired police detective and a lawyer and followed their advice to get statements from both sides.
Haines and attorney Kevin Demet, who now represents the woman, said the club offered the woman $500 to resolve the matter if she signed a confidentiality agreement. However, they disagreed on what some terms of the proposed “resolution,” which was not accepted, were to be.
The money was intended to compensate the woman for lost work time and was to be obtained by imposing a $500 fine on Hale, the Journal Sentinel says.
