Saturday, Oct. 15, 2016 | 2 a.m.
A 40-year-old former Seattle man was charged Thursday with three counts of second-degree rape for repeatedly assaulting women who were too intoxicated to give consent, according to King County prosecutors.
Michael-Jon Matthew Hickey, who is better known as Matt Hickey, moved out of state after Seattle police started investigating rape allegations against him in June, charging papers say.
He was arrested just before 3 p.m. Friday in Las Vegas on a warrant calling for a $200,000 bail, according to Seattle police. A police spokesman was unable to provide further details of Hickey's arrest.
A week after the rape case against Hickey was assigned to a detective in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit, he was the subject of a news story in The Stranger newspaper accusing him of posing online as a female porn recruiter, say the charges. The newspaper reported that Hickey had lured six women to his Capitol Hill apartment, where the women were told they would have to audition by having sex with him, according to the charges. Three of the women did so, while three did not, say the charges.
"Throughout the investigation, nine females reported that Hickey had sex or attempted to have sex with them under false pretenses or stated Hickey had sex with them when they were too intoxicated to give consent," charging papers say.
Detectives made multiple attempts to contact Hickey, including going to his residence, but their phone calls and social-media messages to him all went unanswered, according to the charges.
The Stranger has described Hickey as a tech journalist who has done freelance work for the newspaper.
Hickey has been charged with raping three women, but only one of them — a now- 19-year-old who was raped in August 2014 — met Hickey through the porn ruse and went to his apartment so he could photograph her in lingerie, according to the charges.
Another woman, 32, alleges she was raped after Hickey came over to her apartment to make her hot toddies in October 2013, say the charges. A 35-year-old woman, who met Hickey through an online dating site, told police she was raped after returning with Hickey to his apartment following a date in February 2014, charging papers say.
All three women told police they drank alcoholic beverages prepared by Hickey, which they did not see him make, say the charges. The charges, however, do not explicitly allege that Hickey spiked the drinks with drugs.
Two of the three women woke up naked or half-naked and found discarded condom wrappers on the floor, charging papers say. The third had trouble getting home because she was so confused and called a friend, "who confirmed she sounded very 'out of it.' "
Two other women provided statements to police, but the statute of limitations had run out in those cases, say the charges. The charging documents also include allegations by two more women, ages 36 and 23, but charges have not been filed against Hickey in those cases.
Prosecutors say Hickey's "pattern is always the same," with each of the women providing remarkably similar accounts.
"The defendant has raped both acquaintances and women he has just met," and has committed multiple rapes "going back as far as 2001," Senior Deputy Prosecutor Carla Carlstrom wrote in charging papers.
"Most, if not all, of his victims 'black out' and have little memory of the actual sex. If the victim later confronts the defendant and accuses him of rape, he denies raping them and tells them they initiated it or were 'into it,' " Carlstrom wrote.
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