A Bloomington man was arrested and charged with the rape of a 25-year-old woman after photos and videos of passed-out, nude women were found on his phone.
Robert E. Childers, 26, was booked into the Monroe County Jail on Friday on a warrant for rape after a weekslong investigation into the case. He posted bond shortly after.
The 25-year-old woman told officials that on the night before Thanksgiving of 2015, Childers came to her house with a bottle of Jim Beam at about 8 or 9 p.m.
They had decided to drink together and hang out, Bloomington Police Department Sgt. Shane Rasche said.
After heavy drinking, the woman blacked out. The last thing she remembers was standing in her kitchen. She woke up the next morning noticing that her genital area was wet, but she didn’t know whether or not anything had happened the night before, according to the police report.
Childers and the woman had previously been in a brief relationship in the early summer of 2015, but the woman said the sex they had during that time was consensual.
She told Childers soon after that she didn’t want to continue having sex because she didn’t want to jeopardize their friendship, Rasche said.
BPD detectives began investigating the case earlier this month when a different woman told police she had seen photos and videos on her ex-boyfriend Childers’ phone that were disturbing to her.
In May, she saw a video of a woman passed out on a couch, facedown, wearing no pants. She noticed a man’s hands inserting objects into the woman’s genital area, Rasche said.
In December, while she was drinking with her then-boyfriend, Childers, she was able to look at his phone while he was passed out.
She noticed more photos and videos of nude women, who appeared to be unconscious, in photo albums categorized by the name of each woman. She saw in one of these videos that Childers’ hand appeared to have penetrated a woman’s genital area.
Childers contacted the 25-year-old woman Jan. 13, telling her that he wanted to harm himself and that police were investigating him, according to the report. Childers asked her to speak with his attorney and deny knowing anything about the videos.
Meanwhile, he admitted to the woman he took pictures and videos of her that were sexual in nature while she was unconscious.
The following day, the woman reached out to officials to report a sexual assault.
When the 25-year-old woman told her story to detectives, her description of multi-colored blankets on a couch matched blankets that were pictured in one of these videos.
Detectives then confirmed the 25-year-old woman was the same woman as the one in the videos.
The case is still under investigation, Rasche said.
