Boston City Councilor Ricardo Arroyo, running for Suffolk County district attorney, is discussing the case file regarding 2005 sexual assault allegations against him after suing for its release.
Documents were released Friday from the Boston Police Department's 2005 sexual assault investigation into current Suffolk County district attorney candidate Ricardo Arroyo, files that a judge had allowed to be shared with him with personal information redacted.
The Arroyo campaign said the documents "prove that both the Suffolk County District Attorney's office and the Boston Police Department reviewed allegations 17-years ago against him and determined them to be unfounded." Arroyo had previously said the files — not usually released under state law — would prove he did nothing wrong after being accused of assault while he was a teenager.
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Arroyo's campaign first released several pages of documents; the city released the full set of documents later Friday. They included the pages shared by the Arroyo campaign, one of which notes that a member of the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office concluded by January 2006 that "there was no crime committed." Citing that finding, police determined the case was unfounded on July 21, 2006.
The full document also includes a page that appeared to contradict Arroyo's claim, made at a news conference Aug. 24, that he had never been aware he was the subject of a police investigation.
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A case update from 2005 indicated that Arroyo, now a Boston city councilor, told detectives over the phone he'd been informed of the allegation. Earlier in the day, his mother had told the investigators that Arroyo "had been upset when informed by the school of the accusation," one detective wrote.
In an interview with NBC10 Boston, Arroyo said he didn't remember speaking with an officer because he was going through a very traumatic time in high school.
Arroyo was stripped of his City Council leadership positions following a Boston Globe report outlining separate allegations from 2005 and 2007. While he initially retained key endorsements in the district attorney's race, he lost them in droves Wednesday — a day after his accuser in the 2005 case, a high school classmate, spoke anonymously to the Globe.
She said that how Arroyo reacted to the initial report of her alleged assault made her "sick to my stomach." The woman has not been publicly identified.
The vote in the district attorney primary is Tuesday.
Arroyo accuses his opponent in the primary, interim Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden, of selectively leaking some of the documents to hurt his campaign.
The city councilor told NBC10 Boston that a detective named in the documents is a driver for Hayden.
“The detective who closed my case, who came to the conclusion it was unfounded, is actually Kevin Hayden's driver. And so I think that the connections that we continue to find are troubling. He hasn’t addressed them, ever," Arroyo said. "Again, back to my call for an independent investigation — [Hayden] never did an internal investigation, and now we find, because I finally have documents that nobody thought I would ever be able to get, that the detective on this case was Kevin Hayden’s driver."
NBC10 Boston asked Hayden's office about that driver, Dante Williams.
"Det. Williams was assigned to this office long before Kevin Hayden became district attorney. One of his responsibilities is driving the DA. Any allegation that he leaked information on any case is absurd," a spokesperson for the Suffolk County District Attorney's Office said in a statement Friday night.
Hayden, who did not sit for an interview, released a statement before the files' release Friday saying, "Nothing in the file suggests or indicates that the allegations were unfounded. Also, nothing in the file questions the validity of the victim's statements."
The Arroyo campaign said the documents it released showed that statement to be a line. One document shows the detective found the case should be cleared as unfounded and went on to say that no crime was committed.
Boston Superior Court Justice Debra A. Squires-Lee ordered Thursday night that the Boston Police Department hand over all documents, with personal information redacted, to Arroyo by 2 p.m. Friday.
Hayden has also recently come under fire after a Boston Globe report about his office's handling of a 2021 case against an MBTA Transit Police officer who allegedly pulled a gun on a driver while off-duty. The newspaper reported that an investigation launched by then-District Attorney Rachael Rollins stalled after Hayden took over.
