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Seattle man pleads down rape charges to get less than three years in jail

By Joanna Small
By Joanna Small

SEATTLE — A former reporter and photographer will spend nearly three years behind bars.

Michael-Jon Matthew Hickey, 41, was sentenced today for indecent liberties and assault charges-- but prosecutors say Hickey is a serial rapist.

Michael-Jon Matthew Hickey set up a fake social media profile and posed as a female porn recruiter.  The state attorney general's office fined him $300,000, but the case became criminal when women who met Hickey through that ruse but also just organically said he raped them.

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​He was sentenced Friday, but not for rape.

Four women approached the bench inside a King County Courtroom and told a judge how they will never be the same.

"I keep my body covered, I question people's motives when they talk to me," one of the women said.

"I was 17. Because of you my entire world was deemed unsafe," another said in a letter written by a victim's advocate.

Each says they were raped by Michael-Jon Matthew Hickey after they were so intoxicated they passed out.

"When I woke up I had barely any clothes on and he was assaulting me," another woman told the judge.

Friday they all stood just feet from the man they accused.

"Matt you are a rapist and what you did is unforgivable."

But the prosecution, the judge, and the defense all said rape is very difficult to prove when the victim has little to no memory of what happened.

"I think I could have won some of these—I might have been able to win all of them, the state knew it too.  And that's why they made this resolution," Hickey's defense attorney James Bible said in court.

So Hickey pleaded guilty but to lesser charges— the most serious of which was indecent liberties.

None of the charges were related to Hickey's fake porn recruitment business where documents say he lured women into having sex with him by convincing them it was for an audition tape.

Sydney Brownstone has been waiting for a year and half to watch this work its way through the criminal system. She wrote The Audition, an article published in The Stranger in June 2016 that resulted in the state attorney general fining Hickey $300,000.

"Right after that came out several more women reached out to me and said they had been raped by Hickey—most of them outside the audition scam," Brownstone told us outside the courtroom.

Friday Brownstone watched her investigative work come to fruition but not the way she—and these women—had hoped.

"It's interesting in this case because there are women prosecutors, there are women judges, there's women who came forward and all of them acknowledged that the system doesn't work for them," Brownstone concluded.

The prosecution and defense had agreed to 30 months for indecent liberties but the judge gave 34, the maximum. She said she wishes the other count could be served consecutively to add more time to that—but the law doesn't allow it.

Cox Media Group

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