Heartsounds Member 'Humiliated' By Police Handling Of Sexual Assault Report

US musician Laura Nichol, guitarist/vocalist for Oakland-based punk outfit Heartsounds, was left "humiliated, defeated and disillusioned" following a protracted and pained encounter with Las Vegas police while attempting to file a sexual assault report, she has said.

In an unflinching and descriptive post on Facebook, Nichol recounted that, as a guest attending a night-swim party for Vegas nightclub XS at the Encore hotel, her "body and vagina [were] groped by a stranger in the pool" after she had already suffered a non-consensual ass-grabbing earlier in the night that she had chosen to let go.

Then Nichol found the guy that had felt her up in the pool and "let loose on him with my fists" while yelling at him, which swiftly led to them being separated and individually questioned by security. However, Nichol — who also works as project co-ordinator for the San Francisco Giants baseball team and was the vocalist for melodic death metal outfit Light This City — says that, following a "sympathetic" exchange with some female guards, she was treated with blatant skepticism by a male guard who had arrived to inform her that she would need to be questioned, and then "led out through the halls of the crowded Encore in handcuffs".

"The first room they took me to had someone in it, so they had to lead me back out in front of everyone in handcuffs," she wrote. "When I protested going back in front of everyone like that — it's pretty humiliating — the guard angrily said, 'Well you don't want to be in there with HIM, do you?'" 

Nichol waited in cuffs for "about an hour" before Las Vegas police officers arrived, at which point she says she was treated to more skepticism from two male officers due to a lack of video footage — "I wondered out loud, if there was no footage of the act, does he just then get away with it?" she wrote — and had to defend against an account from a lifeguard who claimed he'd seen her dancing with the suspect before the altercation ("ABSOLUTELY FALSE").

"I was making eye contact with my BOYFRIEND across the pool most of the time I was in there with his SISTER," Nichol wrote. "I didn't dance with ANYONE last night, and anyway, how would that refute my story of the guy groping my vagina if it were even the case?"

When she tried to explain that she wanted to press charges over the incident, she says the police tried to dissuade her from doing so by painting the process as more effort than it was worth, and were "condescending and callous". Her insistence led one officer to sarcastically call her "a peach", then that guy's superior officer — "Another male, for a total of three male LVPD officers," she said — decided that wasn't sexist and called her "confrontational", and then, oh yeah, she was banned for life from Encore as well as its sister resort Wynn and escorted off the property.

She's still going to press charges, though. Fuck yeah, Laura Nichol.

"Though my faith has faltered against the system I will be using to pursue action against the guy that groped my vagina, I will still be pressing charges against him," Nichol wrote. "What he did was not ok. It doesn't seem right that I was led away in cuffs, kept in cuffs for two hours while being detained, and treated like a criminal and an inferior sex by the LVPD officers and Encore staff.

"I am humiliated, defeated, and disillusioned. But beyond that, I [am] sad and scared for the many more girls that will go through the same thing because guys can so easily get away with this type of thing, and no one wants to take accountability for preventing it or punishing those who do it."

You can read her full account of the pretty grotesque chain of events below.