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Chaplain, charged with rape, faces accusers

NORFOLK, Va. — They said he spoke of himself in the third person, boasted of White House connections, claimed to have endured traumatic ground combat in Iraq, was a fan of text messaging and bragged of his prowess on the basketball court.

One sailor said she accepted his support after the death of a shipmate. Another said she accepted his persistent mentorship and applied for a nurse commissioning program. And both young female enlisted sailors said their relationship with Lt. Shane R. Dillman quickly led to sex with him in late 2007.

One in dungarees and the other in service dress blues, the two accusers appeared in a courtroom July 24 testifying — and, at times, crying — about their alleged encounters with the then-command chaplain of the aircraft carrier Carl Vinson.

The following day, a third female witness in the Article 32 hearing testified via telephone from Iraq.

She said she met Dillman — a spokesman said he’s Pentecostal — through Bible study in Kuwait and continued a sexual affair with him there at Camp Arifjan starting in the fall of 2005. The alleged relationship continued back in the U.S. until the spring of 2007. When she broke up with him, she said, he told her “the Lord had taken his hand off of me, that I was following the devil, and that I was a bad person.”

The second witness in Iraq was a male Marine corporal who is dating Dillman’s alleged enlisted ex-girlfriend, who is deployed.

Dillman, 35, faced multiple counts of sexual misconduct and other violations during an Article 32 hearing that featured testimony from 10 witnesses, four of them young enlisted women who had allegedly been involved with him in one way or another. Dillman remained silent. The two-day hearing wrapped up July 25.

He is accused of five charges with multiple specifications including rape, harassment, adultery, fraternization, making threats and “calling a female enlisted service member to his office while wearing only his underwear.”

In the courtroom, he wore khakis, a high-and-tight haircut, a straight face and a wedding band. Beside him was Charles Gittins, one of the nation’s top defense lawyers in military cases, whose recent high-profile case involved the Marines accused of massacring Iraqi civilians at Hadithah in 2005.

In August 2007, charges were dropped against his client, a Marine lawyer who was accused of failing to fully investigate the action.

On the first day of Dillman’s defense, Gittins’ hard-charging style often left the two female accusers crying as he forced them to recount their experiences, which at times differed from previous statements to investigators or to prosecutors earlier in the hearing.

According to testimony, Dillman is married. The alleged victims are female junior enlisted service members. A third female sailor in Iraq testified about their “secret” relationship. The fourth female witness, a Carl Vinson crew member, testified to a relationship that was at times “awkward” but involved Dillman lending her money and a credit card when she was in financial trouble.

Abuse of power?

The allegations date back to September 2005, when Dillman was at Camp Arifjan and continue up to January of this year. There are also allegations of events in the Wilmington and Jacksonville areas of North Carolina; Hampton Roads, Va.; and Bethesda, Md.

The Vinson has been undergoing a refueling complex overhaul at the Newport News, Va., Naval Shipyard since 2005. Dillman reported aboard in July 2006 and was assigned as command chaplain until the end of January, when the investigation was underway. He was reassigned to Naval Air Forces Atlantic.

The investigation was kicked off when one accuser’s live-in boyfriend, a petty officer second class, discovered intimate text message traffic with Dillman on her mobile phone in late December while she was out shopping for a dress.

Witnesses said Dillman told tales of enduring ground combat in Iraq as a chaplain, although that is not reflected in his Navy biographical data — or any of the ship’s literature lauding his good works.

“He talked about war a lot,” one accuser told the court, noting that he’d shown her photos of carnage. “The first picture he opened up was an Iraqi person and his head was gone.”

One of his charges involves possessing “visual images depicting human casualties.”

One sailor said Dillman told her he had been shot while acting as an “interrogator,” that he was part of a special operations team and had taken part in secret missions. Because he was a chaplain, she said, he claimed he would not be forced to “testify” about what happened in the war zone.

Whether he actually went to Iraq is unclear. After the hearing, Navy Times asked Dillman about his claims of combat action in Iraq.

“We were mostly stationed in Kuwait,” he said, gripping a helmet bag festooned with Iraq campaign and combat unit patches, including an Iraqi national flag.

When asked if he’d ever set foot in Iraq, Dillman replied, “We were all over the place.”

Back in the hearing, the two young E-3s said they had trouble interpreting Dillman’s alleged advances, given his role as a religious leader and an officer.

“He started asking me weird questions about my past,” one said. “I trusted him. He was the chaplain.”

He’s also accused of making threats. One of the alleged victims testified that Dillman said he would have the parents of his former lover — the enlisted female now serving in Iraq — audited by the IRS. The alleged victim went on to testify that she was concerned for the safety of her boyfriend, the petty officer second class who later sparked the investigation by discovering the text messages.

“He [Dillman] said all he had to do was make one phone call and he could have my boyfriend taken care of,” she told the investigating officer, Cmdr. Stephen Jamrozy.

The charging documents state Dillman allegedly told a witness “that he was one of the ‘most powerful men on the ship next to the Captain’ and could ‘ruin anyone’s life if he wanted to,’ or words to that effect.”

Raising doubt

During cross-examination, defense attorney Gittins painted the accusers as willing sex partners, keeping in regular cell phone contact after the events they described. As one alleged victim put it, “he forced me to have sex with him” and said she cried “before, during and after” an encounter at Dillman’s apartment.

Gittins argued that one allegation was not rape by dissecting details of the encounter and by questioning her regular cell phone contact with Dillman in the days after. Her phone records revealed often-lengthy conversations.

“You claim that you were raped by a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and you talked to him for hours on end?” he asked.

That alleged victim said she was having immigration trouble at the time and was worried she would be deported. She said she believed if she remained friendly with Dillman, “he wouldn’t do anything against me.” She just got her U.S. citizenship this summer, she said.

Gittins pounced on differences between the second accuser’s statements to investigators and her testimony, getting her to admit she had gone to a movie with Dillman, had dinner with him, had sex with him in a hotel on one occasion and twice in an apartment he allegedly shared with a Navy “judge.”

In an account of their second encounter, the accuser said Dillman told her to pack an overnight bag because he was accompanying a senior officer to Bethesda, Md., and that she should come along, as it would be a good “career opportunity” for such a young sailor. She said she drank in her apartment before meeting Dillman.

And instead of driving to Maryland, she said she followed him to a hotel where he reserved a room. They then went to a nearby mall, he bought her a hat, they ate dinner, she drank some more and went back to the hotel.

Afterward, “he said he cared about me a lot. I said ‘I care a lot about you, too,’” she said at the hearing. “I’d just say it so I could get out of there. I didn’t mean it because I had a boyfriend and I love my boyfriend.”

She said on their third alleged encounter, at his apartment, she refused to get out of his car, but she relented when he “tugged” on her arm and told her she had to come in because it’s a “bad neighborhood.”

Gittins poked holes in her testimony, as well.

“The testimony [she] gave sounded like a date, not rape, and it happened three times,” he said in his brief closing remarks. He also offered as evidence a search of lodging records for the past by the hotel’s assistant manager, claiming they showed no record of either Dillman or the woman.

Honored by others

The stories in the hearing room contrasted wildly with Dillman’s public persona.

In May 2007, he was recognized for distinguished service by the U.S. Military Chaplains’ Association. In a shipboard news article from June 2007, he was quoted as saying, “The true job of the chaplain is showing the troops that you care,” after he was recognized for an individual augmentee deployment from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda and under an expeditionary medical facility based at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

He was commissioned in 2000. A newsletter published by the Military Chaplains Association said Dillman has been endorsed by the Coalition of Spirit-Filled Churches, which includes Pentecostal, Renewal and Charismatic traditions, according to its Web site.

His former supervisor at Bethesda, retired chaplain Capt. Nathaniel Milton, testified that Dillman did a “stellar job,” though he seemed to feel he had been “short-changed” for not getting a billet in the fleet or with the Marines.

Under the Article 32 procedures, the investigating officer will take his findings and make a recommendation to the convening authority, in this case Naval Air Forces Atlantic. While he can recommend anything from a general court-martial to captain’s mast to dismissal of all charges, the convening authority also is free to ignore the recommendation and take his own action.

If he is sent to trial and convicted, the case would be the second major black eye for the Navy Chaplain Corps in less than a year. An HIV-positive Roman Catholic Navy chaplain was sentenced in December to no more than two years in the brig for sexual misconduct with several men, including an enlisted Marine, an Air Force officer and two Naval Academy midshipmen.

Prosecutors traded a relatively light sentence for information that only Lt. Cmdr. John Thomas Matthew Lee could provide regarding the identity of people he potentially infected so they could be notified of their exposure and tested.

In the end, Lee pleaded guilty to two counts of sodomy, one count of aggravated assault, three counts of conduct unbecoming an officer, two counts of failure to obey a lawful order, and three lesser charges.