My Page: Hal Herring
sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Dasen Bid for Bail Denied BailRichard A. "Dick" Dasen, the one-time Flathead Valley business leader who was convicted last month on felony charges of sexual abuse, prostitution and promotion of prostitution, will remain in the Flathead County Jail, at least until his sentencing July 18.
Dasen's attorney, George Best, filed a motion to have Dasen released pending sentencing, citing among other reasons his client's need for daily exercise due to heart problems. Prosecutors have repeatedly said that Dasen is a flight risk and a threat to the community and should remain incarcerated, and on Wednesday, following a procession of witnesses called by Best and the prosecution, Judge Stewart Stadler agreed with them.
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sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Parsing the Verdict in the Dasen CaseOver and over, reporters and trial watchers wondered when Dick Dasen and his defense attorney would pull the rabbit from the hat, the rabbit that would contradict and explain that long procession of witnesses who testified to their sexual relationships with Dick Dasen and the money they received from him. The photos of the underage teenagers V and K engaged in sex - K with her braces and pink rubberbands - were in the white binder that had already been presented to the jury, so it seemed certain that the charge of sexual abuse of children would stick. (It did, along with five other charges; click here to read our news story on the verdicts.)
It is doubtful that V or K would claim that they had been “abused� that day. And if you wanted to view Dasen in the most positive possible light, you could argue that a 60-year-old-man who really loves sex could not be expected to refrain from relations with cash-hungry and willing nubiles. But the law does not really deal in such intangibles.
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Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Dasen’s Fate Now in Jury’s Hands | |
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| Richard A. Dasen (right) with his attorney, George Best at an earlier court hearing. | |
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The Kalispell courtroom was crowded Thursday, tense in anticipation of the final day of the Dick Dasen trial. Connie Guzman, whose daughter, now dead in a car crash, was a "Dasen girl", sat in the back. She’d been subpoenaed as a witness and thus barred from the courtroom until now. An entire front row was reserved for the members of a high school class. The television news people who have been here everyday for the past three weeks stood in the corner that has become their home. There was fearsome energy, tamped by a long wait outside the locked doors of the courtroom, a wait where people mingled in a divided room, with Dick Dasen and his family and friends mostly taking the side by the elevators and everyone else revolving around but not entering that space. [more]
Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Dasen: No Link Between Sex and Money
Dick Dasen took the witness stand in his sex-crimes trial on Tuesday and asserted that the many women he had sex with over the years were not doing it for the money. Rather, he testified, the encounters were a "pleasant experience" for all involved and entirely unrelated to the many thousands of dollars he paid to the women. Dasen, charged with promotion of prostitution, sexual abuse and sexual intercourse without consent for allegedly luring women and underage girls into sex-for-pay relationships, presented himself as a contrite and financially broken man with an adultery and gullibility problem of epic proportions. [more]
Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Prosecution Rests in Dasen TrialThe prosecution in the trial of Dick Dasen rested on Thursday, May 13th, after learning that their last witness was still recovering from complications following childbirth, and would have to make an extraordinary effort to appear in court. Prosecutors Lori Adams and Dan Guzynski also dropped the charge of promotion of prostitution related to that witness, and cleared the way for defense attorney George Best to begin his battle to prove that Dasen was tricked into his encounters with underage sex partners, that a tremendous number of predatory women took advantage of an aging and wealthy man renowned for his generosity, and that the sex acts were independent of the money that those women received. [more]
Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
A Sad Procession of WitnessesHolli Rose was the young woman who police used to set Dick Dasen up for his arrest on the afternoon of February 7th, 2004, the arrest that led to his trial on 14 counts of promotion of prostituion and related sex crims. She is a tall dark-haired woman who looks older than her twenty-three years. As she testifies, she is never too far from tears, the sadness upon her as plain as the severe black suit she is wearing. Rose said on the stand last week that she went to Dasen in the summer of 2003, to get money to escape an abusive boyfriend, the father of her daughter, and began a relationship with Dasen which included what has by now become a kind of repetitive chant of the female witnesses in this trial: “He came in...took off his clothes, performed oral sex...used sex toys...got dressed, went over to a little table and wrote out a check.� [more]
Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Witnesses Pile on the Evidence in Dasen Trial
Two more witnesses who were underage when they had a sexual encounter with Kalispell businessman Richard Dasen testified at his trial Tuesday. T and M were recruited to perform sexual acts for Dasen in late summer of 2003 by Kimberly Hope Niese, who is currently serving a prison term for aggravated promotion of prostitution as a result of the incident.
Niese also endured a long and arduous session on the witness stand Monday, describing a sexual relationship with Dasen that took her from a position of “living in my car with my boyfriend and my dog, and trying to maintain my (meth) habit,� to renting a three bedroom townhouse on 5th Avenue East in Kalispell. Niese collected as much as $15,000 in one month from Dasen, for a series of sexual “appointments� as she called them, and for setting up such appointments for Dasen with other women and girls, among them, T and M.
Defense attorney George Best started off the week with a clear plan: to establish that Dasen was fooled into believing that the women he was meeting for sexual encounters were at or above the age of consent.
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Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
Witness Describes Sex Scenes in Dasen HomeThe first of the underage witnesses in the trial of Richard Dasen took the stand Friday. Now a seventeen-year-old high school student, she's a diminutive and beautiful young woman, with long blond hair held back in a twist. She looks much younger than her age. She answered prosecutor Dan Guzynski’s questions in a small but unwavering voice, her innocent appearance a shattering contrast to the story she related. When she took the oath late in the day on Friday, the courtroom was exhausted from hours of contentious cross-examination of Leah Marshall, the first woman to testify against Dasen, the once-prominent Kalispell businessman who faces 14 criminal charges for allegedly luring numerous women and girls into sex-for-money transactions. [more]
Sex, Money and Meth Addiction
A ‘Dasen Girl’ Takes the Witness Stand | |
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| Leah Marshall testifies | |
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The prosecution team of Dan Guzynski and Lori Adams look very young standing across from defense attorney George Best and his client Dick Dasen in the Kalispell courtroom. In a sense the case here—the one decides whether Dasen will do years in prison for the 14 charges against him, or will somehow be judged the victim of the women and girls he allegedly exploited—pitches the vulnerabilities of youth against the privileges and powers of age.
Deputy County Attorney Lori Adams on Wednesday made the opening statements of the trial. Adams is a short young woman who dresses plainly and wears no make up. She seems like a woman who might be an enemy of the frivolous, one who has relied mostly on her keen wit to make an impression throughout her life. She began her statement with simple declarative sentences, not yet at ease as an orator, but getting better as she went along.
“Ladies and gentleman of the jury, the money and the sex is related…..Ladies and gentlemen, as you heard Judge Stadler tell you, the defendant is charged with 14 crimes in his case…these crimes can be broken down into two categories, those being crimes against our children—when we say children we mean people and girls who are under the age of eighteen…� Adams instructed the jury on the nature of the charges, and what she and Dan Guzynski, who looks like he’s been putting in an awful lot of hours, would have to prove to them over the course of the next few weeks. [more]
Film Review: 'Powder River Country'
Exploring Personal Loss & Coal Bed Methane
The Powder River Country of Wyoming and Montana is extreme fly-over territory, encompassing 11 million acres of sagebrush-steppe and coulee country, watered intermittently by snowmelt from the peaks of the Bighorns, collecting in the rivers of western legend, Crazy Woman Creek, the Little Powder, the Belle Fourche and the Powder itself. It’s mostly a dry country and what water there, away from these trickle-rivers, is alkali. Only the most radically independent and the hardest of hardscrabble ranchers have ever called it home, which means that there is still plenty of room here for the wildlife and birds that have been diminished in other parts of the West. The stars shine in a night sky unsullied by electric light or air pollution; the land is windswept and holds a kind of ancient silence that almost everywhere else has long been broken.
But as a new documentary from High Plains Films carefully and very personally shows -- the noise has come to the Powder River.
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