Dasen Found Guilty on Five Felony Charges

By Jonathan Weber, 5-20-05

Kalispell businessman Richard A. Dasen was found guilty Friday of one misdemeanor and five felony charges, including promotion of prostitution and sexual abuse of children, and was led off in handcuffs pending sentencing. He was acquitted of seven other charges, including two of the most serious - sexual intercourse without consent and aggravated promotion of prostitution. Dasen was accused of luring numerous women and girls, many of them methamphetamine addicts, into sex-for-money transactions with payments totalling more than a million dollars over many years.

The verdict virtually assures that Dasen will serve significant time in prison, though Judge Stewart Stadler will have considerable discretion in sentencing, which is set for July: the sexual abuse count can carry a penalty of up to 100 years but has no mandatory minimum. At the same time, the acquittals indicate that the jury agreed with the defense that some of the witnesses were not credible, and in fact were preying upon a man portrayed as generous to an extreme fault.

Flathead County Attorney Ed Corrigan called the verdict an "adequate response," while acknowledging that some might not agree with that. "It drives home the fact that [Dasen] is not a victim, he's a criminal, no matter how many good deeds he's done. That needed to be said by 12 good people."

The jury deliberated for a bit more than 10 hours Friday, and apparently made a series of judgements about which women were victims and which were, as the defense framed it, "preying" on Dasen. In the most important victory for Dasen, the jury rejected charges of sexual intercourse without consent relating to an encounter with two girls, one fifteen and one sixteen, in which the girls alleged that the agreed sex show between them escalated into Dasen penetrating them with a sex toy.

The family of one of the girls involved in that situation has filed a $5 million civil lawsuit against Dasen, which enabled the defense to assert that she had a motivation for lying.

Prosecutor Lori Adams said: "I don't think anybody is happy with this verdict. It's a tragedy for both sides."

Still, some of the advocates for the women - including Connie Guzman, whose meth-addicted daughter was involved with Dasen and was killed in a car crash in 2003 - were happy and relieved by the verdict.

The sexual abuse conviction arose from what was perhaps the prosecution's strongest piece of evidence: sexually explict photos taken by Dasen of two underage teenagers, one of whom very clearly appeared to be underage. But the jury acquitted Dasen of the promotion of prostitution charges relating to that same encounter, indicating that they viewed the girls as less-than-innocent victims.

By his own admission, Dasen had sexual encounters with scores of women over the years, and paid them extraordinary sums of money, in some cases tens of thousands of dollars. He contended that the sex and the money were not connected, and that he was simply a generous man who liked to "help" and that the women wanted to have sex with him. In the case of the five underage girls involved, he claimed that he didn't know they were underage and that he was duped.

But the women, many of the them poor meth users, painted a very different picture, one of a rich man who used his money and power to entrap them in sex-for-money relationships they were powerless to resist. He met many of the women through Christian Credit Counseling, an organization that helped people with financial problems; women came to him for help, and that "help" often turned into an arrangement in which he gave them large sums of money and they had sex with him. The money mostly went to feed drug addictions, and police say that money led to a significant surge in meth use in the Flathead Valley.

Dasen was for many years a proverbial pillar of the community in Kalispell, running successful real estate, finance and construction businesses and serving on the boards of numerous companies and not-for-profit organizations. He has been free on bail and living at his vacation home in Arizona since his arrest early last year.

For links to New West's full coverage of the Dasen case, including Hal Herring's six-part series, click here. [End of article]