The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office said it will not pursue criminal charges against a now-retired Long Beach police officer accused of sexually assaulting a 17-year-old girl he met while on duty.
Allegations against Ali Assef, an officer with LBPD from 1987 to 2017, came to light in a civil lawsuit filed in late 2022, shortly after the state loosened the statute of limitations on old sexual assault cases.
A woman, now in her 40s, said that Assef groped and sexually assaulted her on three occasions after he met her at Dales Diner in 1995, where she worked as a waitress. The Long Beach Post is not identifying her because it generally does not name people who say they were victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to make their identity public.
Assef previously declined to comment on the allegations.
The DA’s office said it decided against pursuing criminal charges against Assef because there was “insufficient evidence.”
The decision is outlined in an Oct. 17, 2023 memo that the Long Beach Post recently obtained. In the memo, a prosecutor wrote that Assef’s accuser refused to be interviewed by the LBPD sex crimes detective tasked with looking into her allegations.
The woman declined to be interviewed because she was in the middle of a lawsuit against Assef, according to her attorney, Timothy Hale.
As a substitute, Hale said, he provided the DA’s office with a transcript of her deposition in the civil case.
“She spent a full day under oath being grilled by the defense lawyers, so every bit of information there is to be had about what happened to her is in that transcript,” he said.
The DA’s office decided against pursuing criminal charges four days before they received the transcript. A spokesperson for the district attorney’s office said they reviewed the transcript after the fact, but it “did not provide evidence that altered our original decision to decline prosecution.”
With her civil case now settled by a $495,000 payout from the city of Long Beach, Hale said his client “would be more than willing and ready to be interviewed personally” by criminal investigators.
Hale, who has litigated childhood sexual abuse for 26 years, said the woman was “as compelling and strong as any survivor I’ve ever represented.”
Long Beach did not admit any wrongdoing in the settlement, deciding to pay the money “to avoid the uncertainty and additional expenses associated with a jury trial,” Long Beach Deputy City Attorney Howard Russell said previously.
Although the crimes were alleged to have happened more than 30 years ago, they could potentially still be charged because there is no statute of limitations for offenses that carry a potential life sentence, like rape and sexual penetration.
In one of the assaults detailed in the lawsuit, the woman said Assef parked his police cruiser next to the mouth of an alleyway that she needed to walk through to get to her car after work. The two talked for a short while, then he had her follow his car to a secluded area where she said he sexually assaulted her and pointed out that he could arrest her and take her to jail, the lawsuit says.
The LBPD’s investigation, initiated on Feb. 14, 2023, involved contacting the owner of Dale’s Diner to confirm the accuser was employed there in 1995. The LBPD detective in charge of the investigation also attempted to locate police records, including “timekeeping and unit history reports,” according to the charging memo.
The detective submitted his findings to the DA’s office on April 4, 2023, stating he was unable to locate employment records or records on Assef’s whereabouts during the alleged incidents.
Hale disagreed with the DA’s decision not to pursue charges, but he acknowledged that the burden of proof is higher for criminal cases than a civil suit.
In late February 2023, Hale sent a request to the LBPD detective in charge of the case asking that the department consider referring the matter to the State Attorney General’s Office to avoid any potential conflict of interest.
Per department policy, the investigation was handled internally and was not referred to an outside agency, said LBPD spokesperson Allison Gallagher.