This one has an element of comedy to it. Madrid was a divorced mother of four who had relocated from Colorado; she appears to have had a love interest, yet one night in February 1995 she was out clubbing alone when she got into a dispute with a barmaid.
The police were called, and one officer wanted to arrest her, but Lopez offered to drive her home. She accepted.
Then they had sex.
She appears to have waited a while to report him. When the internal affairs investigation began, Lopez resigned and is said to have disappeared. She sued him and the police department.
In the UK, Lopez would not only have been sacked but prosecuted for misfeasance in public office or some such, and rightly so.
The civil trial before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patricia V. Trumbull lasted two days, and resulted in the eight member jury finding the sex was consensual. One reason for that might have been that in Colorado she had beaten her ex-husband’s lover! She was clearly not the kind of woman to submit out of fear as she claimed, drunk or sober.
See the entries for Victoria Patrick (May 2007), Catherine Steven (December 31, 1998) and Stephen McGuire and Raymond Waring (December 31, 2002) to see what can happen to chivalrous police officers who drive home drunken women, although in those cases the men hadn’t had sex with them, period.
[It should be noted that the Patricia Madrid alluded to here should not be confused with any other woman named Patricia Madrid.]
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