Va. woman sexually assaulted at Massage Envy speaks out | The ... - Sacramento Bee

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A woman who was sexually assaulted and “held down by the neck” by her massage therapist is calling on Massage Envy to change company policies after several others have reported their incidents to police.

“It’s not just powerful men that get away with sexual assault, it’s powerful companies too,” Danielle Dick, a professor from Henrico County, Va., recently wrote in a Medium blog. She wrote it as a part of the #MeToo campaign, which inspired thousands of women around the world to share their survivor stories of sexual assault and harassment to show the magnitude of the issue.

The assault happened in November 2015 in a Richmond, Va.-area Massage Envy location, WTVR reported, and Dick is just now starting to talk about it publicly. A year after the assault, Daeshawn Bullard, 26, was convicted of object sexual penetration and sexual battery and sentenced to five years in prison, according to online court records.

“I’ll spare you the horrible details of those 90 minutes at Massage Envy, but in the end I found myself with a masseuse’s hand around my throat, and then face down with his hand covering my mouth while he violated me,” she wrote. “Despite the masseuse’s whispered demand at the end of our session ‘Our little secret, OK?’, I immediately reported the incident to the manager on duty at Massage Envy.”

Dick said in her blog post that the 11-month court process was “long, humiliating, and painful,” even though Bullard admitted to the assault.

“He maintained through the end that he did it ‘for my pleasure,’ ” she wrote.

But the way she was treated by Massage Envy made it “even worse,” Dick wrote in her blog post.

She said after the assault, she reported it to the manager who refused to call 911 and told her “the incident would be handled internally,” WTKR reported.

“The manager did call the next day — to tell me that they understood that I was ‘unhappy with my massage experience’ so they would not charge me for the massage,” she wrote.

And Dick wrote that her case is one among several others where clients have been sexually assaulted by Massage Envy workers.

In September, a Washington D.C. Massage Envy therapist was charged with sexually assaulting two clients, NBC Washington reported. Two other woman have accused the same therapist of sexual assault since those charges were filed, WTOP reports.

Massage Envy is facing a $25 million dollar lawsuit from one of the victims who is accusing the company of covering up suspected sex assaults, WJLA reported. The victim’s lawyer told WJLA that massage envy workers were aware Habtamu Gebreselassie had been accused of sexually assaulting other victims in Maryland and transferred him to another location as a result.

In June, Massage Envy therapist David Egusquiza was charged with sexual battery for assaulting a client, the Miami Herald reported. He allegedly told the victim to keep it a secret before she told police, according to state documents.

Dick has started a Change.Org petition with more than 14,000 signatures calling on Massage Envy to change company polices in “to protect their clients and to support individuals who are sexually assaulted at Massage Envy stores.”

Massage Envy, a corporation with more than 1,200 stores nationwide, has responded to Dick’s petition with the following statement:

“We are deeply concerned by this and, although this is an active legal case and we can’t comment on the specifics, we have reached out to Ms. Dick, through her counsel, to continue to listen to and better understand her concerns and ideas. We can tell you that we expect franchisees to treat every member and guest with dignity and respect, and that includes support for reporting incidents to law enforcement.”

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