Veronika Rodriguez (Lebanon County District Attorney”s Office).
A woman from Pennsylvania has been sentenced to jail after she falsely reported a rape to the police and illegally recorded the accused man without his permission.
In May, a jury in Lebanon County found Veronika Rodriguez, 27, guilty of false reporting, intercepting communications, and releasing those intercepted communications.
On Wednesday morning, she received a 30-day jail sentence and will serve around an additional 22 months on probation, as announced by the Lebanon County District Attorney’s Office.
In January 2023, Rodriguez, then a member of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, went on a date with a military doctor.
The incident involved the two drinking alcohol and engaging in sexual activity in the man’s car while parked at the Keystone Conference Center in Fort Indiantown Gap, a lightly populated area about 30 miles from Harrisburg.
Police approached the car for being parked after-hours and the incident later appeared on a police blotter, the prosecutor noted.
Rodriguez later alleged that the encounter was non-consensual and claimed the man took her glasses, impairing her vision, according to a York-based Fox affiliate WPMT.
However, the timing of her accusation was significant, as she only made the sexual assault claim after both she and the doctor were reprimanded by National Guard officials for inappropriate fraternization, authorities reported.
The recordings told a different story.
Rodriguez told local police her phone had recorded part of the alleged sexual assault. Police seized the phone, which contained both a conversation between the pair and part of their sexual encounter.
The ensuing investigation into the phone’s contents contradicted some of the woman’s claims, authorities claimed. Detectives discovered a later text message back-and-forth where they set up another date. Investigators also found that Rodriguez had sent video and audio to another contact after describing her night with the doctor.
“The Defendant had consensual sex that she secretly recorded and bragged about to a multitude of friends. She falsely cried rape only when confronted about fraternization with the victim by her military superior,” Lebanon County District Attorney Pier Hess Graf wrote in a statement after the verdict. “She then manipulated the secret recording to try and make it appear as a rape. A full review of the Defendant’s cell phone’s evidence was damning and proved otherwise.”
The prosecutor elaborated on the evidence against Rodriguez during a press conference after the verdict, NBC affiliate WGAL reported. The case had drawn local and national attention over how the state handled the incident.
“Every step of the way, this was consensual,” Graf said. “Not only do you have those messages between the two parties, but you also have the way she described it to her friends and in every text, in every message, it was consensual.”
The district attorney took her critics to task in a post-sentencing statement obtained by WPMT.
“It is no coincidence that all of the members of law enforcement and the public who actually saw the evidence, who actually heard the testimony, and who actually had to endure listening to 60 minutes of a sexual encounter all came to the same conclusion — that Veronika Rodriguez was not sexually assaulted, that Veronika Rodriguez had lied to law enforcement,” Graf said.
The prosecutor also addressed the convicted woman for the role she played in the doctor’s forced resignation from his military career.
“With her heinous and wholly false report of rape, (Rodriguez) stole his career and his future,” Graf went on. “He resigned from the military, lost his military pension, and still receives continued harassment to this day.”
