It is often heard that the wheels of justice turn slowly. And sometimes, as sexual assault survivor Ronda Hathorn can attest, the wheels just fall off.
“The hell that Ronda went through (the night of the sexual assault) and then what the system put her through was a nightmare,” Grafton County Attorney Marcie Hornick said when we talked on Wednesday. “This case will always stick with me.”
The first time the case was heard in November 2019, it ended in a mistrial. (More on that shortly.) Then came the COVID-19 pandemic, which put the entire legal system in a holding pattern.
A second trial was set for 2024. Two weeks before jury selection, the New Hampshire public defender overseeing the case left his job, resulting in the trial getting delayed until mid-2025.
The saving grace?
“Fortunately, it was the right outcome,” Hornick said.
On June 18, following an eight-day trial, a Grafton County jury found Michael T. Chamberlain, 50, guilty of aggravated felonious sexual assault for attacking Hathorn, his former girlfriend, in her Enfield home in May 2018. Until the jury verdict, Chamberlain had been out on bail.
“I’ve spent seven years living in terror,” the 57-year-old Hathorn told me. “I was sure he was going to kill me (the night of the attack) and my biggest fear was he’d come back to finish the job.”
(As a general rule, the Valley News doesn’t identify victims in sexual assault cases, but in an interview this week, Hathorn agreed to use her name.)
On Oct. 3, Grafton Superior Court Judge Lawrence MacLeod sentenced Chamberlain to eight to 18 years in state prison.
Abby Tassel, a survivors’ advocate at WISE, the Upper Valley nonprofit that focuses on gender-based violence, spoke on Hathorn’s behalf at the sentencing hearing. Reading from a statement that Hathorn had written, Tassel painted a vivid picture of what had happened before and after the attack.
Hathorn and Chamberlain, who was working in construction when they met, were together for two years before she broke off the relationship in 2015. One of the final straws was when Hathorn learned from friends that Chamberlain had been boasting about having sex with her after she taken sleep medicine at night. She later found out that he had also taken explicit photos of her when she was asleep.
After moving out of Hathorn’s house, Chamberlain would still come by “without any advance notice and creepily look in my windows,” Hathorn wrote in her statement. “Needless to say, it is terrifying to be a woman, living alone in the country and turn around to see a man staring in the window. To this day, I have trouble shaking the fear that someone is spying on me.”
After being out for the day on May 5, 2018, Hathorn was at home getting ready for bed. When she came out of the bathroom, Chamberlain, who it turned out still had a key to the house, was standing in the hallway. After being “attacked and raped, I heard Michael at the phone, erasing damning messages he had left for me that day,” Hathorn wrote.
After waiting a bit, Hathorn crawled across the floor to her landline phone. “I desperately wanted to try to get some help, but wasn’t sure that he wasn’t watching me (outside from a window),” she wrote.
Enfield and Lebanon police responded to her 911 call for help before she was taken to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. WISE, which is alerted when a sexual assault survivor arrives at an area hospital, sent an advocate to be with her.
Tassel, who wasn’t the one to initially respond that night, met with Hathorn shortly thereafter and has been at her side since. “There have been so many times that I didn’t know if I could keep going through this,” Hathorn said. “Abby’s my angel.”
Hathorn needed all the support that Tassel could give. In rape cases where the victim and the accused have previously been in a romantic relationship, guilty verdicts can be hard to come by. When the perpetrator doesn’t “break a window to get into the house and isn’t wearing a ski mask, the defense knows the general public has a really hard time understanding sexual violence against adults,” Tassel said.
During the initial trial in November 2019, Chamberlain’s attorneys seized upon a comment Hathorn had made about undergoing mental health counseling. The defense argued Hathorn’s testimony made her medical records fair game for the jury to hear about.
The legal wrangling led to the mistrial. The defense also wanted records from Hathorn’s closed-door sessions with Tassel. Ultimately, Hathorn and WISE succeeded in keeping the records from becoming public, but it led to further court delays.
Several times, Chamberlain waived his right to a speedy trial, which came as no surprise. Out on bail, Chamberlain, who was living in Grantham at the time of his arrest, was free to roam with no supervision.
“The lack of accountability was really shocking,” Tassel told me. “How is it possible that someone charged with felony sexual assault can just go about with their lives for seven years like nothing has happened?”
Good question.
In August 2017, the Grafton County Department of Corrections launched its “Pre-Trial Services Program,” which monitors and supervises defendants before trial to “ensure safety to the public and themselves while in the community,” the county’s website states.
In an email to the program’s director this week, I asked if Chamberlain was enrolled. I didn’t get a response.
Under his bail conditions, Chamberlain was supposed to be in checking in regularly with police in the community where he was living. But since he tended to move around, cops seemed to lose track of Chamberlain’s whereabouts and who was supposed to be keeping tabs on him.
When Tassel asked a law enforcement officer how this could happen, she says she was told, “police don’t have time to be babysitting.”
In December 2022, prosecutors sought an arrest warrant for Chamberlain, alleging he had violated bail conditions, but the court denied the request.
In every respect, the case was “absolutely an outlier,” said Hornick, a public defender for almost 20 years before taking office in 2019. The only thing it had in common with other sexual assault cases was that it went to trial.
“Nobody wants to admit that they sexually assaulted someone,” Hornick said, adding that along with prison sentences, defendants also want to avoid having to register as sex offenders for life.
It’s no wonder that defense lawyers’ strategy is often “delay, delay, delay,” particularly when their client is out on bail. The more time passes, “memories fade, cops and other witnesses move away,” Hornick said.
I left a message at the New Hampshire Public Defender office in Orford this week, seeking comment on Chamberlain’s case. I didn’t hear back.
After the attack and with Chamberlain out on bail, the state paid for Hathorn to have a home security system. But the state’s commitment lasted only one year. Since then, Hathorn, with help from WISE, has been paying the $1,600 annual fee.
Hathorn, who works in patient care at an Upper Valley health care provider, told me that she’s had difficulty focusing on work since the trial, which required her to spend two days on the witness stand.
She’s taking a break from work, getting a leave of absence through this month. Come November, however, her employer hasn’t guaranteed she’ll still have a job, if she still needs more time away, Hathorn said.
Meanwhile, she still has a mortgage and living expenses to cover. “I’m struggling to keep up,” she said.
Tassel recently started a GoFundMe drive on Hathorn’s behalf: gofundme.com/f/help-ronda-get-her-life-back-after-being-attacked
“She lives very simply, but she is now in danger of losing her wonderful little home because she has gotten behind on bills,” Tassel wrote in her fundraising post.
With Chamberlain now locked away on a mandatory minimum sentence of eight years, I guess you could say justice was served. Still, it shouldn’t have take this long to get the wheels back on.