One attorney rapes the other Cora Faith

The Ferguson, Missouri, attorney opened by introducing herself to her soon-to-be colleagues.

“My name is Cora Faith Walker,” she wrote in a letter to Missouri House Speaker Todd Richardson and two other House leaders. “I will be in the Capitol in January as the Representative of the 74th District.”

But it was the next two sentences 31-year-old Walker penned that would upend a lawmaking body already embroiled in controversy.

“Earlier this week, I reported a sexual assault to the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department,” Walker wrote. “I named my rapist as Steven Roberts, Jr., who hopes to be in the Capitol next year as the Representative of the 77th District.”

The single-page letter, sent by email to Missouri House leadership and first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, again pointed the spotlight at a Missouri state house previously accused of having a “sexist culture.” Both Walker and Roberts are Democrats who are running unopposed for their seats and are expected to be sworn in in January.

The day after Walker sent the letter, she told Post-Dispatch columnist Tony Messenger that the alleged assault occurred sometime between the night of Aug. 26 and the morning of Aug. 27 after she met Roberts at a St. Louis apartment around 9:30 p.m.

The two of them would soon be the only black lawyers in the Missouri legislature, Walker told Messenger, and they had set up the meeting to discuss how they might work together.

They reportedly had two glasses of wine, Walker told the paper, and she woke up the next morning in a bed at the same apartment, with no memory of what happened after drinking the second glass of wine.

“I had no recollection of why I was still there,” she told Messenger. The following day, she informed her husband, Tim Walker, about the incident, but it took them several weeks to decide to go to police.

Walker confirmed the reported details of the allegations to The Washington Post on Sunday but said she could not speak more about them until a police report was made publicly available.