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Pieper Lewis, right, speaks with her attorney Magdalena Reese during a sentencing hearing in Des Moines, Iowa.
Pieper Lewis, right, speaks with her attorney Magdalena Reese during a sentencing hearing in Des Moines, Iowa. Photograph: Zach Boyden-Holmes/AP
Pieper Lewis, right, speaks with her attorney Magdalena Reese during a sentencing hearing in Des Moines, Iowa. Photograph: Zach Boyden-Holmes/AP

Appeal raises $150,000 for girl ordered to pay family of accused rapist she killed

This article is more than 1 year old

Judge had ‘no other option’ but to impose restitution on human trafficking victim given probation with risk of 20 years’ prison

Donors to a GoFundMe appeal have raised enough money to pay the $150,000 restitution an Iowa court ruled a teenage human trafficking victim must pay to the family of her accused rapist, whom she stabbed to death.

Pieper Lewis, 17, was originally charged with first-degree murder in the June 2020 killing of 37-year-old Zachary Brooks of Des Moines. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and willful injury, both punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

On Tuesday a Polk county district judge, David M Porter, deferred those prison sentences. If Lewis violates any portion of her probation, she could be sent to prison to serve that 20-year term.

As for being required to pay the estate of her rapist, “this court is presented with no other option”, Porter said, noting the restitution is mandatory under a state law that has been upheld by the Iowa supreme court.

A former teacher of Lewis, Leland Schipper, organized the GoFundMe appeal, which by Wednesday lunchtime had surpassed the required amount.

“I am overjoyed with the prospect of removing this burden from Pieper,” Schipper wrote, adding: “A child who was raped, under no circumstances, should owe the rapist’s family money.”

Schipper said the money would be used first to pay off the $150,000 restitution and an additional $4,000 owed to the state. The surplus would then “remove financial barriers for Pieper in pursuing college/university or starting her own business [and] give Pieper the financial capacity to explore ways to help other young victims of sex crimes”, Schipper said.

Lewis was 15 when she stabbed Brooks more than 30 times in a Des Moines apartment. Officials have said Lewis was a runaway seeking to escape an abusive life with her adopted mother and was sleeping in the hallways of an apartment building when a 28-year-old man took her in before trafficking her to other men for sex.

Lewis said one of those men was Brooks, who raped her multiple times in the weeks before his death. She recounted being forced at knifepoint by the 28-year-old man to go with Brooks to his apartment for sex. She told officials that after Brooks raped her yet again, she grabbed a knife from a bedside table and stabbed him in a fit of rage.

Police and prosecutors have not disputed that Lewis was sexually assaulted and trafficked. But prosecutors argued that Brooks was asleep when he was stabbed and not an immediate danger to Lewis.

Iowa is not among the dozens of states that have a so-called safe harbor law that gives trafficking victims at least some level of criminal immunity.

Lewis, who earned her GED in juvenile detention, acknowledged in a statement before sentencing that she struggled with the structure of her detention, including “why I was treated like fragile glass”, not allowed to communicate with friends or family.

“My spirit has been burned but still glows through the flames,” she read from a statement. “Hear me roar, see me glow, and watch me grow.”

“I am a survivor,” she said.

Prosecutors took issue with Lewis calling herself a victim and said she failed to take responsibility for stabbing Brooks and “leaving his kids without a father”.

The judge peppered Lewis with requests to explain what poor choices she made that led up to Brooks’s stabbing and expressed concern that she sometimes did not want to follow rules in juvenile lockup.

“The next five years of your life will be full of rules you disagree with, I’m sure of it,” Porter said. He added: “This is the second chance that you’ve asked for. You don’t get a third.”

Karl Schilling, spokesperson for the Iowa organization for victim assistance, said a bill to create a safe harbor law for trafficking victims passed the Iowa house this year but stalled in the senate amid concern from law enforcement groups that it was too broad.

“There was a working group established to iron out the issues,” Shilling said. “Hopefully it will be taken up again next year.”

Iowa does have an affirmative defense law that gives some leeway to victims of crime if they commit a violation “under compulsion by another’s threat of serious injury, provided that the defendant reasonably believed that such injury was imminent”.

Prosecutors argued that Lewis waived that affirmative defense when she pleaded guilty to manslaughter and willful injury.

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