Beginning at the age of 11 and for the next four years, Jaime Rodriguez Rivera's daughter served as a sex slave in Orange County.
But, incredibly, that's not the most alarming fact.
The frail, skinny girl knew her serial rapist well.
He is her father.
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An office cleaner by trade, Laguna Hill's Rivera frequently took his
daughter with him to various OC businesses including churches,
bookstores, an electric company and–get this–the Lake Forest City
Hall–at night and, at his disgusting whim, used her for sex.
His
incest included forcing the girl to drink beer and then fondling,
digitally penetrating, raping and sodomizing her so often she bled,
according to court records.
Perhaps because Rivera didn't believe he'd sunk low enough, he also let strangers rape his daughter in public settings.
When
the girl was 12 years old, he took her with him to clean an Orange
County race-car business and, once there, told two unknown men that she
was 17 before allowing them to sodomized her, according to court
testimony.
A year later, he took his daughter to a Lake Forest
bookstore, ordered her to play “spin the bottle” with two different
strangers as a way to strip her before the men took turns sodomizing
her.
Whenever the terrified girl protested or struggled, Rivera
employed a carrot and stick tactic. He'd threaten that she'd never see
her siblings again if she talked. At other times, he told her that she
was more than his daughter. She was, he explained, his “special”
girlfriend and wife.
During the entire four years of the abuse the mother was present but unaware, according to court testimony.
At
his 2010 trial, Orange County prosecutors easily convinced a jury that
Rivera was guilty of 10 serious sex crimes including lewd acts on a child, aggravated sexual assault, forcible rape and forcible sodomy. Superior Court Judge Gregg
L. Prickett sentenced him to prison. Unhappy, he appealed his
convictions as unfair. There was no proof that he forced his daughter to
participate in sex acts, he argued.
This week, a California
Court of Appeal based in Santa Ana considered and rejected Rivera's
cries. They ruled there had been solid evidence that the girl felt
duress during the incest.
“The defendant is the victim's father
and, therefore, was in a position of authority over her,” the justices
wrote in a 12-page, March 13 opinion. “The victim testified she was scared of the defendant and always nervous that he might commit more
sexual acts against her. The victim stopped trying to say 'no' to the
defendant because he always ignored her . . . She felt unable to refuse
the defendant.”
Upshot: Rivera, 41, will continue to serve his 85 years to life prison sentence.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.