Last year, an Orange County jury convicted three young men for the 2002 videotaped rape and molestation of an unconscious 16-year-old girl on a pool table in a Newport Beach garage. The case made national headlines not just because the drunk men laughed as they repeatedly shoved a Snapple bottle, apple-juice can, lit cigarette and a pool cue in both of the girl's lower orifices, but because one of the defendants was the son to an assistant Orange County sheriff, Don Haidl.
If Haidl also happens to be exceptionally wealthy (via selling used government cars at auction), then he was more than a bit jaded. He spent millions to humiliate the victim. Private detectives tailed her, dug through her family's trash cans, filmed her day and night, illegally released her personal medical records, and hired a defense lawyer who called her “a slut” in court, claimed that she raped the three men (Gregory Scott Haidl, Keith James Spann and Kyle Joseph Nachreiner) and demanded her arrest. (The nastiness prompted me to write many stories, but in the end, there was this one.)
Thanks to the work of the Orange County district attorney's office (in particular, Chuck Middleton, Brian Gurwitz and Susan Kang Schroeder), which overcame a 13-attorney defense onslaught and won convictions after a second trial, on March 10, 2006, Superior Court Judge Francisco Briseno sentenced the weeping defendants to six-year prison terms.
Where are they now?
• Gregory Scott Haidl, 22, lives with 4,889 other inmates at Pleasant Valley State Prison in Fresno County.
• Kyle Joseph Nachreiner, 23, joins 3,700 other men who make their home inside Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe.
• Keith James Spann, 23, resides at Norco State Prison in Riverside County.

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.