US Air Force says it has no plans to investigate Senator Martha McSally's rape claims

New military court ruling could make prosecution of attacker impossible

The Air Force said Friday that it had no plans to open an investigation into Senator Martha McSally’s revelation that she was raped by a senior officer while serving in the Air Force.

In a statement, Ann Stefanek, chief of media operations, said the Air Force could not begin an inquiry until Ms McSally agreed to participate in one or new information came to light.

In a powerful public testimony on Wednesday, Ms McSally, the first woman in the Air Force to fly in combat, told a Senate hearing room that she had been raped by a superior officer, one of multiple times she was sexually assaulted while she served her country.

In a Congress with a historic number of women, Ms McSally’s revelation was another example of a female lawmaker coming forward to share a personal story of sexual assault. Senator Joni Ernst said in January that she had been raped while she was in college, and had been emotionally and physically abused by her husband. Representative Katie Porter has spoken openly of the domestic abuse she said she suffered in her marriage.

But Ms McSally’s revelation was the latest surfacing of a claim of sexual assault in the military, which has struggled to deal with the issue even as more combat roles have been opened to women.

Ms McSally did not name the superior officer. Nor did she offer details of the assault.

Any attempt by the Air Force to prosecute Ms McSally’s attacker would now appear to be impossible because of a ruling made by the military’s highest court last month, just two weeks before Ms McSally disclosed the rape publicly at the hearing on Capitol Hill.

On 22 February, the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces threw out the conviction of an Air Force lieutenant colonel who had sexually assaulted a female enlisted subordinate because the case had been brought long after the expiration of the five-year statute of limitations on military rape cases that was still in effect in 2005, when that assault occurred.

While Congress amended the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 2006 to eliminate the statute of limitations on rape cases, the appeals court ruled that the case against the lieutenant colonel was required to have been brought within the statute of limitations in effect at the time.

The New York Times