She accused a Special Forces operative of rape. He was quietly court-martialed and acquitted.

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Noah Shachtman
@NoahShachtman
NEW: She accused a Delta Force soldier of rape. He was set to be tried in civilian court. Then the Army swooped in.
A photo collage depicting a female military officer with a hand over her mouth.

Delta Force's Dirty Secret
She accused a Special Forces operative of rape. He was quietly court-martialed and acquitted. Then the Army erased all record of the trial testimony. Now she demands answers.
rollingstone.com
9:29 AM · Dec 21, 2021

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/delta-force-army-rape-coverup-1271045/

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https://archive.ph/lmzk1

For Erin Scanlon, a junior Army officer in the artillery branch, Fort Bragg was a prime posting. The blond 25-year-old from suburban Phoenix had secured a lieutenant’s slot in the storied 82nd Airborne Division thanks to the good offices of one of her ROTC instructors at the University of Arizona. “He was a really good mentor that I looked up to,” she tells me recently. “He had been in Delta Force.” Scanlon lived off-post in an apartment in Fayetteville, a moody military town in the North Carolina pines just outside of Fort Bragg, the biggest Army base in the U.S. On the evening of Sept. 9, 2016, a friend of hers from the gym, a military wife whom I’ll call “Tina” to protect her privacy, invited her to a charitable event at a barbecue restaurant and bar called Mac’s Speed Shop. It was a fundraiser to honor five slain Green Berets, hosted by “some SF guys,” Tina texted.

The Special Forces of the U.S. Army are based out of Fort Bragg, as is the powerful and secretive Joint Special Operations Command, making this spot, inland of the Eastern Seaboard, the central node in the United States’ global special-operations complex. But Scanlon’s unit, despite its distinguished pedigree going back to World War I, is a division of the conventional Army, which is kept separate from top-secret JSOC by high walls, both literal and figurative.

Scanlon and Tina arrived at Mac’s shortly before 10 p.m. A number of motorcycles were parked out front. They belonged to members of the Coast x Coast motorcycle club, made up of active-duty soldiers on Delta Force, a classified manhunting unit that is the Army component of JSOC. A nonprofit associated with the club, the Coast x Coast Foundation, raises money through annual cross-country motorcycle rides to honor fallen special operators. The founder and CEO of the nonprofit is a 39-year-old man, Cristobal Lopez Vallejo, who goes by the alias Cris Valley. He was host of the event at Mac’s that night. Right as Scanlon and Tina walked into the crowded barbecue joint and beer hall, Vallejo stopped them, “tried to flex, laughed, and walked away,” Tina would later recall to a Fayetteville detective.

Vallejo, dressed in camouflage cargo shorts and a T-shirt, was tall, lean, strong, and fiercely handsome, with a black beard and shaggy brown hair much longer than most soldiers get to wear. “Throughout the whole night he kind of acted like a celebrity,” Scanlon says. “Going around chatting with people like a politician.”

*snip