SAN FRANCISCO — A 25-year-old Stanford University employee was arrested Wednesday and charged with perjury for allegedly lying about being raped twice on campus last year, authorities said.
Jennifer Ann Grice of Santa Clara first reported the false sexual assault in August, when she told a nurse at Valley Medical Center in San Jose that a man grabbed her while she was in a campus parking lot, dragged her into a restroom and sexually assaulted her. her, the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office said.
In October, she went to Stanford Hospital for another rape test and told the nurse who was performing the test that she was returning to her office after lunch when the man grabbed her arm, forced her into a basement closet and raped her, prosecutors said. She again refused to talk to police, they said.
Both of Grice’s sex-assault test kits were quickly analyzed “given the extreme risk to public safety of a potential sex offender,” prosecutors said, adding that the lab results were “inconsistent with her story.”
In both cases, she signed a consent form acknowledging that the nurse was an authorized reporter to inform law enforcement of the assault and signed forms to receive public funds, prosecutors said.
In January, during an interview with a district attorney’s investigator, Grice admitted to lying about the rapes and wrote a letter of apology to the person who became the target of her allegations.
“She stated that she was upset with the victim because she felt he had ‘false intent’ and turned her friends against her,” prosecutors said.
Griess was charged with two counts of perjury and two counts of falsely reporting a crime to nurses at two different hospitals, prosecutors said. It was not immediately known if she had an attorney who could speak on her behalf.
Stanford said in a statement that Grice had been placed on leave and the university “will be reviewing her performance.”
“These false reports harm both the actual victims of sexual assault and the members of our community who have felt fear and anxiety because of the reports,” the university said, adding that false reports in sexual assault cases are rare.
Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen called the alleged false rape reports “a rare and very devastating crime” and said he sympathized with those falsely accused, students who had to look over their shoulders and “legitimate victims of sexual assault.” who wonder whether to believe them.’
The reports of rape led Stanford University police to issue campus-wide electronic alerts, sparking widespread fear and protest in October by hundreds of students who marched to demand that the university do more to protect students.
Investigators also found that Grice filed a sexual harassment complaint in March 2022 against a male colleague with the university’s human resources department, which found the allegation unsubstantiated, prosecutors said. The employee matched the description Grice gave to the nurses she reported the rape to.
On the university’s website, Gries is listed as the head of the housing services center.
In 2016, the university was in the national spotlight after an emotional statement from Chanel Miller, who was sexually assaulted on campus by Stanford athlete Brock Turner, went viral. Turner, a star swimmer, was infamously jailed for six months for sexually assaulting an unconscious Miller last year.
Judge Aaron Persky, who issued the sentence, was recalled by voters in 2018, becoming the first judge to be recalled in California since 1932.
