Ill. officer fights abuse allegations

On the western edge of town sits a ranch-style building that might be called nondescript if it weren't for the top-to-bottom aqua paint job and the little sign mounted just above the front door.

"The Play Pen Gentlemen's Club," it reads in playful, multicolored letters.

A few blocks away in this town of about 500 residents on the Indiana border is the white cinderblock headquarters of the Belgium Police Department, whose officers make frequent "walk throughs" at the Play Pen.

But prosecutors claim former part-time police Lt. David Lewis wasn't just looking for troublemakers when he made several stops a night at the strip club. They accuse Lewis of forcing himself on seven women who danced at the bar between September 2004 and February 2007, allegedly having sex with some of them while he was on duty and armed.

Lewis, 45, was arrested in April on charges that included criminal sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual assault, criminal sexual abuse, obstructing justice and armed violence. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Earlier this month, a Vermilion County jury found him guilty of sexual abuse and official misconduct in the first case to go to trial. He is scheduled to be sentenced Nov. 19.

As both sides prepare for as many as six more trials, they provide starkly different portraits of Lewis and his alleged victims.

Prosecution witnesses from the first trial painted Lewis — known to dancers at the Play Pen as "Gunner" — as an aggressive womanizer who used his position to coerce strippers into kissing or having sex with him.

But Lewis' attorney, Mark Christoff, said his client's character should be weighed against that of his accusers.

"Nobody wants to seem to back up and look at why it's ... strippers that all work together making these allegations," Christoff said in a recent interview. "Dave Lewis has never had a problem in his life up until these allegations all start coming out."

The 25-year-old woman he was convicted of abusing said sometime after 3 a.m. on March 17, 2006, Lewis pulled over her Ford Expedition as she left work at the Play Pen. As Lewis stood outside the open driver's side window, she said, she asked him what she'd done wrong.

"Nothing," she said he told her, before reaching through the window, putting one hand behind her neck and the other between her legs and forcing her to kiss him.

The woman said she stomped on the accelerator, speeding away with Lewis still reaching into the SUV.

The Associated Press generally does not identify victims of sexual abuse.

A short time she drove away, she said, Lewis tried to call her three times on her cell phone, adding that he apparently had her number from an earlier police report he'd taken at the Play Pen. Phone records produced in court indicated someone called the woman at 3:23 a.m. from a Belgium police number. Lewis was the only officer on duty. She said that was the last call, received as she sat in her driveway in Homer, 18 miles west of the Play Pen.

Christoff told jurors that records showed the woman made three calls between 3:07 a.m. and the call from the police department, leaving little or no time for the traffic stop. He said the woman couldn't have gotten home by 3:23 if she left work after 3 a.m.

But it took the jury about two hours to convict Lewis, who has been held in isolation at the Vermilion County Jail since April.

No dates have been set in the other cases against Lewis.

Among the other accusations were that Lewis, while armed, forced one woman to perform oral sex on him. Others accused him of forcibly kissing them and exposing himself while he was on duty.