The two Columbus, Ohio, vice cops who lost their jobs in January over their “gross neglect of duty and incompetence” when they arrested Stormy Daniels in July, 2018, continued to cost that city money this week.
On Monday, the Columbus City Council voted to settle a lawsuit brought against the city and former officers Steven Rosser and Whitney Lancaster by six strippers at the club Kahoots. The women alleged that the two voce cops unfairly targeted them for arrest as part of a vendetta against the club.
The club had earlier fired a bouncer who served as a confidential informant for Rosser and Lancaster. According to the lawsuit, the two vice officers vowed to harass the club, and the dancers who performed there, until the bouncer got his job back—which did, eventually, happen.
According to a Columbus Dispatch investigation, “every complaint filed by Columbus vice detectives between September 2017 and July 2018 was against Kahoots.”
But on July 11, the same two cops, along with others from the city’s since-disbanded vice unit, arrested Daniels at another club, Sirens, as she performed her striping act there. Daniels claimed the the bust was politically motivated, due to her then-ongoing lawsuits against Donald Trump. While the city did not admit political motivations behind the Daniels arrest, an internal investigation found it to be “improper.”
Daniels sued the city for $2 million, but agreed last year to a settlement of $450,000.
In the Kahoots lawsuit, the city will pay $185,000 to the six dancers who said they were wrongly arrested by Rosser and Lancaster. But one of those dancers, Carla Hoover, told WOSU Radio that the damages from her arrest have been far worse.
“I cannot work in the city of Columbus because I’ve been blacklisted,” Hoover told the station. “Which means my name is put out as someone who is not hireable because I fought against the charges that were put on me by Rosser and Lancaster.”
The city still has one more lawsuit to face arising out of Rosser and Lancaster’s alleged activities. The owners of Kahoots say in a suit that the vendetta against their club by the two vice cops did, as the officers allegedly threatened, put the establishment out of business.
Photo by WCMH-TV YouTube Screen Capture
