The two Columbus, Ohio, vice cops who led the 2018 arrest of AVN Hall of Famer Stormy Daniels at a strip club in that city face a whole new round of legal charges this week. This time, Steven Rosser and Whitney Lancaster (pictured above, l-r) face federal charges for allegedly violating suspects’ civil rights, and bilking a client for whom they worked a moonlighting job out of extra cash.
According to a report by the Law & Crime legal site, Rosser and Lancaster were arrested this week and charged with conducting warrantless searches and seizures, and detaining individuals without cause.
Both charges stem from incidents at Columbus strip clubs. But their most infamous strip club incident was the July 2018 bust of Daniels, which the Columbus Police Department later ruled to be “improper.” The cops were then disciplined and, in January of this year, fired for “gross neglect of duty and incompetence” in the arrest of Daniels on charges that were dropped less than 24 hours later.
Daniels later sued the city over the arrest, winning a settlement of approximately $400,000 late last year. Daniels claimed that the arrest was politically motivated, due to her then-active lawsuit against Donald Trump.
The two vice cops have also been sued by six women who worked as strippers at another Columbus club, alleging that Lancaster and Rosser arrested them wrongly as part of a revenge scheme against the club’s owner.
But legal issues for the now former vice cops continue to pile up. Federal prosecutors this week also charged them with wrongly double billing the owner of an indoor water park who hired them to monitor the facility for fire-related issues. But according to the charges against them, Rosser and Lancaster billed the water park owner for their time at the same time they were working paid, regular shifts in their jobs as Columbus police officers.
Photo by WBNS TV Screen Capture
