She reported being raped in the Utah National Guard. In the 2 years since, she says, ‘they failed me at every turn.’

Editor’s note: This story discusses sexual assault. If you need to report or discuss a sexual assault in Utah, you can call the Rape and Sexual Assault Crisis Line at 801-736-4356. The National Sexual Assault Hotline is 800-656-4673.

Corinne Galland boxed up her past life in the Utah National Guard and spent a weekend packing it away inside a storage unit in Murray.

Her Army-issued uniforms. Her awards for excelling as a leader. The size 2 Lululemon leggings she was wearing the day she says she was raped by a superior officer.

It all feels like evidence — of her dedication to the military career she dreamed of and the only physical item she has from what she says destroyed it. How could she get rid of any of it? What if it could be used if the Army were to ever actually investigate her assault report?

She can’t stand to look at the reminders. She can’t stomach throwing them away. So they’re stuck in the metal-gated purgatory that costs her $200 a month.

She was a 27-year-old captain in November 2021 when one of her superiors raped her, she alleges, in an armory across the street from the Salt Lake City International Airport. A few weeks later, after she alleges he assaulted her twice more, Galland reported him to the guard.

For two years, she says, her rape report has been left in limbo for months at a time and ultimately was never looked into by the Army. The final say on whether her case would be forwarded for military investigation belonged to the head of the guard, Maj. Gen. Michael Turley, who resigned earlier this year after a “substantiated finding” of his own separate misconduct with a woman who was his subordinate.

His inappropriate relationship didn’t come to light until August, after the conclusion of a two-year investigation by the federal Army Inspector General.

Galland, now 30, believes her case shines a light on how reports of assault might have been mishandled under Turley’s administration and how the Utah guard’s process is flawed when alleged victims come forward.

When she first reported, Galland remembers being discouraged by the guard’s equal opportunity representative. She says he asked her: “Do you love your job?”

“Because if you do,” he said, according to Galland, “there’s a 99.9% chance you’ll lose it with these kinds of allegations against someone like him.”

And he was right. The man she accused was elevated to a position higher in the echelon of the guard shortly after she filed her report, a move that a guard spokesperson acknowledges could be “perceived” as a promotion but didn’t change his rank. And Galland — the only female commissioned officer in her brigade, aside from warrant officers — says she became so discouraged by the reporting process that she felt forced to resign.

Because Galland accused the man of both harassment and assault, her case was immediately put on hold by the Utah National Guard, says spokesperson Lt. Col. Christopher Kroeber.

Under the Utah guard’s policies, the assault claim is sent to civilian police to investigate. Meanwhile, the guard doesn’t question anyone or gather any possible evidence for harassment claims until the assault case is fully resolved by the criminal justice system and returns to the guard for possible action.

The last step at the guard for the assault report called on Turley to decide whether to ask the Army’s federal Office of Complex Investigations for a review. Kroeber confirms that Turley closed Galland’s case instead. That meant the military resolved the assault allegation in her case without ever investigating it.

The Utah National Guard is confident in the fairness of its process, Kroeber says, and “is not concerned about potential bias or for how cases were handled” when Turley was in charge.

With Turley now out, Galland is calling on the guard’s leaders to review how they evaluated her case and all other reports of assault and harassment that happened during his tenure. She feels they have a duty to do so. “They left me behind,” she says.

Sometimes, when she spirals about the guard’s handling of her allegations, knowing those maroon leggings exist in her storage unit is the only thing that confirms for her what she experienced. She had run in them a hundred times before on the hard track at the VASA Fitness near where she lived, as she had that morning. Eight miles at 0400 hours. She says she remembers them pooled around her ankles at 0700.

How it started

Galland says the officer started commenting on her body days after she began working with him in 2021. She was “too pretty,” she remembers him saying, to be in the military. She shouldn’t work out in front of the other soldiers, he allegedly said, because they’d be intimidated by her “perfect physique” from her bodybuilding competitions.

Galland had entered the guard four years earlier as a scrappy 23-year-old in May 2017, after graduating at the top of her class in the University of Utah’s ROTC program. National guards are run by full-time officers — called Active Guard Reserve — who work with part-time soldiers when they train each month; the soldiers can be called for active duty in state or foreign service.

At 5-foot-3, Galland was small but tough, tattooed and above all, idealistic. She was in second grade when the 9/11 attacks happened. Twenty years later, the soldiers she wanted to work with were still fighting the same forces. She saw it as the one job where she could really make a difference.

In May 2021, she was transferred to the superior officer’s battalion, one of two in her brigade. Galland had been struggling in her previous position as an officer who oversaw the success of the training programs for a team deploying to the Middle East. While other officers were criticizing her, she says, the superior officer offered to support her.

The comments he made about her escalated, she says. After asking her where he could find photos of her in bodybuilding competitions, she says, he advised her to remove them from her social media accounts because “other people might see them as sexual.”

By August 2021, Galland wrote in a witness statement, he told her that he was attracted to her. He said he liked brunettes.

The Salt Lake Tribune typically does not identify victims of sexual assault, but Galland agreed to the use of her name. She shared documents with The Tribune from her time in the guard, including the witness statement she filed and later shared with police. The Tribune also received information through several public records requests.

Although the police officer who investigated Galland’s case submitted a possible rape count, prosecutors in Salt Lake County decided against filing it and the man Galland accused was not charged. The Tribune is not identifying him in this story, and he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

It appears he has left his full-time position in the guard. Kroeber confirmed the man remains enlisted, though, and continues to participate in monthly drills.

With no military investigation into the rape allegations, there was never a finding that would have led to the man facing discipline for that. He has retained his rank and title.

“While we value the sanctity of the right to due process, we also believe victims and take accusations seriously,” Kroeber says. He added: “Misconduct that threatens the safety and security of our members is not in line with our core organizational values.”

The Utah National Guard — whose membership is about 10% female — has taken steps in recent years to address misconduct. But sexual harassment and assault have long plagued the ranks of the U.S. military.

At the time of her allegations, Galland was the Sexual Harassment/Assault Response and Prevention representative for her battalion and had worked to improve the culture.

The first alleged attacks

Galland’s instinct was to shrug off the comments, she says. She felt like she couldn’t say anything because the superior officer held her career in his hands, with the sole power to promote her. She says he mentioned that often, starting with the first time he put his hands on her thighs.

On Nov. 2, 2021, Galland and the officer were in the armory late at night.

She says he came into her office, running his thumb along the college books she had on her shelf: “King Lear” and “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” She says he looked at her and said, “So you’re smart and sexy? It’s a good thing there’s a desk separating us.”

Then, she told The Tribune and wrote in her witness statement, he reached out to her and put his thumb on her lips. She flinched from the touch and says she remembers him saying, “So that’s where the line is.”

She was shocked and walked out of her office as he trailed behind through a dark and empty hallway.

As she got closer to the front door, she says in her statement, he grabbed her by her combat backpack and flung her against the brick wall, knocking the air out of her. He pinned both of his arms around her, so she couldn’t move, she wrote. At double her weight and at least a foot above her, Galland says, “he was so much bigger than me. I was terrified.”

She remembers shouting, “You’re a good person, you’re a good person” hoping that would stop him “before he did something to me.”

He dropped his arms, she says, and she left.

At drill the following weekend at Camp Williams, she says, she confronted him and told him to stop. A week later, she wrote in her witness statement, he sexually abused her for the first time during an out-of-state work trip.

While they were in his hotel room finishing paperwork one night, she says, he demanded she sit on the bed with him. She didn’t want to, she says, but she worried about offending him. He kept trying to cuddle and kiss her and he wanted to have sex, she later wrote in her report, but she repeatedly told him no “and I stopped it from happening.”

He pushed her to stay to finish the work, she says, and they eventually fell asleep. Galland says in the report that she woke up the next morning to him moving her hand over his genitals. “I didn’t mean to wake you up,” she remembers him saying. She pulled her arm away and ran out.

The Army’s code of conduct says superiors should not ask subordinates for sex because of the inherent power differential. Even if sex is consensual, it may be considered a violation of Army and the Utah guard’s regulations.

“We have several policies and regulations that pertain to fraternization and other things,” says Kroeber, “that lay out clearly that it is inappropriate to have any relationship with a subordinate.”

Her account of assault in the armory

Galland had gone to the armory that morning, a day toward the end of November 2021, still in her workout clothes. The officer asked her about daily reports that she would pull each morning from computers in a secure room, she says, as they both went inside.

The room is meant to be a “sanitary environment,” she says, to protect classified information; there are no cameras or recording devices and phones or smartwatches weren’t allowed. The officer made a comment that it would be “an ideal location for inappropriate conduct” because of that, Galland said in her witness statement.

Then, she wrote, he used his key to allow her inside; only certain members of the guard have a key. The door locked automatically behind them.

The officer asked her to perform oral sex on him, she told The Tribune and wrote in her statement. She said, “No.”

“No?” she remembers him saying. “OK then.”

She says she remembers him opening the door to look both ways down the hallway, then closing it again. Click. She says he turned to her and told her to stand up. “His tone had shifted in a way that scared me,” she wrote in her witness statement.

Galland alleges in her statement that he pushed her against the plastic fold-up desk, pulled down her tightly fitting leggings, and raped her.

She froze. He left. She pulled up her pants.

“I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t get any evidence,” she says, explaining she didn’t complete a rape examination afterward. “All I have is those pants. I haven’t worn them since.”

She ran in them for the last time, she says, as she went to the restroom. She came back out in her uniform.

The officer assaulted her twice more after that, she alleges, in the first weeks of December 2021, which she also describes in her witness statement: once forcing her to perform oral sex on him and a second time raping her again. She says she tried to raise objections each time, but worried he would take it out on her career if she said “no” too forcefully.

She says he told her that if she came forward she would get in trouble as an officer engaging in a relationship with another officer. The Army’s rules for sexual contact between members of different ranks states: “All members may be held accountable for relationships that violate this policy.”

Galland says, “I felt so helpless.”

The fallout

Galland initially wanted to forget what she says happened. She would replace dinners with a bottle of sauvignon blanc.

She would run compulsively, with eight miles becoming 10 or 12 or 14. As long as her feet were hitting the track, she wasn’t thinking.

She became so gaunt her bones poked out of her small frame like tent poles. “My body was just trying to flee a situation I couldn’t flee from,” she says.

Galland says she started to feel like she had the same post-traumatic stress disorder some of the soldiers she’d spent her career training returned home battling. At work, panic attacks would send her running to a restroom to cry and throw up. She would shake going back into the secure room to pull the daily reports.

Her family was concerned, Galland says, but she didn’t tell them what was happening.”I was just running and running and running,” she says.

On Dec. 16, 2021, Galland checked herself into a mental health facility in Bountiful, “somewhere where I couldn’t hurt myself,” she says. She stayed for only one night, worried about missing work.

A few days after that, she says, she called the officer and told him what he did to her was assault.

“If you decide you ever want to tell someone about this, please give me a heads up first,” she recalls him asking. He said he would keep his distance from her, she says, and try to move to a different position. But in the days after that, she says, he repeatedly pushed back his timeline.

By New Year’s, Galland was barely functioning. Her ankle had hurt for days and swelled to the size of a fleshy softball. She finally saw a doctor — who said her fibula had snapped in half.

With a boot around her foot, Galland was forced to stop. Within a day, she says, she had decided to report.

Starting the complicated reporting process

As Galland went through the guard’s reporting process, she says she felt like she’d found herself in a minefield, as unexpected hurdles and hostilities shook her like an “explosive” going off.

She started at the guard’s Office of Equal Opportunity on Jan. 4, 2022, taking her friend, Jeremy Fenn, for support. Fenn had been a cadet with her and worked in the Utah National Guard, which he described as having a “boys club” atmosphere that led him to transfer to Arizona. He is now Galland’s partner.

In the meeting, Galland described the arc of her allegations, from harassment to rape.

Fenn, like Galland, also remembers the equal opportunity staffer telling her in response that she had a “99.9% chance” of losing her job by filing a report. Fenn says the staffer also told Galland: “Even though he outranked you, you should’ve known better.”

Galland says that was the first explosion — victim blaming. She wanted to scream at the staffer in frustration, she says, but instead, she found herself explaining grooming to a person who was supposed to work with victims.

The equal opportunity staffer instructed her to get an attorney, she says. Kroeber, the guard’s spokesperson, says at this step the guard provides lawyers for alleged victims who want one, but an individual can also hire someone outside the guard. The accused, he says, can also request guard representation.

The guard attorney Galland worked with instructed her to write a witness statement detailing her experiences; it came to 19 pages, and she gave it to the equal opportunity staffer. The Tribune has a copy of an email confirming that was submitted Jan. 24, 2022.

From there, Galland’s case would go into limbo for more than a year.

The processes for handling reports of harassment and assault vary widely across the country because each state is responsible for operating its own national guard.

In Utah, the guard’s equal opportunity office investigates harassment allegations. But if the same person has made an assault claim, that allegation is split off — while the harassment case gets put on hold — and sent to a sexual assault response coordinator, or SARC. That person hands it off to civilian police for investigation.

Galland’s case was delayed in the civilian justice system for months.

In the meantime, the guard’s policies said the man Galland accused could not supervise her and a no-contact order was put in place between them. The executive officer for the brigade, Major Mikel Jackson, was responsible for enforcing the order.

Explosion No. 2, she says, was how the man she accused was treated by leadership.

Jackson told Galland, she says, that in order to keep them separated he decided to move the man she accused into the upper level in the guard. Kroeber says while the man was moved to a higher echelon in the guard — going from battalion up to brigade — his rank remained the same. He says it wasn’t as much a promotion as a “perceived promotion.”

“There isn’t a lateral position sometimes that a person can be moved,” Kroeber says.

When serious allegations have been made against a service member, guard administration can choose to place an “administrative flag” on their file that limits career progression, Kroeber confirmed. But while that’s typical, it’s not mandatory, and officers under investigation can be promoted, he says.

Galland was angry about the move, she says, and hurt that Jackson and many of her superiors told her directly that they hadn’t read her witness statement and “didn’t know much about” her concerns.

And even though the move was meant to separate them, the superior officer remained in Galland’s unit. Kroeber confirmed that, but says the officer “did not have influence or control over her” in his new position.

But he would be allowed into leadership meetings, while Galland says she was told not to attend so they wouldn’t be in the same room together. Texts that Galland shared with The Tribune from her battalion leadership confirm that.

Galland says she later asked Jackson to help her get a military protective order against the officer. Those orders are shared with and can be enforced by civilian police.

But she says Jackson asked her, “You’re not trying to hurt him or his family, are you?” And he persuaded her to drop the request, she says.

Jackson did not respond to a request from The Tribune for comment.

Galland says it took months of her fighting with the guard’s leadership for them to move the officer to a different unit.

‘Not everything is prosecutable’

After filing her report with the SARC, Galland went with Fenn to talk to Salt Lake City police on Feb. 1, 2022. The officer who took her report turned out to be a major in the Army.

The officer later wrote in his report: “I am also in the military and understand the culture that the military projects on these incidents.”

From there, the case was handed to Randy Peck, a detective then in the special victims unit who spoke to Galland several times. On March 2, 2022, Peck wrote in a report that he tried to contact the superior officer she had named. He never called back. His attorney returned the call on April 29, 2022 — nearly two months later — and said they would not be providing a statement.

After Galland told Peck she never consented to any sexual contact in the armory, Peck wrote in his report that he decided to forward the case to the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office to screen for charges. He recommended a first-degree felony count of rape on May 2, 2022.

District Attorney Sim Gill confirms his office received the case from police that day. A screening was scheduled for May 12, 2022.

But then the file sat untouched for eight months, he confirmed to The Tribune.

He says at some point he realized his office had a conflict in handling the case: A prosecutor on his staff is also in the Utah National Guard and had been assigned to work on it in some capacity within the guard’s system.

Under a contract, Gill’s office sends conflict cases to Cowdell & Woolley PC — but that transfer didn’t happen until the middle of January 2023.

Michael Green, who screened Galland’s case at that firm, is a former Utah assistant attorney general who currently serves as an attorney in the Army, he says, where he’s been enlisted for 18 years.

He says he didn’t feel he could prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” — which is the legal standard — that the superior officer had raped Galland. He says because it happened in the armory room where there were no cameras and Galland never completed a rape examination, he had little evidence outside of testimony.

A second attorney in his office, former longtime prosecutor Brooke Larsen, says she came to the same conclusion. “Rape cases are really difficult,” she says. “Was there bad behavior on his part? Absolutely. But not everything is prosecutable.”

Green believes there are parts of Galland’s witness statement that suggest she appeared to consent at some points, or didn’t clearly express non-consent at others. He says the defense would’ve been able to use that statement against her. And civilian law, he says, doesn’t take into account whether someone was a superior in a workplace.

“I have an ethical duty to only bring forward charges that meet that standard,” he says.

Asked about Galland’s statement that she did not say “yes,” Green says there was “probably a misdemeanor in there that’s chargeable.”

Victim advocates say consent in one interaction is not blanket consent for all future acts; they also say consent can be withdrawn at any time during an encounter. Still, Donna Kelly, an attorney at the Utah Crime Victims Legal Clinic and a retired prosecutor, says cases can be harder to prove when a victim appears to have consented in certain interactions but not others.

“The burden in criminal court is very, very high,” Kelly says. “It’s just a difficulty of the system. She didn’t do anything wrong.”

Galland could ask the Utah Attorney General’s Office to screen for charges, Gill confirmed, because the statute of limitations hasn’t run out.

’So much red tape’

While Galland waited for her case to move forward in the civilian process, the job she had hoped for — working directly with soldiers to train them — opened up.

Although the man she accused had been moved up to a higher-level position in the brigade as her case was pending, Galland says Lt. Col. David Price, the commander for her battalion, told her that she wouldn’t be considered for a new job “until the results of the investigation are clearer.”

The position was given to someone else. “They were saying they were trying to protect the integrity of the investigation,” she says, choking up. “But it felt like I was being punished.”

On May 16, 2022, after years of what she says were exemplary evaluations, she opened her latest review to see poor marks across the board. That day, she refused to sign it and resigned from her full-time position as an officer in the Active Guard Reserve.

The officer she accused also resigned from his full-time position in the guard a few months later, Kroeber confirms.

After Green declined to prosecute, Galland’s rape case finally came back to the guard 10 months later, on March 15, 2023 — nearly a year after she had left.

Turley, as the adjutant general of the Utah National Guard, had the final say on whether her assault case would be investigated by the military. He could choose to send it to the federal Office of Complex Investigations, or OCI, for review.

OCI, according to its charter, is supposed to investigate cases of assault in a national guard where it appears it was not sufficiently examined by civilian forces or where OCI investigators think they can uncover additional evidence on the military side. The national office reviews sexual assault allegations for violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and possible consequences within the Army, ranging from a reprimand to a discharge.

Kroeber says he cannot comment on why Turley did not request an OCI investigation, though he believes that the decision by prosecutors not to pursue charges in the civilian process played into the decision.

Typically, he says, OCI staff will work with a guard attorney and recommend whether a case should be forwarded for more investigation. The adjutant general can decide to not forward a case, even if it is recommended. Kroeber declined to say what recommendation was given to Turley in Galland’s case.

Kroeber says there are no specific requirements a case has to meet to be sent to OCI, and the decision to forward a case there from the Utah National Guard is done on a case-by-case basis.

Galland says the decision to not send her case to the office denied her any kind of justice. Her assault allegations were dropped. “It was his responsibility, Turley’s responsibility,” Galland says. “He was the choke point for all of this.”

With that closed, the Utah National Guard began an investigation into Galland’s harassment claims, Kroeber confirmed. According to an email shared by Galland, the equal opportunity office opened her harassment case on May 11, 2023.

Kroeber says as of mid-November, that is still ongoing and declined to comment on it. If a member is found guilty of harassment, the guard initiates proceedings to determine the consequences.

The setup in the guard for handling cases of harassment and assault — which pauses its own proceedings and possible consequences while the civilian process runs its course first — leaves soldiers at risk, Galland argues. “There’s so much red tape and bureaucratic slowdown,” she says.

Kroeber says: “We acknowledge that sometimes these processes take longer than we wish they would, and in these cases, we are truly empathetic to the pain of potential victims.”

Her life now: nightmares and therapy

She used to have thick dark hair when she was in the guard. As soon as she quit, Galland says, she started lightening it to the blond color it is now.

“I didn’t want my hair to look at all like it did” when she was allegedly assaulted, she says.

Through her local veterans clinic, Galland has met other women with military sexual trauma, defined as PTSD from “any sexual activity during military service in which you are involved against your will or when unable to say no.”

She still has nightmares, she says. She’s still overexercising and showers multiple times a day to try to feel clean. But she’s found some camaraderie in trying to heal with other women.

Today, she lives in Arizona and works as the operations manager for a desert tour company, she says. She opened her own yoga studio last month.

She’s in the process of medically discharging from the guard and is on a no-drill status.

“I stayed for as long as I could,” Galland says. “But I realized they weren’t going to do the right thing. They failed me at every turn.”

Everything she had when she quit her full-time role — her furniture, along with her Army gear and the maroon leggings — are hundreds of miles behind in her storage unit.

But much of the aftermath, she’s learned, hasn’t been so easy to pack away.