By: Daiyu Tang
The Hathian Police Department is facing new, specific allegations from within its own ranks after former HPD detective Hope Ripley went on record accusing then Corporal Koh Gausman and then Sergeant Carter Ellis of kidnapping, sexual assault, and battery, followed, she says, by a $100,000 transfer and a smear that she “liked hard sex.” Ripley further alleges that when a physician documented her injuries and an officer took a report, HPD senior command tore it up and had the doctor arrested as retaliation for dating to support her side of the story.
The Observer has reviewed bank records and a cashier’s cheque that align with Ripley’s account of the money. The documents do not prove the assault; they do corroborate the transfer and the donation she says she made with it. This city has seen claims like these before and from our investigations into officer abuse to more recent profiles of polarizing HPD figures. That history doesn’t adjudicate guilt here, but it does make the questions urgent.
“Teaching me a Lesson” – The Survivor’s Account
Ripley says she was summoned on a day off (the 30th September 2024) to an office meting. Then the door was blocked, and after a struggle where she understood what was going to happen it ‘all went black.’ She woke somewhere she didn’t know with cells and a round bed. Ellis allegedly tried to force oral sex; she says she bit him (perhaps giving Maja her perspective) and he left. Gausman, she says, stripped her, removed a tampon, and raped her. She describes being cuffed in a shower and whipped with a belt, drugged and violently ill, stitched after a suicide attempt, and later dumped at HGH where a Dr. Jasmine Dvarian treated her and an Officer Sophie Blair took a statement. When Blair elevated it within HPD, Ripley says, Capt. Julian Heckler tore up the report and ordered Dvarian arrested for “false accusations against an officer.”
Ripley portrays Ellis as a habitual abuser in Isolation stating that she once “…walked in on Carter shoving a scalpel through Brandie Kelley’s cheek…” and says the off-site location was a place “certain cops” knew.
The Money – ‘Payment for ‘Services’ and a rumour’
Before the incident window, Ripley’s balance reads $327,452.73. Shortly after, a $100,000 deposit lands in her account without clear payee details. One week later she showed evidence of a purchase of a cashier’s cheque for exactly $100,000 made out to a sexual-assault survivor charity, where we have confirmed receipt. Ripley says Gausman first offered the same amount, when she refused to be drawn into bought silence someone then deposited it anonymously and that’s when the rumours started around the station that she liked ‘hard sex’.
A Right of Reply – Officers on Record
When asked for comment, Carter Ellis dismissed the story as yet another attempt to ruin his reputation and warned of “Consequences. Law consequences.” He did not engage the specifics of my reporting; the location, the doctor’s report, the $100,000, instead accusing the press of assumption and suggesting we “check the morgue” if we wanted a real story. Threat? Or surrender that his reputation had long-since been ruined? The jury is out. Pressed on whether his longtime colleague might distance himself to protect his own career, Ellis waved it off: Gausman had just been promoted and “would never turn his back on me.”
Koh Gausman called Ellis his “brother in law enforcement” and said the sergeant is equally hard on men and women. (LOL -Ed) He professed not to know where the ‘hard sex’ rumour or the $100,000 figure came from and argued that HPD’s policy against officer-on-officer crime speaks for itself. If it had happened, he said, Ellis and any accomplice would have lost their badges, and the fact Ellis still wears his should “tell you something.” Asked about the claim that a report was torn up and a doctor arrested, he said he was not privy to any such thing. He characterized what we are “digging for” as fabricated and suggested the public hates the uniform more than the man.
Policy, however, is not proof; rank is not exoneration. If a report can be destroyed, policy is parchment. If command interference occurred, an intact rank is evidence of process failure, not innocence.
Editor’s View
We’ve been here before. We’ve published the horror when HPD locked doors and looked away. We profiled the officers who boast that they’re monsters because the badge lets them be. So spare me the lecture about hating the uniform, I hate what gets done behind it, not the uniform itself, and I hate the amnesia demanded of this city every time we’re told to move along. I appreciate those in HPD who do the right thing and I even understand those that take some shortcuts, or don’t do everything right, because let’s face it if they did they’d probably be dead before lunch. Yet, rape and this story is wrong. So wrong. We don’t let these slide and nor should HPD brass. Tearing up reports, arresting doctors? All-to-believable because while much of HPD brass can be trusted to engage at least with some good faith, this can’t be said of all, all of the time.
This case is different only in one way: a survivor sat in my office, sober and steady, and put her name to it. She brought receipts. She waived anonymity knowing exactly what that means in Hathian. She didn’t ask to be pitied. She asked not to be alone and not to let this story die in a breath.
Whether you call it Blue on Blue or just what happens when a closed system rots from the inside, it’s beyond the pale. I say that not only as a reporter, but as someone who has already written, in painful detail, about losing agency to violence and choosing, in the aftermath, not to disappear. The first thing abusers steal is your voice. The second is the record. Hathian’s survivors keep teaching the rest of us how to drag both back into the light and I’ll be the one to help.
To Ellis: legal threats are not a defence. If the facts are on your side, bring them, the time stamps, the logs, the chain of custody, the logs. To Gausman: ‘ isn’t proof of anything except how very good this department can be at protecting itself. Show the audit trail. Put your own openness on the table again, not the posture; the paperwork.
To HPD brass: you want the public to trust you? Start by proving that no report was destroyed, no doctor punished for doing her job, and no hush money moved through a survivor’s account. If you can’t prove that, then you prove Hope’s point.
To the women who wear the same uniform Ripley once did: I see you. If you’ve been told to swallow it for the team, don’t. If you’ve been told there will be consequences for speaking, there may be, but silence has a longer sentence, but that’s a choice only you can make. Take your Badge and take your agency and weigh up how you live, survive and flourish. That’s your right.
Legal Disclaimer
These are allegations unless and until proven in court. We publish because the claims are specific, partially document-supported, and concern potential public corruption and violent crime by sworn officers. All named parties have been, and remain, invited to respond in full.
