Exclusive Interview: Groomed by a badge

A Chico woman who believes she was groomed for on-duty sex by a “sex-obsessed” police sergeant says she was “treated like a whore” when questioned about the relationship by a Chico Police Department investigator.

The woman, 38, asked that her name not be disclosed. The sergeant, Michael Williams, was fired early this year after five women reported sexual relations with him while he was on duty in 2023. (See four-year timeline that led to Williams’s firing here.)

Williams was demoted in 2021 from lieutenant to sergeant after having sexual relations with a subordinate, records show. At some point in Williams’s Chico PD career, he was a school resource officer.

It was the woman’s ethics complaint in late 2023 that started the first of multiple internal affairs investigations resulting in Williams’s termination. She was interviewed by Peter Durfee, who at the time was Chico PD’s professional standards sergeant and is now a lieutenant. Durfee is also a member of the Butte County Board of Supervisors.

“He treated me like a whore,” the woman said of Durfee. “He hated that his buddy was getting reprimanded. I could feel it. His questions, the way they were angled, the tone. I cried.”

The woman said her sexual encounters with Williams while he was on duty lasted seven months and had ended by the time she complained. Durfee, she said, was focused on her “timeline” and why she was reporting the incidents “now.”

“When do you want to know that your lieutenant is fucking everyone on duty?’” the woman  said in an interview at her residence last week. “Today? Next week? When is a good time?”

Williams, Durfee, and Chico Police Chief Billy Aldridge did not respond to messages requesting comment for this story.

The on-duty sex revelations—and the way the woman says she was treated—come 10 years after a departing Chico police chief, Mike Dunbaugh, warned city leadership about the cultural dangers of “a significant ‘good ole boy’ faction within (Chico PD) … or, at a minimum, the strong perception of one.” The department has not had a female above the rank of police officer since 2015.

The Williams scandal was first disclosed in a Chico Enterprise-Record expose. After that story was published, Williams left his employment at an at-risk youth program in Bend, Ore. Williams had been working there as a “program manager,” according to a text message he sent the woman a few months ago.

Seth Stoughton, one of the nation’s leading experts on police practices, was forwarded the Enterprise-Record expose and asked for any observations.

“I’m wondering how no one noticed that his police vehicle was spending 30+ minutes or more than an hour at private residences without, presumably, any work-related reason,” replied Stoughton, an ex-cop who heads up the Excellence in Policing & Public Safety Program at the University of South Carolina. “If he had been a patrol officer, that is the kind of thing I would expect a patrol sergeant or watch commander to notice when it became a pattern.

“Perhaps his rank protected him from that kind of scrutiny.”

In addition to the 38-year-old woman, others who reported on-duty sex with Williams included:

—A mentally ill woman with frequent police interactions who disclosed her relationship with Williams to 11 law enforcement officers.

—A victim of a domestic violence incident Williams had responded to.

—A woman who called police and ended up having sex with Williams in the back of his patrol vehicle.

—An ex-girlfriend who told police she had “a lot” of sex with Williams while he was on the clock.

Williams, who is in his mid-40s, was fired Jan. 28 for violating numerous department policies. In May, he voluntarily relinquished his state police officer certification.

“You just trust them, especially because he was a police officer.”

Chico PD’s investigation concluded that he violated no laws. Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey said no criminal investigation was “submitted” to his office for review.

Reports obtained through a Public Records Act request by E-R reporter Molly Myers reveal Williams used police computers to access information about all five women. The 38-year-old woman was not surprised. Williams once told the woman that he didn’t care about her past, something the woman had never talked about, she said.

Ramsey said he was told by Chico PD that the information accessed by Williams about the women were “internal files” and not records protected by penal code statute such as those in the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System. 

“Therefore, there is no criminal liability,” but rather an “ethical personnel violation,” Ramsey said.

Groomed to accomodate sexual addictions

The woman, who lives near Enloe Medical Center, said she ran into Williams the first time while buying a beverage at a store in spring 2023. He was out of uniform.

“He makes you feel like you’re the Queen of Sheba,” the woman said. “He makes you feel like you’re one in a million. And that’s how, I believe, he got so many women.”

The woman said she was manipulated by Williams and groomed to accommodate his sexual addictions.

“First text I got from him was him in his lieutenant uniform, and it makes you feel safe, makes you feel like it isn’t wrong,” the woman said. “I think deep down inside my heart, I knew the whole time it was wrong, but I had never been in that situation before with someone in such a high rank, in any avenue of life. You just trust them, especially because he was a police officer.”

The first time the two had sex at her home, Williams was off duty. In retrospect, the woman thinks he was testing the situation, because for every other sexual encounter for the next seven months he came to her apartment in uniform—and in a hurry.

“He was very direct,” the woman said. “Every time he came, he was like, ‘It has to be really fast.’ I’d offer him food and drink and … he just wanted sex.”

Williams would park his SUV with “Supervisor” on the side under a tree near her apartment. Their encounters would typically last 20 to 30 minutes, she said. “I think the neighbors … didn’t know what to make of it because of his high rank,” the woman said.

Stoughton, the police expert, said he would like to know whether Williams, during his sexual activities, “was ‘out’ on a call or paperwork or something, or whether he even had a CAD status.”

CAD stands for computer-assisted dispatch. Stoughton is curious whether Williams “was in an ‘available to answer calls’ status or whether he put himself into some kind of ‘administrative/do not disturb’ status.”

On one visit, the woman said she “playfully” told Williams that she wasn’t going to help him reach orgasm “because I never get to come.”

“And he got really, really mad at me,” the woman said. “And he goes, ‘Don’t you do that to me. Don’t you ever do that to me.’ … Like he needed his fix, and if I wasn’t going to give him his fix, he wasn’t going to let go of me. … And I told Peter Durfee that … in the interview.”

Williams told the woman that she should have sex with him because he struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder from having shot three people during his police career. According to the woman, Williams claimed to have been traumatized by his shooting of Desmond Phillips, a 25-year-old Black man in mental crisis, in March 2017 shortly after he was promoted to sergeant.

But Williams told a different story to investigators right after the shooting: While he approved the siege on the Phillips residence that resulted in Desmond being shot 11 times by two young officers, Williams did not fire his weapon. He reported being hit above an eye by shrapnel from police gunfire.

Williams also told the woman he had been traumatized by the unexpected death of former Chico PD Sgt. Cesar Sandoval at age 50 in April 2023.

Williams, the woman said, was obsessed with pornography.

“He would send me videos,” she said. “He always wanted pictures. He would ask for threesomes. He was almost, for lack of a better word, begging. This guy was just sex obsessed.”

One fantasy Williams talked about with the woman was pulling her car over in his patrol SUV in a remote location and having sex, she said.

“I want other women to come forward.”

She said Williams lied about his personal life; he would routinely block her phone messages at the end of a workday and on weekends. She came to suspect he was involved with other women, and if one wasn’t available when desired, he would just go to the next. She said she tried to have a relationship with Williams beyond on-duty sex, but he wasn’t interested until after he had left the department.

Williams joined Chico PD as a police officer in 2013, transferring from the San Mateo Police Department. He was twice promoted—to sergeant in 2017 and to lieutenant in 2019—by former police chief Mike O’Brien, now a member of the Chico City Council.

“He was always flattering me, like grooming,” the woman said. “He would pay me compliments and make me feel special. … I can’t even imagine what he was telling criminals and mentally ill women and women of domestic violence. I don’t know if he was promising them things.”

Williams claimed to be in treatment for sex addiction, the woman said. Williams told her he was addicted to either pornography or to “the thrill of getting caught” having sex on the job, she said.

“It felt like I was to blame”

The woman was asked in a follow-up email to more fully describe her interview with Durfee.

“I remember Peter’s countenance was really polite in the beginning, and he put his hands together in a businessman like way,” she replied. “Peter asked to see my phone … and I said that he could take pictures of all the texts to show that I was telling the truth. As he was reading through the texts, he said ‘wow you guys did do a lot of texting.’ 

“… At the end, he was sort of playing bad cop because I don’t think he wanted to believe that his buddy was doing this. I remember … he asked me ‘What do you want to get out of all of this?’ and I said ‘Nothing! I just want him to get help.’”

The woman said she remembers Durfee being unresponsive when she disclosed her own mental health issues and that Williams had claimed to be seeing a therapist for sex addiction.

“He did not say anything,” she said. “He didn’t answer. He didn’t comment. … I let Peter know that I am bipolar and … take medications and that when I was seeing Mike, I was in the depths of mental health disaster. I remember apologizing a lot and crying at some point in the interview.

“I’m not saying Peter wasn’t doing his job, but it felt like I was to blame for some of Mike’s behavior, as if I was some bad seducer. He actually said at the end, ‘You don’t want this getting out, do you?’ And I said ‘no.’”

Administrative investigation opens

While the on-duty sex stopped before the woman complained to Chico PD, she continued to see Williams occasionally until he left Chico.

Williams went on leave, citing a work-related injury in November 2023, three days after he was notified of an administrative investigation. He never returned to Chico PD.

One day last spring, an Amazon box with a new laptop inside arrived at the woman’s front door. Though Williams denied sending her the computer, the woman believes he did.

“I don’t want gifts from him,” she said. “I want him to admit what he did. I want other women to come forward.”

Dave Waddell, a professor emeritus in journalism at Chico State, contributes regularly to ChicoSol about law enforcement. The 38-year-old woman was his student more than 15 years ago—Editor.