A professional rock climber who repeatedly sexually assaulted a woman during a weekend trip to Yosemite National Park in 2016 was sentenced on Tuesday to life in prison, prosecutors said.
The climber, Charles Barrett, 40, was given the maximum penalty for his conviction in February on two counts of aggravated sexual abuse and one count of abusive sexual contact, Phillip A. Talbert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of California, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Mr. Barrett “used his status as a prominent climber to assault women in the rock-climbing community,” Mr. Talbert said. Three other women testified that he had sexually assaulted them, though their cases were not federally charged because they fell out of the prosecutors’ jurisdiction. “Barrett’s long history of sexual violence supports the imposition of a life sentence,” Mr. Talbert said.
Timothy Patrick Hennessy and David A. Torres, the lawyers for Mr. Barrett, said in a joint statement on Tuesday: “We believe that imposition of a life sentence was excessive. Nevertheless, we will file an appeal.”
The case illustrates growing concerns about the risk of sexual harassment and abuse faced by women increasingly engaged in the sport of mountaineering, as more of them have shared their stories of harassment or worse.
In August 2016, Mr. Barrett was living and working at Yosemite National Park when a 19-year-old woman visited the park for a weekend of hiking, prosecutors said in court records. The park encompasses more than 747,000 acres along the central western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in east-central California.