Van Nuys Judge Successfully Fights Off Would-Be Rapist

A Van Nuys Municipal Court judge fought off a rape attempt Saturday morning by a man who abducted her in his car while she was jogging in the Tarzana hills near her home, police said.

The judge, Leslie Ann Dunn, 36, told The Times she struggled free from the man, who had taken her to a nearby elementary school parking lot.

Dunn said she believes the incident will have an impact on her perspective from the bench.

“I know what it feels like now. . . . I don’t know how I did what I did,” said Dunn, who is 5 feet, 2 inches and weighs 100 pounds.

“I’m a mother. I just kept thinking my kids need me, and that’s the only thing I had in my mind.”

A Sylmar man was arrested in connection with the assault but was later released.

Dunn, a judge in Van Nuys Municipal Court for five years, said the assailant dragged her into his car and drove her to the parking lot of the Collier Street Elementary School and, threatening to kill her, attacked her.

However, the petite judge was able to struggle free and escape, she said in a telephone interview.

Mother of Two

Dunn, wife of lawyer Peter L. Dunn and the mother of sons aged 6 and 2, said that she was about five minutes from her home south of Ventura Boulevard when the incident began.

She said a car pulled up behind her to ask for directions. Dunn, who was dressed in sweat pants, sweat shirt and jogging shoes, said she felt threatened and ignored him. When she refused to answer a second time, she said, he drove up ahead, turned in a driveway, then drove toward her. She said he got out of the car and pulled her into the passenger’s seat.

“We fought on the sidewalk first . . . I remember screaming and kicking,” said Dunn. “It seemed surreal, so one thought was, how do I shake off this surreal feeling and say, ‘This is really happening.’ I thought, ‘Do I resist? Do I go passively?’ ”

After he overpowered her and she was in the car, she said, “I kept trying to make his car inoperable. I kept putting the gear-shift into park. I was honking the horn as he drove.

‘Courage to Fight’

“There were no other cars. It was pretty desolate. He stopped the car. . . . He just started struggling with me. He kept saying he was going to kill me, but I never saw a weapon and that is what gave me the courage to fight. . . . I kept offering him money. I said, ‘I’ll give you money’. . . . I was able to get out and another struggle ensued on the pavement and I don’t know what happened at that point but I was just able to break away.

“I’m surmising that he heard someone coming or heard something or didn’t want to do it outside, but something broke in him and he left. He took off his license plate from (the front of) his car and he left.”

Dunn said that while she had been the victim of burglaries in the past, she had never suffered a physical attack. Dunn said that while she has presided over many criminal cases, she does not oversee rape trials, which are conducted in Superior Court.

Still, she says she now has experienced the “sense of violation” of being attacked in a neighborhood where she had lived since 1977 and felt safe.

“I read criminal cases every day of my life and the stories are gruesome and I’m very, very grateful that I didn’t end up like other victims do.”

Dunn was appointed by former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. in May, 1981, and elected in 1982, according to the California Courts and Judges Handbook. A former assistant city attorney in Los Angeles, she also worked as a volunteer with the Los Angeles Rape Response Unit, an organization that does rape counseling.