Marine Convicted of Coercing Witness Into Sex : Court-martial: El Toro investigator is found guilty of adultery and and faces expulsion from the military. He denies the charges.

A Marine Corps investigator here faces expulsion from the military after being court-martialed for using his authority to coerce a female witness into having sex with him.

Staff Sgt. Randy L. Robinson allegedly threatened to make “trouble” for a woman whose Marine husband was under investigation for possible child abuse unless the woman had sex with Robinson at both his office and her home, according to transcripts of Robinson’s court-martial.

But Robinson, 35, who was freed from the brig several weeks ago, is now appealing his convictions for adultery, dereliction of duty and other crimes. He continues to deny the allegations, maintaining in an interview that he never did more than “shake hands” with his El Toro accuser.

“I’m not guilty, and I got railroaded out of the United States Marine Corps after giving them 16 years of honorable service,” Robinson said. “It kind of tears my heart out of my chest, to tell you the truth.”

Robinson was convicted last August at a general court-martial at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, but the case against him has never been publicly disclosed.

At the El Toro base, however, the unusual case has rekindled the issue of sexual wrongdoing and how it is handled, even as the military braces for a potentially scathing report by the Pentagon over the infamous Tailhook scandal.

The Tailhook incident, named after a society of military aviators that hosted a convention in Las Vegas in 1991, centers on allegations that Navy and Marine Corps flyers sexually abused and harassed female officers at a hotel party. The long-awaited Pentagon report on the case is expected in coming weeks.

The climate surrounding that ongoing scandal may have “played a part” in Robinson’s conviction, said his lawyer, Maj. Anthony Verducci, who raised the specter of Tailhook several times during Robinson’s court-martial and asked jurors whether the case might influence their judgment on Robinson.

“I think everyone knows the military is under scrutiny as to how it deals with (charges of) sexual misconduct. There’s an unspoken pressure that . . . we can’t sweep this stuff under the rug,” Verducci said in an interview.

Said Robinson: “They set out to make an example of me, and they did.”

Robinson, married for the last 11 years, was convicted of adultery and dereliction of duty in his relations with his accuser. He was also found guilty of giving a false statement under oath and of obstructing justice by trying to persuade two potential witnesses against him to change their testimony.

In bringing the charges, military authorities alleged that Robinson attempted to persuade witnesses to have a “rapid memory loss,” according to a report on the case.

He was freed from the brig at Camp Pendleton on Dec. 24 after a five-month sentence and now faces a bad-conduct discharge from the military, loss of pay and demotion in rank, pending his appeal. He now lives in Riverside County, working part-time in construction and at a gun store.

The conviction grew out of an investigation that Robinson, then with the Criminal Investigation Division at El Toro, conducted in the fall of 1991 into allegations that an El Toro Marine had abused his children and made threatening and obscene phone calls to his own wife.

The investigation began oddly, the wife testified during the proceedings against Robinson. The first time the sergeant interviewed her about the case, she said, he asked questions about her undergarments and her sex life, according to transcripts of the court-martial.

On at least four different occasions over the next several weeks, beginning on Labor Day of 1991, Robinson had sex with the woman--either after visiting her home on the base or summoning her to his office, she testified. Robinson forced himself on her several times, even though she cried during the encounters and told him that “he was hurting me,” she testified.

Robinson would sometimes call the woman several times a day, reminding her “how much trouble my husband could be in,” she testified. In addition to the allegations of child abuse, Robinson had also learned that the Marine and the woman had lived in base housing for a year before their marriage, in violation of regulations, according to military documents.

The woman testified that she felt helpless to do anything. “I knew that I had to do what this man wanted . . . because he had the power to take my husband away from me,” she said. “He told me that nobody needed to know what went on.”

After one sexual encounter, the woman testified, she eyed the pistol that Robinson had left lying near the bed and considered using it on him.

“I hated him,” she said. “I felt dirty. I felt nasty. I felt used. I felt like his personal whore.”

The woman declined to discuss the case with a reporter. Her husband did not want to talk about details, but said: “Justice was served. What (Robinson) did was totally wrong. . . . It’s not a pretty situation.”

According to military court transcripts, several Marines buttressed the woman’s testimony, telling investigators they had seen her at Robinson’s office at odd hours and that her car appeared to have been in the office parking lot overnight.

Prosecutors also sought to introduce evidence stemming from allegations that Robinson, while an investigator with the Naval Investigative Service in Iwakuni, Japan, in 1989, had sexual relations with a woman who had brought assault charges against her Marine boyfriend.

The prosecutor, Capt. Frank Delzompo, told the court that the woman thought having sex with Robinson could get her access to the military base, while Robinson appeared to have used his position “to gain sexual favors.”

The military investigated the incident but did not bring charges. The judge at Robinson’s court-martial, Maj. John Walsh, refused to allow evidence about the Iwakuni case at trial, saying that it did not appear relevant and noting that the woman in question could not be located.

Robinson denies that he ever had sex with either woman. At his court-martial, he insisted that he was guilty only of “bad judgment” in having the El Toro woman come to his office late at night.

“I don’t become friends with any complainants or witnesses” in an investigation, Robinson said in an interview. “I keep a professional relationship with everyone we deal with. The only time I ever touched that woman was to shake hands and thank her for coming in.”

Robinson said he believes the woman brought the allegations against him as a way of getting her husband out of trouble with investigators. He said that the investigation of the woman’s husband was dropped soon after she alleged sexual misconduct by Robinson.

Maj. Verducci sought to punch holes in the accuser’s testimony at Robinson’s court-martial, pointing up inconsistencies in the woman’s past statements on the case. The defense did succeed in securing not-guilty verdicts from the military jury on several sodomy counts.

Verducci said he will press Robinson’s appeal to a military appellate court in Washington, primarily on the grounds that the DNA evidence used to match Robinson to three of four sperm stains cannot be trusted in court.