Former Kentucky sheriff’s deputy charged with rape, sodomy and perjury

A former Kentucky sheriff’s deputy has been charged with raping a woman he supervised on home incarceration, the state Attorney General’s office announced.

Ben Fields, who was a deputy in Letcher County, faces two charges each of third-degree rape and third-degree sodomy, three charges of tampering with a monitoring device and one charge of perjury.

A Letcher County grand jury indicted Fields, 36, on Thursday. Attorney General Daniel Cameron, whose office is handling the case, announced the indictment.

Fields was a court-security officer for the sheriff’s office and also had a job at a home-incarceration monitoring service, Letcher County Sheriff Mickey Stines told the Herald-Leader earlier this year.

Stines said Fields’ job at the monitoring service was not related to his job as a deputy, but two women have charged in a federal lawsuit that Fields wore his uniform while doing work for the monitoring service.

The lawsuit alleges that Fields coerced one woman to have sex with him in return for letting her not pay the monitoring fee required to be on home incarceration.

Fields allegedly had the woman meet him in a judge’s office at the courthouse after business hours, where he had sex with her. Fields told the woman he wanted to meet there because there were no security cameras, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in January.

In December, people at the courthouse received notice of Fields’ inappropriate conduct, including text messages, according to the lawsuit.

When Fields found out, he filed a complaint against the woman that resulted in her being arrested, the lawsuit says.

Stines said he suspended Fields the day the lawsuit was filed.

A second woman later joined the lawsuit. The complaint says that after the woman initially refused Fields’ offer to waive her home-incarceration fee if she had sex with him, he arrested her.

After the woman got out of jail and was back on home incarceration, Fields came to her home in his police cruiser and told her if she didn’t do what he said, he would put her back in jail, according to the lawsuit.

The woman had sex with Fields in his police vehicle, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit charges that Fields violated the women’s rights and that Stines failed to properly train and supervise him. The amended lawsuit also names the monitoring service, Eastern Kentucky Correctional Services, as a defendant.

Fields and Stines have denied wrongdoing in their responses to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount of damages.

The indictment returned this week said that from July 2021 through January 2022, Fields tampered with a prisoner’s home monitoring device, raped someone he knew was in custody and/or under home incarceration and made a false statement in a criminal complaint, according to Cameron’s office.

Most of the charges are Class D felonies, which are punishable by one to five years in prison.