Man Who Enslaved Teen Girl Gets No Prison Time

A Georgia man who abducted a teenage girl, kept her in a dog cage, and coerced her into sex was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week, and yet he will not actually serve any of that sentence.

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in 2017, now-33-year-old Duluth resident Michael Wysolovski was arrested after FBI agents and police raided his home and discovered a 17-year-old girl who had been missing for over a year. Wysolovski reportedly met the unnamed girl in an online anorexia forum, coerced her into meeting up with him, and then held her captive in residences in Decatur and Duluth.

Per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The victim and Wysolovski agreed to enter a “consensual non-consensual” sexual relationship, a type of BDSM (bondage, domination, submission, masochism) relationship in which the partners agree to simulate non-consensual sex acts, prosecutor Michael DeTardo said during the plea hearing.

Over time, Wysolovski violated the set boundaries for this arrangement, refusing to use “safe words” and using “excessive force” including biting and physical violence. The victim, who was anorexic, initially encouraged Wysolovski to control her eating habits and kept journals detailing her desire to lose weight, DeTardo said. Wysolovski later used food to punish the victim or force her to perform sexual acts.

When police found the girl, she was fungus-ridden, malnourished, and had been living in a goddamn dog cage.

Wysolovski spent eight months behind bars in the Gwinnett County Detention Center following his arrest, and was released in February 2018. He pleaded guilty last Thursday to first-degree cruelty to children and interstate interference with custody. Since the age of consent in Georgia is 16, he was not charged with child molestation; more frustratingly, though he’d been previously indicted on charges of rape, prosecutor DeTardo concluded that rape actually fell into a “gray area” of consent that might not sway a jury, and the charges were dropped. And yet:

The specific child cruelty charge he pleaded to specified that the cruelty was caused by “excessive physical pain during sexual intercourse.”

Wysolovski will still register as a sex offender, but per his plea deal, he will not serve prison time. His eight months in the county detention center will count toward time served, and he will spend the remaining nine years of his sentence on probation.

This news comes on the heels of a similar story from Watertown, New York, in which 25-year-old bus driver Shane Piche pleaded guilty to raping a 14-year-old girl on his bus route, but according to local station WWNY was only sentenced to 10 years probation. The victim’s mother wrote a letter to the station lamenting the sentence:

I wish Shane Piche would have received time in jail for the harm he caused to my child. He took something from my daughter she will never get back and has caused her to struggle with depression and anxiety.

Piche, like Wysolovski, will register as a sex offender.

This post has been updated to more precisely reflect the nature of the crime.

Update (May 1, 12:24 p.m.) According to the Daily Mail (which we will not link to because they named an underage victim) the conditions of Wysolovski’s probation reportedly limit his access to pornography, drugs and alcohol. Last week, the victim also read an impact statement in court detailing Wysolovski’s abuse. “The second I left my home my life was ruined,” she said. “He did unimaginable things to me and irreparably broke my spirit and sense of self…He lowered my self-esteem greatly and led me to believe that I will never be loved, or have a proper life if I gained any weight.”

Per AJC, one of the reasons Wysolovski was offered the lesser sentence was because the victim—who suffers from a series of mental health issues—and her family did not want the case to go to trial. “She would be attacked again by you and your attorney,” the victim’s father said in a victim impact statement.