Who is Margo Borders? Woman says Breonna Taylor-shooter Brett Hankison sexually assaulted her while in uniform
A woman who claimed that the cop who was fired in connection with Breonna Taylor's death sexually assaulted her has now filed a lawsuit against the officer on Tuesday, November 10. Brett Hankison, who was fired as a Louisville Metro police officer in June 2020 after shooting Taylor on March 13, 2020, has been accused of assaulting a woman in 2018, who was then 22 years old at that time.
According to an NBC report, the woman, identified in the lawsuit as Margo Borders, allegedly said that she met Hankison at the Tin Roof bar in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was in his police uniform and was working a side gig as security. Borders claimed that Hankison, who she knew through a mutual friend since 2017 offered her a ride back home, and after she accepted the offer, he allegedly sexually assaulted her.
She said she was left “physically injured and mentally battered” from the alleged incident, WHAS-TV reported. “When he offered to take her home, she was thrilled. He was a police officer. There was a sense of trust there. She didn’t have to pay for an Uber, she was a broke law student," the woman’s attorney, Sam Aguiar, said. The lawsuit alleges that Hankison was involved in a series of sexual assault cases, where he used to meet these women while working as a security guard and later took them home to allegedly abuse them.
Earlier this year, Borders and another woman claimed on social media that Hankison similarly assaulted them. Borders posted her account from 2018, claiming that Hankison sexually assaulted her in her own apartment while she was unconscious. "In April of 2018 I went out to a bar with some friends," she wrote. "I went to call an Uber home and a police officer who I had interacted with on many occasions at bars in St Matthews offered me a ride home. He drove me home in uniform, in his marked car, invited himself into my apartment and sexually assaulted me while I was unconscious. It took me months to process what had happened and to realize that it wasn’t my fault and I didn’t ask for that to happen by allowing him to give me a ride home," she added.
She continued, "I never reported him out of fear of retaliation. I had no proof of what happened and he had the upper hand because he was a police officer. Who do you call when the person who assaulted you is a police officer? Who were they going to believe? I knew it wouldn’t be me." Borders later named Hankison as the alleged assaulter, and asked her followers to "demand justice.”
Another woman, Emily Terry, wrote on Instagram last spring that she began walking home from a bar while she was drunk when "a police officer pulled up next to me and offered me a ride home. I thought to myself, 'wow, that is so nice of him.' And willingly got in. He began making sexual advances towards me; rubbing my thigh, kissing my forehead, and calling me 'baby.' Mortified, I did not move. I continued to talk about my grad school experiences and ignored him. As soon as he pulled up to my apartment building, I got out of the car and ran to the back. My friend reported this the next day, and of course, nothing came from it." Beside a photo of Hankison, Terry stated, "This is Brett Hankison... Flash forward [to 2020], I see his face. This face. Involved with the shooting of Breonna Taylor."
Police spokesperson, Dwight Mitchell said at the time that both ladies had been contacted by the police department’s Integrity Unit in order to "initiate and conduct an investigation." Aguiar said in a statement, “we hope through this civil litigation that Brett Hankison will be held accountable. That his conduct will be exposed, that it will be made clear that this is something LMPD tolerated, that they had notice of, that they never acted on. In civil litigation, you can’t ask for this to have never happened. You can’t go back in time and day... go in time machine and say that you would have fired Brett Hankison so he didn’t do this to all of these women, so you have to ask for money damages.”