A U.S. Secret Service officer was arrested and charged with indecent exposure on Sunday night after he was seen masturbating in the hallway of a Miami hotel, according to the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office.
The officer, John Spillman, 33, a member of the uniformed division of the Secret Service, was based in Washington but had been in the Miami area as part of a security detail for an event President Trump was attending over the weekend, Secret Service officials said. That event ended the day before the arrest, and Mr. Spillman was off duty at the time of the episode.
According to a police report from the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, the incident occurred at the DoubleTree by Hilton Miami Airport & Convention Center. Mr. Spillman followed a woman from the hotel lobby to her room on the sixth floor, the report said. The woman, whom the report did not identify, immediately entered her room “because she was in fear” for her life, it said. She then saw Mr. Spillman masturbating next to her room with his pants lowered, the report said.
Hotel security alerted the local police, which made the arrest “without any incident,” according to the police.
After it learned of the arrest, the Secret Service placed Mr. Spillman, who joined the force in 2019, on administrative leave pending the results of the criminal proceedings and an internal investigation, Richard Macauley, chief of the uniformed division of the Secret Service, said in a statement on Monday.
“The alleged conduct is unacceptable and stands in stark contrast to the professionalism and integrity that I demand of our personnel,” Mr. Macauley said. “This agency takes these matters with the utmost seriousness.”
Mr. Spillman is being held in jail on a $1,000 bond. A hearing has been set for May 27. It was not immediately clear if he had any legal representation. In a brief phone call Tuesday, a relative of Mr. Spillman’s said he had not been aware of the incident and declined to comment.
Reports of misconduct over the years have undermined the public image of the Secret Service. This year, a Secret Service officer from Virginia was charged with possession of child sexual abuse materials for exchanging sexually explicit photos and videos with a girl in Pennsylvania, local media reported. The status of that case was not immediately clear.
In 2015, two senior agents were investigated after accusations that they had crashed a government-issued car into a White House barricade after a night of drinking. The episode prompted congressional hearings to examine “recent and longstanding problems at the U.S. Secret Service.”
A year earlier, three agents were sent home from an assignment in the Netherlands for heavy drinking. And in 2012, agents’ actions in Colombia, which included meeting prostitutes at hotels and drunken revels at brothels, drew widespread scrutiny.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
