A judge in Dallas has ruled in favor of a young woman who brought a civil suit against a man she says raped and assaulted her while visiting Austin in 2016. District Judge Tonya Parker‘s decision on Dec. 28 came six weeks after the bench trial (without a jury) and nearly two years after the man avoided a criminal trial by admitting to lesser charges, in a deal offered by the Travis County District Attorney’s Office.
Parker has ordered defendant Tyler McPhillips to pay survivor/plaintiff Kelsey Kribs $1,911,471.80 in damages, which includes $1 million in exemplary (punitive) damages. Kribs filed her civil action in April 2018 while felony sexual assault charges against McPhillips were still pending in Travis County. A year later, he pleaded guilty to unlawful restraint, a third-degree felony, and received five years’ probation; after a court-ordered evaluation, he is not required to be supervised as a sex offender.
Survivor Kelsey Kribs “felt like her criminal case was being ignored and mishandled by the Travis County D.A.’s Office. She didn’t know where else to turn.”
Kribs testified she brought McPhillips to the Austin City Limits Music Festival in 2016, a week after befriending him in Dallas. The two planned on sharing a hotel room with her friends, but after drinking on Sixth Street, McPhillips became unruly. Kribs escorted him to her car to listen to music, hoping it would calm him. She maintains that, once in the Jeep, McPhillips tried to kiss her and turned aggressive; when she dismissed his advances and tried to leave, he pulled her into the backseat and raped her. When she eventually freed herself, Kribs says, he punched her several times, spraying blood throughout her car and breaking her nose (requiring surgery). She managed to flee back to her hotel lobby where the desk attendant called 911. Austin police found McPhillips inside Kribs’ car, naked from the waist down.
In his defense, McPhillips has repeatedly stated (in a 2019 deposition and at the civil trial) that “I don’t remember what happened that night.” In her ruling, Parker found “clear and convincing evidence” McPhillips assaulted Kribs, “intentionally causing serious bodily injury to her face” as well as severe physical pain, emotional distress, and mental anguish when “she refused to engage in certain sexual acts with him.” Parker also ruled that McPhillips “intentionally caused physical contact with [Kribs] in a manner so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized society,” thus making enhanced damages appropriate and necessary.
After Parker’s ruling, Kribs’ attorney Brian Butcher told the Chronicle that the case offered “vindication for a brave young woman who was the victim, first, of a brutal rape and then, a second time, by the District Attorney’s Office in Travis County who let her rapist off with a plea deal that looks like a wink and a slap on the wrist.” Butcher says Kribs decided to file the suit because “she felt like her criminal case was being ignored and mishandled by the Travis County D.A.’s Office. She didn’t know where else to turn.”
Kribs told the Chronicle in November that “from day one, I never felt supported” by the D.A.’s Office. Her case was handled by several prosecutors: Intake attorney Josh Reno presented it to the grand jury, then it was in Katie Sweeten‘s hands until she took a new post as a federal prosecutor, and finally Assistant District Attorney Victor Erbring took over in early 2019. Kribs said it was “impossible” to connect with prosecutors for updates, and that she wanted to go to trial: “I needed to sit in front of [McPhillips], and I needed him to hear me,” she said.
McPhillips was offered several plea-bargain deals before accepting one that, Erbring told us, was “significantly worse for the defense” than earlier proposals. According to Erbring, Kribs was content with that outcome and “wanted to avoid trial once we started preparing her for trial and testifying.” But Kribs said she only backed down after meeting with Erbring, who she claims lied to her about the results of her rape kit. “He said I had two samples inside of me [and the defense was] going to try to say I had sex with someone else that night,” Kribs explained. “I was so devastated after that. It was a complete lie.”
Asked to respond to this, Erbring told us via email on Dec. 4, “Due to the conclusions from testing [her rape kit], as well as other information, one of the potential areas of defense questioning could relate to sexual contact with someone other than this defendant.” Kribs has since reviewed the records from her forensic exam and says the claim is “totally false. … It’s nowhere to be found. I don’t know why he would say that.” (The Chronicle did not review the records, but they were admitted as evidence during the civil trial with no mention of conflicting DNA results.)
The case is not over yet. A sanctions hearing is set for Jan. 22, during which Kribs’ legal team will present evidence that McPhillips committed perjury while testifying, citing dozens of discovery requests that involved “information that [Kribs] had not relayed and which McPhillips could not possibly know” unless he remembers the events in question.
Following Parker’s decision, Butcher said, “Kelsey feels an overwhelming sense of relief. This is justice. It doesn’t fix the injustice she experienced through the criminal process, but it’s a giant step forward in her healing.” As Kribs told us in November, “I just want to feel validated in this – like someone has heard me. And someone has responded to this situation and they understand now what I’ve been through.”
This article appears in January 15 • 2021.