Plenty-of-Fish Rapist Couldn't Convince Jury the Sex was a Bad One-Night Stand

From 9 to 5, Ignacio Carrillo worked with some of the country’s biggest companies, household name brands, as an executive in one of Chicago’s award-winning public relations firms.

After hours, he’d troll the dating website Plenty of Fish looking for young women.

So he could drug them. And rape them.

Three years ago, he was promoted to vice president of a Loop communications company run by women and founded by a pioneering woman of color, the Flowers Communications Group. Carrillo took on the plum MillerCoors account, and his ascension to VP was celebrated in a press release. This guy was going places, and not just in the Porsche he’d drive around Chicago.

On Thursday, a jury took just 90 minutes to decide Carrillo, 40, should go to prison.

Five years ago, in the fall of 2009, he connected with a 38-year-old west suburban woman on Plenty of Fish. They arranged to meet at a Lincoln Park bar. The woman testified that she drank a glass of wine. They went to another bar, and she drank a shot. Then she found herself disoriented and in a Lincoln Park hotel room with Carrillo.

She texted her sister a few times: “Help. Not well.” and “Please help me.”

When she tried to leave, she testified, Carrillo grabbed her phone, threw it against a wall, dragged her back into the room and raped her.

Her sister found a cab and together they found the hotel. The sister got to the room and saw a nude Carrillo “smirking” as he lay on the bed, her half-naked sibling weeping. She grabbed the victim and they ran from the room. “I thank the taxicab driver, wherever he is, for getting me there,” the sister told the Tribune.

The woman told police what happened, but she was reluctant to press charges. When another victim came to Chicago Police two years later and said Carrillo hooked her on Plenty of Fish, drugged her and raped her, the 2009 victim moved ahead with her case.

Carrillo hasn’t gone on trial for the 2011 assault yet. That woman, 33 at the time and from Skokie, was allowed to testify at this trial about her date. She said Carrillo bought her a drink while she was in the bar bathroom. She only sipped her martini, which angered Carrillo. He poured “olive juice” into the drink and told her to drink more. She didn’t drink anything else that evening, but after walking to his Porsche, she testified, he pushed her against the car, lifted her dress and raped her.

Carrillo suggested they go to a hotel room, she testified, but she refused. “He said this could’ve been a nice evening, but I ruined it,” she told the jury.

She went to police, who connected Carrillo to the 2009 case. DNA evidence was collected, and they made an arrest. Carrillo faces another trial for the 2011 attack.

Carrillo’s attorney, Daniel Radakovich, told jurors this wasn’t a sexual assault but a one-night stand steeped in regret and disgust because a woman had sex with a man she didn’t like. But the jury wasn’t swayed by the message the public relations and marketing expert’s advocate was trying to deliver.

Carrillo could be sentenced to as few as four or as many as 15 years behind bars.

After the verdict was rendered, the Tribune reports, Carrillo said nothing. He just stared at the floor.

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