No Rape Charge Against Former FL GOP Chair Ziegler As Case Moves To State Attorney: Police

SARASOTA, FL — The Sarasota Police Department isn’t filing rape or sexual battery charges against disgraced GOP leader Christian Ziegler, though the agency suggests a video voyeurism charge against the former chair of the Republican Party of Florida.

The department prepared a probable cause affidavit for a video voyeurism charge, a felony, against Ziegler and forwarded the case to the state attorney’s office on Friday, SPD said in a news release.

Detectives began investigating sexual battery allegations against Ziegler on Oct. 4 following an Oct. 2 incident.

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Ziegler denied the accusations and claimed he had consensual sex with his accuser, a woman he and his wife, Moms for Liberty co-founder and Sarasota County School Board member Bridget Ziegler, previously had a three-way sexual encounter with a little over a year ago.

The victim told investigators that she initially agreed to have Christian Ziegler at her home the day of the incident because she thought his wife would join them, according to a search warrant shared by Florida Center for Government Accountability.

She canceled on Christian when she learned that Bridget Ziegler wouldn’t be there, messaging him, “Sorry I was in mostly for her.”

The victim said that Christian Ziegler showed up at her house anyway, entered her home and had sex with her without a condom. The woman later told a relative she was raped.

Christian Ziegler has maintained his innocence and said their sexual encounter that day was consensual.

On Nov. 2, he told investigators that he took a cell phone video of his encounter with his accuser, but initially said he deleted it. Police learned that after the allegation was made against him, he uploaded the video to his Google Drive, but they were unable to find it during an initial digital extraction, according to the search warrant.

Police were able to recover the video taken on Ziegler's cell phone in early December, according to FCGA.

Ziegler’s brief video shows them in her apartment while she was bent over a piece of furniture in the bedroom, FCGA said.

Surveillance video footage from the building also shows him arriving at her apartment, knocking on her door and walking inside. He and the woman are later seen leaving the apartment together, the report said.

Police filed a third search warrant in the investigation on Dec. 8 seeking records from Christian Ziegler’s Instagram account. Investigators previously requested his cell phone and Google records.

In that third search warrant affidavit, a detective wrote that she believes "probable cause exists to show (Ziegler) has utilized Instagram to commit the crime of Video Voyeurism,” reports said.

Investigators sought access to his Instagram messages, videos and photos, including those shared using the app’s “vanish mode,” which makes them disappear.

During the months-long investigation, detectives conducted nearly a dozen interviews, issued numerous subpoenas, reviewed hours of surveillance footage, and searched through a substantial number of images and videos on cell phones and their respective cloud data backups, police said.

Video evidence on Christian Ziegler’s phone showed that the encounter between him and the victim “was likely consensual,” police said.

The victim told police that she was unaware that she was being recorded and didn’t consent to the recording, leading to the video voyeurism charge, the agency said.

Ziegler has cooperated with police throughout the investigation, according to SPD.

He was stripped of his role as chair of the state’s Republican party earlier this month and there have been repeated calls for his wife to step down from the school board.