Boston Judge Vacates Sentence For Bachelorette Contestant

BOSTON, MA — A contestant on the current season of "The Bachelorette" was convicted in May of assaulting and groping a woman on a cruise ship, but at a post-conviction hearing Friday on the case against him, Boston Municipal Court Judge Mark Hart Summerville allowed the man to withdraw his May 21 guilty plea to one count of indecent assault and battery.

Lincoln Adim, 26, was found guilty of one count of indecent assault and battery on May 31.

But now the case effectively returns to the pre-plea stage - just as if Adim was still charged with indecent assault and battery but had not yet pleaded guilty or been sentenced.

Adim is from Nigeria but lived in Boston as a teenager, according to a biography posted to The Bachelorette website. He also has worked in the Boston area for the past five years: His LinkedIn profile says he currently works as a account sales executive in the Greater Boston area and LA.

He was accused of groping a woman while he was on a harbor cruise, which lead to the assault and battery charge, prosecutors previously said.

Adim was sentenced to a two-year probationary period where he has to stay away from the victim and attend three Alcoholics Anonymous meetings per week. If he failed to do that, he'd have to serve a year in jail. He was also ordered to register as a sex offender. All of that is voided, now, according to the District Attorney's office.

Because Massachusetts law requires defendants convicted of that offense to wear a GPS monitor during any period of probation, and because the judge did not impose such monitoring when he sentenced Adim in May, the case was called today on a prosecution motion to revise the sentence under Rule 29(a)(1) of the Massachusetts Rules of Criminal Procedure and the Supreme Judicial Court’s decision in Commonwealth v. Grundman.

That decision specifically notes that such a sentence “may be corrected … by resentencing the defendant to include the GPS monitoring condition within sixty days from when the sentence was imposed,” District Attorney's Office Spokesperson Jake Wark said in an email.

Instead, Judge Summerville vacated Adim’s guilty plea. Suffolk prosecutors filed a notice of appeal and the case was scheduled for another hearing on July 27.

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