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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah National Guard member, who was secretly recorded by her supervisor while changing her clothes while on deployment, is speaking out after he was sentenced in January.
U.S. Army Maj. Kenton L. Francis, 52, an officer over a behavioral health unit deployed to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, Africa, was sentenced to six months of confinement and was dismissed from the Army on Jan. 30 after admitting to recording a noncommissioned officer.
He was first incarcerated at an Army correctional facility at Sembach Kaserne in Germany and is awaiting transfer to a facility in the U.S.
The woman spoke to KSL.com to encourage women, especially in the military, to report sexual abuse and harassment, no matter the rank of the perpetrator. KSL.com does not typically identify victims of sexual abuse, and the Guard member wishes to remain anonymous.
She said she first found her fit in the Utah National Guard while training to provide psychological support to her fellow service members.
She deployed in the spring of 2024 to Djibouti, a small East African county at the mouth of the Red Sea, planning to stay for a year to help other Guard members struggling with the transition.
She found the change in environment suited her.
"I was doing really good. I was losing the weight that I wanted to. I was really confident in myself," she said. She was still enrolled at school full-time and was volunteering at an orphanage in town. "I felt so fulfilled. I felt really sure of myself. I learned who I was and I liked it."
Often, due to the triple-digit heat and humidity, she would walk the mile and a half from her quarters to her office — two shipping containers stacked on top of each other — and change into a uniform there.
She said Francis, her supervisor, "would always tell me that I could use his office anytime I wanted, that his space was my space and that he liked being able to share the things that he had. And I just assumed that he was just overly generous. He was just being nice."
She said Francis, a licensed social worker, took on a "goofy kind of dad thing," and would "often tell me that I was like a daughter to him — very often. He would say that a lot — that I was family."
"He was my go-to person, the one person I trusted the most over there. ... He kind of forced himself into that position. He got me to open up about things that I didn't talk about with other people," she said. "So I do feel like he was grooming me, either consciously or subconsciously."
On Aug. 23, 2024, the woman asked to change in his office after lunch. She had been to the pool on break, a routine she had gotten into and she was wearing civilian clothes over her swimsuit, she said.
When she went up to the door, he was fiddling with something at the cubbies near the doorway, "turned around, saw me, said, 'It's all yours.' He walked past me and he closed the door behind me," she said, but the interaction "felt off."
While in the room, she looked where Francis had been, and saw a little green light from behind the hanger hole in gift card packaging placed in a basket. She felt behind the paper, and "pulled out the phone, and it was actively recording," she recalled.
He was supposed to leave the facility in two days, to celebrate his 25th wedding anniversary, according to the woman.
"I'm like, 'OK, I'm just gonna pretend this didn't happen. I'm going to delete this. ... We're going to forget this ever happened,'" she said, "I was 100% (in shock)."
Attempting to understand what happened, she went searching, first for Francis, who had left the office, and then for a co-worker. In the time she was gone, Francis had returned, admitting to a senior enlisted officer and another co-worker what he had done.
"I just didn't know what to do. But basically, that choice was kind of taken from me, which, honestly, I'm glad," she said. "I don't think I would have (reported). I really didn't think that anybody would believe me."
"He was so well respected and so well-known, and he's a lot higher ranking than I was. He was very well-liked. Everybody liked him. He was always smiley, happy. Everybody loved him, everybody trusted him. And I'm like, 'There's no way people would believe this,'" she said.
In the aftermath, she was issued a protective order against Francis on the small base, while he was around for the next week. "Every time the door would open, or someone would put in the door code to go in, I was always just scared that it was him, coming to find me or talk to me. ... I didn't want to see him. I didn't want to run into him. I was shaking at all times, crying constantly."
The Guard's Criminal Investigation Division interviewed her and took him away. "I'm thankful that it was all able to get dealt with so quickly," she said.
When the sentencing came around, the servicewoman said Francis, who was close to retirement, was going to be allowed to separate from the military on his own accord, only facing three months in prison. "And I said that wasn't enough. I wasn't happy with that."
She traveled to Italy for the proceedings and shared a victim impact statement. In the end, Francis, who was found to have secretly recorded her three times, was the equivalent of dishonorably discharged for officers, according to a release from the U.S. Army Office of Special Trial Counsel.
Francis' actions "betrayed not only her trust, but also the trust the Army placed in him as the deployed behavioral health officer-in-charge," said Maj. Zach Ray, an Army prosecutor for the case, in a statement.
"I'm thankful, at least, that I was heard," she said, but still is working through the effects of what Francis did to her, in that position of trust. She is back in Utah now, close to finishing her schooling for social work.
After all this, she said her takeaway is to "speak up. It doesn't matter who it is. It does not matter who it is. Say something. Absolutely say something, and make sure that they're held accountable for their actions"
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