By Sanchali Singh
(RUTLAND, Vt.) Vermont State Police announced on Wednesday that it has issued a citation to a man from Florida on two counts of obstructing justice for claiming he was too medically ill to travel for a court hearing.
In a statement, state police said the investigation into the claims of 79-year-old Leonard Forte, a resident of LaBelle, Florida, has been ongoing from 1997 until November 2019.
Forte is a former law enforcement officer with the New York Suffolk County District Attorney's Office and was convicted in a Vermont jury in 1988 for three counts of rape of a 12-year-old girl. At the time, Forte had appealed his conviction, and a motion for a new trial was granted in 1989.
The state Attorney General’s Office refiled the charges in 1997, but Forte said he was awaiting a heart transplant and was too sick to stand trial.
The state then entered into an agreement with Forte that he would provide a medical update every six months for when he could continue with the trial.
From 1997 until November 2019, state police said the state “relied on representations in Forte’s medical records, including his admission to hospice in 2016, that he was physically unable to travel.”
It wasn’t until an investigative report for USA Today was published in November 2019 and questioned Forte’s medical claims.
In the report, reporters from USA Today networks focused on how Forte has been “alive and free” because he couldn’t be tried for child rape. Forte allegedly had been living in Florida as a retiree, “collecting boats, taking vacations and successfully fending off his trial by professing for more than two decades that he’s on the verge of death.”
The report also claimed that Forte never got his heart transplant.
USA Today published the following:
Meanwhile, in dozens of filings and phone calls to the Vermont court, Forte has stalled his case, typically by claiming end-of-life conditions that then don't come to fruition. In 2012, he said he’d been removed from the transplant list because his situation was so dire. In 2014, he said he was undergoing a surgical procedure with up to an 85-percent likelihood of death. In 2017, he said he'd been referred to hospice care and had six months to live.
I’ve been dying for 25 years, your honor," he stated in a phoned-in court appearance to a Vermont judge that year. "I’m sorry I’m still alive.”
The 12-year-old-girl who Forte raped, who was a friend of his daughters, is now a 45-year-old woman with teenage children of her own. USA Today reported that she has been waiting for nearly three-quarters of her life waiting for Forte to appear in a Vermont courtroom.
After the report was published, members of the Vermont State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigations collaborated with special agents assigned to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to conduct a joint investigation into Forte’s claims.
Investigators determined that Forte had been misrepresenting his health claims and inability to travel to Vermont.
In addition to his rape charges, Forte will be charged with two counts of obstruction of justice.
The state issued the citation to Forte through his lawyer to appear for arraignment on July 7 in the Criminal Division of Vermont Superior Court in Bennington.