A Georgia man was sentenced to 10 years in prison last week after holding a teenage girl captive and sexually assaulting her ― but he will not see the inside of a prison cell.
Michael Wysolovski, 33, was arrested in June 2017 after FBI agents found a 17-year-old girl, who had been missing for over a year, trapped in a dog cage in his home in Duluth, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the victim, who HuffPost will not name because she is a sexual assault survivor, was found severely malnourished and suffering from back problems due to the dog cage. She had also contracted ringworm from the unsanitary conditions.
“The psychological damage Michael Wysolovski inflicted is beyond imagination,” the victim, clutching a stuffed animal, said in court last week, according to local outlet WIS News.
Wysolovski pled guilty last week to first-degree cruelty to children and interstate interference with custody. Although he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, Wysolovski received credit for time served during the eight months he was in a detention center prior to his sentencing. The remaining nine years and four months of his sentence will be served on probation and he will have to register as a sex offender for life.
“I don’t see any emotion from you. I don’t see any remorse from you,” Gwinnett County Superior Court Judge Timothy Hamil said during sentencing. “I am not moved to give you first offender status... In my time on the bench I can count on both hands the time I’ve refused to give someone first offender status ― but there’s something inside me that says this is one of those times.”
Wysolovski met the victim when she was 15 in an online chat room for people with eating disorders, the AJC reports. The girl, who had anorexia, was unhappy at home and Wysolovski eventually convinced her to come live with him after she turned 16, the age of consent in Georgia.
Prosecutor Michael DeTardo said during the plea hearing that Wysolovski and the victim initially agreed to enter into a sexual relationship involving BDSM and simulating non-consensual sex acts. The victim also asked Wysolovski to control her eating habits as part of the BDSM relationship. Wysolovski, however, began abusing the boundaries, refusing to use safe words and resorting to physical violence when the victim did not comply with his demands. He later force-fed or sexually assaulted the victim as punishment, and repeatedly held her in the dog cage over the course of the year she was with him.
Initially, Wysolovski had also been indicted on charges of rape, false imprisonment and aggravated sodomy. DeTardo said the relationship was a “gray area” because the victim initially entered it consensually, and might be risky to bring to trial. The victim and her family did not want to go to trial and instead prioritized Wysolovski registering as a sex offender.
The victim was found after she contacted another user on the online eating disorder forum and that woman called the police.
The news of Wysolovski’s sentence comes on the heels of a similar story of a New York man named Shane Piche, who raped a 14-year-old girl he met while driving a school bus. Piche was sentenced to 10 years probation but no prison time because, according to the judge, he only raped one girl, rather than multiple.
