The incest and rape trial of a retired Army two-star general in a Virginia civilian court has been postponed until September.
Retired Maj. Gen. James Grazioplene, 69, faced an Article 32 hearing on charges he had repeatedly raped his daughter at various military postings in the United States and Germany in the 1980s. The military charges were dropped due to statute of limitations issues within the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
In late 2018, a grand jury in Prince William County, Virginia, returned an indictment on rape and incest charges related to three counts of incest that allegedly occurred between August 1987 and May 1988 while Grazioplene and his family lived in the jurisdiction. The family lived in off-post housing in Woodbridge, Virginia at the time.
Prince William County has no statute of limitations on rape.
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The trial had been scheduled for April 29 but, according to the county’s circuit court website, the trial date was postponed to Sept. 3.
Grazioplene, a Gainesville, Virginia resident, was denied a bond request and has been in custody at the Prince William County Jail since mid-December, jail officials told Army Times.
Grazioplene’s daughter, Jennifer Elmore, 47, told investigators at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 2015 near where she lived at the time about the incidents after years of therapy, she said in the 2017 Article 32 hearing.
She described ongoing assaults that began at age 3 and continued until she was 18 years old and left home.
Elmore reported the alleged assaults to the Army a decade after her father had retired from the Army.
Army Times’ policy is not to identify alleged victims of sexual assault, however Elmore went public with her story in a Washington Post interview in late 2018. She cited one of her reasons was to help others know that they too could come forward.
A February 2018 ruling by the Armed Forces Court of Appeals set a precedent of assigning a five-year limit to rape charges in the case of an Air Force lieutenant colonel who had been accused of sexual assault in 1997.
Under Virginia law, Grazioplene faces 10 years in prison for each of the three incest charges and life imprisonment for the three rape charges.
If found guilty of the alleged 1987 rape of his daughter, his retirement rank would be reduced by three to four pay grades from his last rank of O-8, or major general.
Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.
