A former CIA clandestine service officer accused of putting an aspiring operative through a sordid “training” program centered on servicing him sexually is now nowhere to be found, the alleged victim’s lawyers say.
Adding additional intrigue to the search for ex-spy Shaun Wiggins, the upstate New York data analytics firm he co-founded has apparently vanished.
The attorneys representing Wiggins’ accuser hired a skip tracer in hopes of tracking him down. Still, Wiggins remains frustratingly out of reach, making it all but impossible to serve him with legal papers to get the civil case underway, according to court records and a source with knowledge of the situation.
ADVERTISEMENT
In an astonishing lawsuit filed earlier this month, which was first reported by The Daily Beast, a young woman using the pseudonym “Jane Doe” said Wiggins, 59, coerced her into having ongoing sexual relations with him beginning in 2017 under the guise of teaching her to use her body “as a weapon.” Doe claimed Wiggins told her the carnal knowledge she was picking up would become part of her “technical skillset” once she made it to the CIA, and that it would not only come in handy when eliciting secrets from foreign targets, but also to cement bonds between herself and her eventual colleagues.
The alleged assaults occurred during Doe’s 14-month tenure at Soteryx, the firm Wiggins launched in 2016 with two other ex-CIA officers, including Wiggins’ brother. However, Wiggins’ promises to help Doe get hired by the CIA fell flat, according to the suit, which says Doe ended up under psychiatric care instead of realizing her dream career.
“As became increasingly clear, though… Wiggins was not conducting an actual CIA recruitment,” the complaint states. “Rather… Wiggins was operating as a ‘groomer,’ using his position of actual and apparent authority and power to cause [Doe] to accede to his repeated sexual assaults.” (The CIA said it could not confirm or deny The Daily Beast’s request for verification of Wiggins’ past employment, though he is regularly cited in local media as having worked for the spy agency.)
Attorney Jon Bell, who is representing Wiggins, told The Daily Beast that he was unable to comment on pending litigation. He previously told local Saratoga Springs newspaper The Daily Gazette that Wiggins “denies the allegations against him,” calling them “baseless and untruthful.”
“We expect that Mr. Wiggins will be fully exonerated,” Bell said.
Soteryx’s general counsel was unable to be reached on Tuesday, and a call to the company connected to an automated recording saying the number was out of service. An email sent to Soteryx for comment on Wiggins—whose bio has been deleted from the Soteryx website—and his possible whereabouts went unanswered. Now four days past the court-imposed deadline, Doe’s lawyers have still not been able to serve him, a person familiar with the case told The Daily Beast.
Doe’s lawsuit was filed on July 11 in New York State Supreme Court, after which Judge Lisa Headley ordered the documents to be served personally on Wiggins and Soteryx by July 21. Attorneys Megan Goddard and Siobhan Klassen engaged a process server to take care of the task, a motion submitted in court by Klassen states.
On the morning of July 19, the process server performed a “skip trace” on Wiggins to pull up his last known address, according to the motion. Although he worked in New York, and was thought to reside there, the results came back showing an address in Englewood, Colorado, the motion states. But when the process server showed up the next day, Wiggins wasn’t there.
The resident of the home “stated that he moved into this address approx. 1 month ago and does not know the subject,” reads an email from the process server to Doe’s lawyers.
That afternoon, Doe’s lawyers emailed Bell to ask if he would be willing to accept service but they received an “out of office” auto-reply, informing them that Bell would be away until the end of July, without access to email, the motion states.
The next day, the process server went to Soteryx’s listed address on the fourth floor of an office building in Schenectady, New York, according to an email string included in court filings by Doe’s team. There, she found a different business occupying the space, and no one on the premises had ever heard of Wiggins, the process server wrote.
“The company and suite number does [sic] not exist,” the process server wrote. “We can not serve something that doesn’t exist.”
She tried a second address for Soteryx in what she described as a “huge 6-story building that is part residential” in Saratoga Springs.
“As per lobby attendant, the subject is not located here,” her email said. “I went to the suite and spoke to a woman who is employed by [a local accounting firm], and they have occupied this suite for the last 3 years.”
At a crossroads, Goddard and Klassen had no choice but to serve Soteryx via the Secretary of State’s office, they state in a separate filing.
On July 21, the two attorneys had the process server contact the U.S. Postal Service to “formally request the most recent address for Defendant Wiggins,” according to Klassen’s initial motion.
“Upon her request, she was informed this process may take significant time,” it says.
Doe’s lawyers are now asking the court for an additional 45 days to serve Wiggins, hoping they’ll be able to locate the absent defendant so the lawsuit can proceed.
Wiggins’ formal response to Doe’s suit is due by Aug. 18.
Doe is suing Wiggins under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which opened a one-year “lookback window” for sexual assault victims to file claims that otherwise would have expired under the state’s statute of limitations. Some 130 cases have been brought thus far, and such bold-faced names as boxer Mike Tyson, director James Toback, and former President Donald Trump have been hauled into court under the act.
“I am grateful for the Adult Survivors Act, which has allowed so many survivors of sexual assault and abuse to hold their abusers accountable,” Goddard told The Daily Beast in a previous interview. “Abusers should always be held responsible for the harm they inflict, but the window for survivors to file lawsuits under the Adult Survivors Act ends in November of 2023.”
Doe, for her part, resigned from Soteryx in October 2018 and took a job as a restaurant server, according to her lawsuit. In 2021, after she told her story to a friend and a legal aid attorney visiting the restaurant, Doe at long last understood “how fully she had been victimized and traumatized by… Wiggins,” the complaint states. She eventually told her family what had happened, and completed an intensive four-week outpatient program at a psychiatric hospital in Saratoga. Doe is asking for undetermined damages for sexual assault, battery, and infliction of emotional distress, as well as gender discrimination and sexual harassment.
Goddard and Klassen on Tuesday declined to comment on their ongoing search for Wiggins.
