Sex-trafficking Victim Chrystul Kizer Gets 11 Years for Killing Her Abuser

The Washington Post / Kim Bellware, Jessica Contrera

13:18 JST, August 20, 2024

KENOSHA, Wis. – A judge on Monday sentenced a Milwaukee woman charged with killing the man who sexually abused her as a teenager to 11 years in prison plus five years of extended supervision. The decision ends a six-year legal saga that tested the limits of the court’s leniency toward trafficking survivors who commit crimes.

Chrystul Kizer will ultimately not serve the full 11 years in prison, after Kenosha County Judge David P. Wilk credited her with more than a year and a half of time already served.

Kizer, now 24, initially faced a possible life sentence for shooting 34-year-old Randall Volar III when she was 17. Volar, who was White, had been filming his sexual abuse of Kizer, who is Black, for more than a year.

This year, Kizer agreed to plead guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree reckless homicide with use of a dangerous weapon, which carried a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.

Advocates said Kizer’s case marked the first time a Wisconsin court had allowed a defendant who was a sex-trafficking victim to use an “affirmative defense” for a homicide charge. More than 30 states have affirmative defense provisions that allow trafficking victims to be acquitted of certain charges against them if they can prove at trial that a crime was committed because of their abuse.

Kenosha County District Attorney Michael Graveley had argued that Kizer carried out a premeditated killing to steal Volar’s BMW, while public defender Jennifer Bias said Kizer acted in self-defense after Volar had pinned her to the ground while trying to initiate sexual contact.

Prosecutors declined to comment, and Kizer’s attorney was not immediately available after Monday’s sentencing.

The decision means Kizer will be in her mid-30s when she is eventually released from Taycheedah Correctional Institution, Wisconsin’s state women’s prison. Kizer did not visibly react to the sentence, while several advocates in court to support her shook their heads in dismay.

Claudine O’Leary, a human-trafficking survivor and founder of Rethink Resources, a Chicago-based consultancy group for victims of human trafficking, said Kizer’s sentence shows that courts still don’t fully embrace a trauma-informed approach to justice.

“Too often, these courts are looking for the perfect victim. And Chrystul did not fit the image of what they thought a perfect victim would look like,” O’Leary said. “They didn’t understand the kinds of experiences Chrystul had early on, and so the court system is simply not prepared to support her.”

O’Leary noted that Kizer was not treated like a victim early on and her experiences with sexual abuse weren’t taken seriously.

A 2019 Washington Post investigation showed that the Kenosha Police Department knew Volar was abusing underage Black girls for nearly three months before his death. After a 15-year-old Black girl fled from his home in nothing but a bra and jacket, police raided Volar’s residence and found hundreds of videos of child sexual abuse; among the stash were videos Volar had made of Kizer and girls who appeared to be as young as 12. But while the investigation continued, police and prosecutors allowed Volar to remain free.

In a 2019 interview, Graveley, the Kenosha prosecutor, said that his office did not know the age of the girls in the videos and delayed filing charges until they could determine whether they were minors.

Records later obtained by The Post show that investigators described many of the girls being abused in Volar’s videos as appearing to be in their early and midteens. One, they wrote, could have been as young as 12.

Bias, Kizer’s attorney, described Volar as a “predator” and a “pedophile” who preyed on young Black girls from the Milwaukee area.

“He was arrested, quickly released and continued his behavior,” Bias told the judge Monday.

Volar first met Kizer when she was 16 after he responded to an ad she posted in Backpage.com – a major online marketplace for prostitution before it was shuttered in 2019 for involvement in sex trafficking. Kizer said in court Monday older girls she befriended told her it was a way she could make the money she needed for snacks, school supplies and food for her younger siblings.

In interviews and court filings, Kizer has said that in exchange for sex acts, Volar took her on dates and groomed her with cash, shopping trips and gifts such as a locket she came to treasure. Though prosecutors maintained Volar’s only role in sex trafficking minors was as a buyer, Kizer said he also trafficked her to other men; Volar plied her with drugs to make her more comfortable when he drove her to a hotel to meet other men and then take their money.

On the night of June 4, 2018, Kizer told Volar she was fighting with her boyfriend in Milwaukee and needed to get away. He sent an Uber to bring her to his home in Kenosha, where they stayed up throughout the night.

Volar began massaging her leg, but Kizer rebuffed him, saying she didn’t want to do that, she said. Kizer would later tell detectives Volar pinned her to the ground before she was able to get away. She retrieved a gun from her purse and shot him. She lit a fire in his house and fled in his BMW, which she had often driven in the past.

While Kizer told detectives she was tired of Volar “touching her,” prosecutors framed her behavior as a premeditated murder. On Monday, Graveley said Kizer reached out to Volar the night she killed him under false pretenses; they cited her texts and social media messages as evidence of her plan, including one she sent from Volar’s home on the night of the murder that said, “I’m finna do it.”

Graveley said she downloaded a police scanner app before the shooting, and posted a laughing emoji on Facebook beside the words “MY MUG SHOT.” She got the idea to light the fire from watching the TV show “Criminal Minds,” Graveley said.

Prosecutors acknowledged that Volar committed a felony each time he trafficked Kizer. They described him as a person who had dealt with the challenges of a physical deformity in his hands and leg and was naive and socially awkward. After working in nursing homes and at a gas station, he made a “substantial amount of money” as an early investor in the cryptocurrency bitcoin.

Graveley depicted Kizer as greedy and impulsive and said she was untrustworthy, having changed her story several times after her arrest in Volar’s death.

“Her deceptiveness and impulsivity speaks to dangerousness in the community that is of recent vintage,” Graveley said.

After Graveley spoke, Kizer asked the judge for mercy and asked not to be sent back to prison. With handcuffs hanging from her wrists as she read her statement, Kizer said she had changed and matured; she was no longer the person she was when she shot Volar in his home in 2018 and set his house ablaze.

Kizer endured a difficult childhood suffering sexual abuse and poverty before meeting Volar in 2016 and being subsequently abused by him and trafficked to other men. She said she wanted to move beyond the trauma of her past, toward a future that she hoped would include a husband, a home and a family.

“I’m filled with remorse and regret, and I’m genuinely sorry,” Kizer told Volar’s family seated in the courtroom.

Volar’s family did not speak in court, but Randall P. Volar Jr., Volar’s father, submitted a letter to Wilk imploring him to show Kizer no leniency.

In the end, the judge said that while trafficking was a real and serious problem, he saw too wide a gulf between Kizer’s past statements to law enforcement and the repentant person she claimed to be.

“It appears that your relationship with the truth seems fluid and opportunistic,” Wilk said. And while Kizer had accepted responsibility for her actions, the judge said, she continued to blame others – including the police who failed to arrest Volar.

Kizer’s childhood, Wilk said, explains her circumstances – “But it doesn’t excuse them.”

Sarah Bendtsen, the director of policy strategy for the anti-trafficking nonprofit organization Shared Hope International, said Kizer’s response after the shooting and the way her story initially changed are consistent with how trauma victims may behave.

Bendtsen said a person who has experienced trauma such as sexual abuse searches for control any way they know how, and their reactions can seem callous – like Kizer’s decision to burn Volar’s house and take his car.

“Observers may think she could have shot him and then called 911,” Bendtsen said. “That’s using the average person’s standard, and she’s not the average person: She’s a young person who’s been to hell and back.”

The trial court’s decision to send a trafficking survivor to prison for nearly a decade indicates the justice system is still struggling to grapple with the complexities of survivor trauma, Bendtsen said.

And while she was discouraged by the sentence, Bendtsen said the case raised awareness of how survivors’ experiences factor into an affirmative defense.

“Chrystul is not an anomaly. I think the visibility on her case and calls for advocacy has to have made a dent,” Bendtsen said. “I don’t believe we’re back at square one.”