The man accused of raping a fellow Gettysburg College student in 2013 and then sending her a Facebook message years later reading, “So I raped you,” is being returned to the United States to face charges.
Ian Cleary, now 31, was handed over to U.S. authorities at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport on Thursday, the Appeal Court prosecutors’ office in Metz confirmed. He’d been in French custody since April, when authorities arrested him in the northeastern city of Metz, near the German border.
Cleary had been the subject of a years-long international manhunt, launched in 2021, after he sent a string of disturbing Facebook messages to Shannon Keeler. At that point, Keeler had already spent years trying to convince authorities that Cleary stalked and raped her while they were both students at Gettysburg College. She has claimed Cleary, an upperclassmen and athlete, followed her back to her dorm room after a party and assaulted her while she begged for him to stop and texted her friends for help.
Despite reporting the attack and completing a rape kit, Gettysburg officials and other authorities declined to press charges. She was told at the time that it was difficult to prosecute rape claims when the victim had been drinking.
“So I raped you,” Cleary wrote from an account that authorities later verified was his
Another message read: “I need to hear your voice, I need to know if I did it or not.”
Upon discovering the messages, Keeler again went to the police, and then went public with her story, sitting down for an interview with the Associated Press in 2021.
Upon Cleary’s arrest she said she was grateful for the law enforcement response but added it only happened “because I went public with my story, which no survivor should have to do in order to obtain justice.”