Years After She Was Raped, She Got a Chilling Message. After Attacker's Guilty Plea, 'Impact Never Went Away' By KC Baker 11

On a blistering July day, Shannon Keeler stood in a Pennsylvania courtroom face-to-face for the first time with the man who stalked and raped her more than a decade ago when she was a college freshman.

On July 17, Keeler, her husband and family watched as Ian Cleary, 32, pleaded guilty to second-degree sexual assault in 2013, when he stalked Keeler at a party, sneaked into her dorm and sexually assaulted her when she was a freshman at Gettysburg College, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported.

At the time, prosecutors declined to pursue the case, leaving Keeler to grapple with the horrific attack on her own.

Then in 2020, came a shocking turn of events when she read an unopened Facebook message from the man she had tried to forget for years.

“I need to hear your voice,” Ian Cleary, now 31, of Saratoga, Calif., allegedly wrote to her in a 2019 message she discovered in 2020, according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by PEOPLE. “I need to know if I did it or not.”

In an even more chilling message, he allegedly wrote, “So I raped you.”

Armed with the messages she had received from Cleary, authorities took a new look at the case, issuing a felony warrant for his arrest weeks after the Associated Press ran a story about local prosecutors’ hesitance to prosecute campus rapes.

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After a three-year search, in April 2024, authorities found Cleary in Metz, France, and extradited him to Pennsylvania, the AP reported, citing the U.S. Marshals Service.  

Keeler, according to her attorney, Andrea Levy, “is currently preparing her victim impact statement which she will deliver live in court at Ian Cleary’s sentencing hearing” on Oct. 20, she wrote to PEOPLE in an email.

Below is her statement following the plea hearing:

It’s difficult to put into words what it meant to sit in a courtroom today and hear Ian Cleary plead guilty to sexually assaulting me in 2013, when I was a student at Gettysburg College.

This moment was 12 years in the making. The system that failed me a decade ago finally delivered accountability, but at a cost. Evidence was lost. Time passed. My life moved on, but the impact never went away. Not for me. Not for my family.

Justice is not just a conviction. It is about doing the right thing, even when it’s hard. It is about giving victims a voice and reminding people that right is still right, even when the system is slow to catch up.

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I’m deeply grateful to those who made this outcome possible. Sergeant Evans, State Trooper Navitsky, the DA’s office, the U.S. Marshals, and especially Maryclaire Dale of the Associated Press, whose reporting gave this case the visibility it needed. To Andrea Levy and PCAR, your countless hours of legal advocacy over the last four years gave me both the emotional and legal support I needed to see this through. And to my husband Luke, my parents, my siblings, and my friends, thank you for believing me and standing by me through all these years. I wouldn’t be here without you.

If you’re hurting, you are not alone. You still have control over yourself and your story. You have power in what you choose to do with your pain. The legal system is just one path. There are many ways to explore healing, and only you can decide what’s right for you.

There are organizations in every state, like PCAR in Pennsylvania, that exist to champion the rights of victims and provide the support needed to navigate your options, including the legal path. I encourage anyone in a position to do so, including the federal government, to support these nonprofit groups. They make healing more accessible, and in many cases, they help make closure, and sometimes justice, possible.

I don’t deny that it took resilience to get here. But I also know many pieces had to fall into place. Right is right. Wrong is wrong. And often, the right thing to do is also the harder thing in every realm of life. We all have a part to play — If I can inspire even one person facing a hard decision right now to choose what is right, whether they are a police officer, teacher, lawyer, government official, witness, athlete, or friend, then we have moved the needle.

During the plea hearing, attorneys for Cleary and Keeler each proposed a four-to-eight-year prison sentence for him, which Judge Kevin Hess will decide at his sentencing, according to The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.