A woman stood in the front of a Ramsey County District courtroom Wednesday and told a judge her first impressions of Jeffery Eldred when the two met in the fall of 2018.
He portrayed good morals, strong values, respect for women, she said. She liked him, and the two started dating.
The woman cried as she recalled what she now knows about the 34-year-old Shoreview man.
“He’s a predator, a serial rapist, a monster,” she said at Eldred’s sentencing hearing.
Ramsey County District Judge Sara Grewing sentenced Eldred to about two and a half years in prison on one count of attempted third-degree criminal sexual conduct.
His sentencing comes more than a year after the woman spent the night at Eldred’s Shoreview home in November of 2018 and awoke to Eldred sexually assaulting her.
She described how her body felt paralyzed at the time, and her mental state groggy, making it difficult for her to stay alert as she tried to get Eldred to stop. Sometimes Eldred pretended to go back to sleep, she told the court, and she recalled willing herself to stay awake, terrified of what he would do if she drifted off.
But she kept slipping out of consciousness, she said, and then waking up again and again to find Eldred on top of her.
She now realizes Eldred had drugged her before the two went to sleep that night, she told the court, adding that he didn’t count on her regaining consciousness.
“I didn’t even exist as a person to Jeff that night … I was just a body,” she said.
The next morning, Eldred acted like everything was normal, the woman recalled. When she confronted him with her memory of the previous night, he denied it and made her think she imagined it, she said. The Pioneer Press generally doesn’t name victims of sexual assault.
Then, later that morning, she was on his computer and saw his Gmail account open. Inside, she saw an email with a photo attached and clicked on it. It showed Eldred engaging in sexual conduct with a woman who appeared unconscious. That’s when she knew she’d been raped, she said.
She soon discovered dozens of other emails containing similar images.
Scared, she didn’t feel she had time to comb through them all, so she took screen shots of some with the camera on her phone and quickly left. She filed a report with police a couple weeks later.
“I will never be able to get the visual of those women out of my head,” she said Wednesday, adding that the discovery was terrifying and left her struggling with nightmares, insomnia and depression.
Police identified one of the women in the photos as someone Eldred had an on-and-off relationship with from late 2017 through most of 2018 and tracked her down.
She was horrified when they showed her the photos, court documents say.
Eldred wound up pleading guilty last July to sexually assaulting the woman without her knowledge multiple times while she was unconscious, court documents say.
Police have been unsuccessful in their attempts to reach the other women depicted in the photos, but are continuing to pursue leads, according to Jessica O’Hern, an investigator with the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office.
Eldred denies there are more victims, and told police the other photographs depict consensual sex.
His defense attorney, Thomas Bauer, repeated that Wednesday.
“Throughout this case I have been fighting phantom victims that don’t exist,” Bauer told the judge. “Videos that could be consensual referred to as other victims.”
He added that the reason no other victims have come forward in the case is because there aren’t any, and asked Grewing to allow Eldred to serve his sentence concurrent to the 10 year sentence he’s already serving for his Hennepin County convictions.
Grewing denied the request, and dismissed Bauer’s characterization of other victims as “phantoms.”
“I do believe they exist and that they will be found,” Grewing said, adding that she also believes Eldred is a “sexual predator.”
She praised the woman who spoke Wednesday.
“I can’t imagine where we would be if not for your quick actions,” she said. “For your daughter, for my daughter, for all our daughters, you are a hero.”
In addition to prison time, Eldred is required to register as a sexual offender for the rest of his life.
He apologized at the hearing and said he hopes to be there for his two children as they grow up.