An American man as former FBI agent of Alabama has been sentenced to life behind bars for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl

Air Force veteran Christopher Bauer was able to move from FBI to Alabama state police despite sexual misconduct allegations

By Edward Era Barbacena 

 A white American man as a former FBI agent was sentenced to life in prison Thursday for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl while serving as an Alabama state trooper.

Alabama's state police hired Christopher Bauer even after he was kicked out of the FBI amid earlier claims he raped a co-worker at knifepoint.

An Associated Press investigation showed Bauer, 45, moved from one law enforcement job to another with the help of a forged letter making it appear he was “eligible for rehire.”

The forgery prompted an FBI investigation but federal authorities held off charging Bauer as the state proceedings played out.

A jury convicted Bauer in June of first-degree sodomy and sexual abuse of a child under 12 following a weeklong trial in which defense attorneys claimed the girl made up the allegations.

Shackled and wearing an orange jail uniform, Bauer told Montgomery Circuit Judge Jimmy Pool that he never imagined he would end up on the prisoner side of a jail cell. He said juries don't always get it right.

Many of the allegations played out in Louisiana court filings that had been public for a year when Bauer was hired in Alabama. The woman who accused him of rape, a co-worker at the FBI, wrote in an application for a restraining order that Bauer had choked her and made her “scared for my life.”

Bauer disputed those claims, telling colleagues the acts were consensual. But the woman previously told AP that Bauer sexually assaulted her so frequently her hair began to fall out.

“It was a year of torture,” she said. “He quite literally would keep me awake for days. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep, and in six months I went from 150 pounds to 92 pounds. I was physically dying from what he was doing to me.”

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Bauer's sentence. The agency has refused to release records from its internal investigation into Bauer's hiring, with a spokeswoman saying only “there were no disciplinary actions taken as a result of the review.”