A sheriff in California is fighting a plan that would place a convicted rapist in a taxpayer-funded rental home that's located near a Girl Scout camp.
State officials are weighing a plan to transfer Michael Thomas Cheek, 74, from a locked psychiatric facility to a rental home valued at more than $800,000 in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Santa Cruz County Sheriff Chris Clark told Fox News Digital the property is near a Girl Scout camp and schools, and that the rugged terrain could make it more difficult for deputies to respond if Cheek were to commit another crime.
"The community for which he's being considered to be released, it's a really tight-knit community," Clark said. "It's not necessarily the easiest place for us to get to, you know, if and when something were to happen."
"When you talk about our mountain communities, it's not uncommon that during the winter, you know, these folks lose power. The cell connectivity is extremely poor up there. And so, when you think about monitoring him electronically, how effective are those systems if you have no electricity? And how about if people can't call for help if they suspect Mr. Cheek is up to something when cell service is poor?"
In 1980, Cheek was convicted of raping a young woman at gunpoint. He subsequently escaped from the Contra Costa County jail and raped a 15-year-old girl at gunpoint.
He completed a sex offender treatment program located at a psychiatric facility in 2019, but two attempts previously failed that would have put him in Santa Cruz County.
"Mr. Cheek has no tie to our county. He's not from Santa Cruz County. And so his only tie here is that he frankly abducted somebody and raped them. And so he victimized people here. And so to me, it is completely unfair and shouldn't be the case where a county that somebody's victimized people is then burdened with the thought of having to house him here in one of the most expensive places frankly in the country to live, which we are," Clark said of the convicted rapist.
Braden Peters, 20, better known as the "looksmaxxing" influencer "Clavicular," walked up to court with a barking dog ahead of his arraignment in a Massachusetts courtroom on Thursday.
Peters appeared in Orleans District Court and entered a not guilty plea on charges relating to an alleged rape. A court clerk confirmed to Fox News Digital that he posted $10,000 bail relating to the charges.
The incident allegedly involved a 17-year-old victim that occurred in 2025 at his family's Cape Cod home.
Former criminal defense attorney and Fox News Contributor Ted Williams said Peters arriving at court with a dog was not necessarily unusual.
"I don't think it's really out of the ordinary for a defendant to show up at court and the dog is left outside on a leash at a specific location or left with a person," Williams told Fox News Digital.
Williams said the dog could have served as a source of support for Peters ahead of the court appearance.
"There are people who are more attached to their dog than they are attached to a human being, believe it or not, and that may be just his support mechanism — the dog," Williams said.
What would be unusual, Williams said, is if the animal were allowed inside the courthouse under normal circumstances — as dogs or animals of any sort are not permitted in courts, he said.
Peters has amassed more than 1 million followers on his Instagram account and is known for rating people's looks via livestream and providing "advice" like surgery and personal training.
In this specific case, Fox News Digital previously reported the teenage victim told investigators she messaged Peters online looking to connect and make content – to which he allegedly sent for an Uber to pick her up and bring her to his house.
On Wednesday, Peters’ attorneys filed a memorandum asking the court to release him on cash bail, arguing he was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community and offering to surrender his passport and have no contact with the alleged victim.
He was not jailed awaiting Thursday’s arraignment; he appeared in response to a summons and then posted bail.
READ IT: Braden Peters’ defense memorandum for his release.
He went on to say, "The fact that these allegations first arose in June 2026 when the complainant and her Florida attorney appeared together at the Chatham Police Department just days before filing an amended civil lawsuit seeking thousands of dollars from Mr. Peters speaks for itself."
This is not Peters' first run-in with the law. He was previously arrested in Florida on battery charges in Kissimmee after a reported fight between two women at an Airbnb property.
The Cape & Islands District Attorney's Office in Massachusetts did not provide a comment to Fox News Digital on Thursday's court proceeding, citing the pending case.
EXCLUSIVE: Twenty-three years after Duane "Dog" Chapman chased fugitive Max Factor heir Andrew Luster to Mexico and tackled him on a Puerto Vallarta street, the convicted serial rapist is a free man â despite an initial sentence of 124 years.
"I hope he's smart enough â and he's smart â to never do anything like that again," Chapman told Fox News Digital Wednesday, more than two decades after the capture that helped make him a household name.
Chapman, his son Leland and several others went to Mexico after receiving a tip about Luster's whereabouts â months after he fled the U.S. in the middle of a California rape trial. They first identified him from the tipsters' photo, which showed a knee and a watch.
Chapman had been studying his face closely for weeks, but he also recognized the watch from a televised interview, he said. And he credits his son with first spotting Luster, who was speaking with a young woman in a bar on June 18, 2003.
"When I saw him, you talk about an adrenaline rush went through my body," Chapman told Fox News Digital Wednesday. "Tim got down . ..he snuck up behind him, and then I pushed him. He fell over. We all jumped on him, and I screamed, 'You're under arrest by the United States of America.'"
They pulled him into an SUV and drove off â only to be intercepted on the road outside town by Mexican authorities who arrested everyone amid the chaos.
Luster claimed he'd been kidnapped, Chapman said, so he handed the lead investigator what Chapman called a "bible" of information on the case.
Luster, the great-grandson of makeup mogul Max Factor, vanished during a recess in his trial and was convicted in absentia on 86 counts involving the drugging and raping of three women between 1996 and 2000 at his home in Mussel Shoals, California.
One of the victims, who asked not to be named out of concerns for her safety, said she's still struggling to comprehend Luster's release even though she knew it was
"Itâs very unsettling knowing that he is not behind bars, not in a closed facility," she told Fox News Digital Wednesday. "He is out in the public, in a community that just â it just doesnât feel very good at all."
She said she has concerns for her own safety, her family, Luster's other victims and even investigators after a notebook containing a "payback list" was recovered from his Mexican hotel room â with their names on it.
She said she dated Luster for five or six months without knowing she'd been drugged and raped the night they met â something detectives discovered years later, after they recovered videotapes from the home.
"It was me, comatose on his bed, wearing the clothes that I was wearing the first night I met him," she said. "Thatâs how I knew when it happened, because I had just bought that outfit, and I was wearing it the night that I met him. So thatâs how I figured out when it happened to me, which was absolutely horrifying."
Police found more than 100 videos, she said. Not all of them involved criminal activity, but those that did were "mortifying," she said, as Luster spoke to the camera like he were playing with "a toy."
"Theyâre pretty brutal," she added. "The things that he did to us while we were completely unconscious were things that, I mean, had we been able to feel anything, it would have been awful. He narrated the video and talked to the camera throughout and thoroughly enjoyed the whole entire thing."
He initially received consecutive sentences totaling 124 years â later reduced to 50, and he was released earlier this month after over two decades behind bars.
Prosecutors had opposed early release in 2024 and again in 2025. However, he was able to earn substantial early release credits under California's controversial Proposition 57 criminal justice reforms, and his prison term came to an end on Oct. 11.
"I did not know that [Prop 57] meant that it was gonna make Andrew Lusterâs crimes be deemed nonviolent," Doe No. 3 told Fox News Digital. "Thatâs just so baffling. I just feel like if anybody could watch these tapes of what he did to me and all of these other women, just to look at that and try to put the word nonviolent on it, that word could not come out of your mouth. It just would be impossible."
Doe was among those who successfully lobbied for changes to the law to close that nonviolent loophole.
Chapman said he never received the bounty for Luster and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money for the operation and ensuing legal fallout.
Mexican law did not allow bounty hunters to apprehend fugitives. Chapman said he was arrested alongside his son Leland, longtime friend and associate Tim Chapman, who is not a blood relative, and members of a camera crew.
"He told me, 'Iâm going to get him for you,' and he did," Doe said of Chapman. So to help him get out after he put Luster back behind bars, she kicked off a legal fundraiser that she said attracted donations from around the country.
As part of the series, he plans to help bail out certain inmates with a history of good behavior and positive reports â but not for people facing serious felonies or sex abuse charges, he said.
"We'll call out the ones that deserve a second chance, right, and you can't be perfect OK, so if they run, yeehaw," he said. "I don't wish they would, but if they do, then I'm going to catch them."
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