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A Maine district attorney accused of sexually abusing a girl more than a decade ago said the allegation is not true and that he passed two lie detector tests after it was reported to police.
Matthew Foster, the top prosecutor in Hancock and Washington counties, was investigated by the Maine attorney general’s office after his accuser, who is now 25 years old, filed a complaint with police in 2017. The attorney general’s office decided not to file charges against Foster, who has been the counties’ district attorney since 2014.
Foster said Saturday that the results of the subsequent lie detector tests show that he never sexually touched his accuser.
“I stand by everything I said in these examinations, and which I have said from day one: I never engaged in any of this conduct,” Foster said. “I am outraged that these false statements are being made about me. I will not stand for it a moment longer.”
Foster said he was given a lie detector test by Maine State Police on Aug. 23, 2018, and that police concluded he was telling the truth when he said the alleged touching never occurred. Foster provided to the Bangor Daily News a redacted copy of the test results, which indicated he also had passed an earlier lie detector administered to him by a private polygraph examiner.
The administrator of the state police test, Polygraph Unit Supervisor Terry James, concluded that the test showed Foster answered the questions truthfully. The results showed “a high probability that Mr. Foster did not sexually touch Ms. Hinerman as alleged,” James wrote in the report.
The woman, Kathleen Hinerman, took her accusation public recently after Foster, who is up for reelection on Tuesday, said during an Oct. 12 online candidates’ forum that he had never been investigated by the attorney general’s office for any reason.
Some critics of Foster, who say he has done a poor job as district attorney, have said they have known about Hinerman’s accusation against Foster for years, since she began telling people about it roughly five years ago.
Foster has said he initially denied he had been investigated by the attorney general’s office because it is against the law to release information about police investigations and, because he is a prosecutor, he believed he was not allowed to confirm the investigation had taken place.
