Chicago — A Lakeview man accused of sexually assaulting four women between 2002 and 2017, including three women he met at Chicago bars, has been convicted in one case, court records show.
After a bench trial, Judge Michael Clancy found Gabriel Dathey, 40, guilty of criminal sexual assault of a victim unable to give knowing consent and sentenced him to four years. Clancy found Dathey not guilty of two counts of criminal sexual assault during the commission of another felony, which carried potentially stiffer sentences. The other cases are still pending, and Dathey’s attorney is appealing the conviction.
Dathey was convicted of sexually assaulting a 22-year-old woman in her Roscoe Village apartment after meeting her at Berlin nightclub, 954 West Belmont, on February 24, 2012.
The woman told police she accepted a couple of drinks from Dathey and recalled receiving a ride home from him, but she remembered little else about what transpired after that—except waking up in her bedroom with Dathey on top of her.
“She told him to stop and said she was sick and vomiting,” police officers wrote in a report. “She felt she had been drugged.”
Prosecutors charged Dathey in 2017 after receiving the results of sexual assault evidence kits that Chicago police submitted to the state crime lab for analysis years earlier. At the time, officials said he worked as a cab driver.
Days after the assault in Roscoe Village, on March 4, 2012, Dathey met a Finnish au pair at the now-defunct Visions Nightclub at 632 North Dearborn, according to police records. The woman reported feeling disoriented but remembered being in a house with three men and having sex with one of them.
“She reported she started crying and said’ no’ when he entered the room wanting to have sex,” officers wrote.
Cops caught up with Dathey within days of that attack and secured a DNA sample. Prosecutors did not say why the test results took nearly six years to come back.
Another woman allegedly met Dathey outside Berlin nightclub on August 10, 2014. She admitted to being very intoxicated and said she accepted a ride home from Dathey, according to police records. Then 30 years old, she told officers that she was disoriented but believed Dathey sexually assaulted her in his car behind her home in the 2100 block of West Cortland.
The oldest attack to result in charges against Dathey occurred on the Loyola University campus early on September 29, 2002.
An 18-year-old woman was walking on school grounds when Dathey approached her and asked her to go with him, police reported at the time. He pulled her to the ground, pulled her jeans and underwear down, and proceeded to assault the woman, police said.
After police arrested Dathey in 2017, prosecutors said he was unable to have sex with the woman, but his DNA was found in a discarded condom.
Even though Dathey was arrested more than five years ago, he only accrued 313 days credit toward his prison sentence because he spent most of that time on bail without electronic monitoring, according to court records. He is scheduled to be paroled on April 28, 2025.
