Charges stem from vulgar emails sent to Snoqualmie police chief and mayor
By Kelsey Turner, InvestigateWest
Reporter Kelsey Turner covers gender-based violence and other issues relating to poverty and marginalized communities in the Pacific Northwest. She can be reached at kelsey@investigatewest.org.
As Sharilyn Lux sorted through her mail last week, she paused at a letter from her local government. The city of Snoqualmie, a small suburb east of Seattle where Lux has lived for the last two decades, had charged her with the crime of cyber harassment.
“Here we go again,” Lux said.
It’s the third time the city has brought Lux, a rape survivor who has spent the last six years demanding answers about her case, to court over the numerous communications she has sent city staff since 2019. The city says her emails and phone calls — which are often filled with vulgar language and accusations that Snoqualmie officials are criminals — constitute harassment and are wasting public resources.
But Lux, a 49-year-old middle school Spanish teacher, says they’re necessary to get answers about her unsolved rape case from 2019. Lux believes Snoqualmie police botched the investigation, pointing to lost evidence, unpursued leads and the involvement of an officer who’d been suspended for shoddy follow-through on sexual assault cases, InvestigateWest reported in February.
The charge of cyber harassment, a gross misdemeanor punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine, is the latest development in an ongoing battle between Lux and Snoqualmie, raising questions about Lux’s right to free speech in the wake of a brutal crime that police failed to solve. The city declined to comment on the charge, noting that they do not comment on pending criminal cases.
The charge stems from a series of emails that Lux sent to Snoqualmie Mayor Katherine Ross and Police Chief Brian Lynch in December, according to a Snoqualmie police report. The emails, which were also sent to other mayors, the state Attorney General’s Office and media outlets, included many vulgar phrases directed at Ross and Lynch. Lux repeatedly called Ross gendered insults while criticizing police and city staff for not acting on her rape case.
Ross reported the emails to police and confirmed that she wanted to pursue a criminal case, according to the citation. A Snoqualmie police officer concluded that the emails “appear to contain a significant amount of lewd, lascivious, indecent, and obscene language, which is one of the elements of the crime of cyber harassment.” After getting a search warrant for Google, which allowed police to review Lux’s email account, internet activity and Google Pay information, the officer recommended the case be forwarded to the city prosecutor’s office.
Lux said the investigation into her emails is more proof that the city seems more motivated to silence her than to solve her case.
“This is unreal that they got a warrant for my email,” she said. “They are wasting all their energy to criminalize me.”
Although the cyber harassment citation was issued Feb. 18, Lux didn’t see the letter until a few days later. She doesn’t check her mail every day because she’s afraid to go to the post office to pick it up, she said. A 15-year protection order put against her by the Snoqualmie city clerk last year bars her from coming within 500 feet of City Hall, with some exceptions. She can go to the post office, which is within the 500-foot radius, but only if she’s “prompt,” the order specifies. It’s vague enough that Lux isn’t always sure when she might be violating it.
While harassment isn’t allowed under state law, some lawyers in Washington argue that Snoqualmie’s actions are an overreach that violate Lux’s First Amendment rights. Joan Mell, an attorney on the board of the Washington Coalition of Open Government, described the 15-year protection order as “way abusive,” saying that it “so far exceeds” the justifiable court intervention needed to protect the city clerk, InvestigateWest previously reported.
In July, the city charged Lux for misusing the 911 emergency response system. The Snoqualmie City Council had created the misdemeanor crime through a city ordinance just two months earlier, following frequent calls from Lux.
According to the state Attorney General’s Office, if a city passes an ordinance criminalizing certain conduct, it’s typically up to the person charged with the crime to challenge its constitutionality. Lux did that last fall — her attorney, Isham Reavis, argued that Snoqualmie had drafted an “unconstitutional ordinance prohibiting core First Amendment activity because it has grown tired of taking Ms. Lux’s calls.”
But just days before the case was set to go to trial in late January, the city moved to dismiss the misuse of 911 system charges, and the case was dropped. While this was a positive outcome for Lux, Reavis voiced regret that “what we view as unconstitutional law does remain on the books.”
Reavis said he’s “deeply disappointed” that the city has decided to charge Lux again. But he’s not surprised.
“They are explicitly targeting her, both in the laws they’re passing and now this new charge,” he said. “Obviously, these are angry emails which use colorful language, but I feel disappointed that anyone would want to bring charges on that.”
Lynch, who took over as Snoqualmie’s police chief in 2023, has made several efforts to stop Lux from communicating with the department. In one of his first actions as interim chief in July 2023, Lynch gave staff a “new response plan” for handling 911 or nonemergency calls from Lux, according to a memorandum that Lynch sent to the dispatch supervisor. If Lux calls about a “historical rape,” the memorandum says, the call taker would reply: “It sounds like you do not have an active emergency, and it appears you are in crisis. I will be transferring you now to the crisis line.”
Lux has now heard dispatchers and police staff recite this script to her dozens of times.
“They had been instructed to dismiss her and claim that she was suffering from a mental health crisis, whether or not she was,” Reavis said.
On Feb. 6, hours after InvestigateWest published its investigation about Lux’s case, the city of Snoqualmie announced that Lynch was the subject of an ongoing internal investigation and was put on administrative leave. “The City of Snoqualmie does not comment on pending investigations,” the city’s press release says. The Snoqualmie Police Department didn’t respond to InvestigateWest’s request for comment.
Lux said the media coverage of her case was finally helping her feel heard after years of being dismissed by Snoqualmie’s leadership. But now, she’s bracing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees.
“I feel like I was finally getting my dignity back and really, honestly, starting to heal for the first time in six years,” Lux said. “They’re not going to take it from me.”
