A 19-year-old man is accused of holding his girlfriend captive in her dorm room at a university in Minnesota while he raped, beat and waterboarded her for days until she escaped.
Keanu Labatte was arrested on Sunday at St Catherine University, an all-female school in St Paul. He is charged with three counts of criminal sexual conduct, one of domestic assault by strangulation and one of threats of violence.
The office of the public defender representing Labatte declined to comment.
According to a criminal complaint filed this week, Labatte arrived on campus last Thursday to visit his girlfriend of two months. She is not named in the complaint.
After finding texts, pictures and social media content that infuriated him, Labatte grabbed her phone and kept it away from her for days, according to the complaint. She was strangled, threatened with a knife, forced to lie in a bathtub while Labatte covered her face with a washcloth and poured water on her, and sexually assaulted in her dorm room from Thursday to Saturday, it adds.
