A judge has ruled that district attorney candidate Seth T. Carey violated several Maine Bar Rules, including unlawful conduct stemming from his unwanted sexual advances involving a woman who lived in his Rumford home.
“In this case, the court concludes that the nature of the conduct in question reflects adversely on Carey’s trustworthiness and fitness as a lawyer,” Justice Thomas Warren wrote in his 18-page order on the Maine Board of Overseers of the Bar petition against Carey.
The judge’s decision Friday came a month after a three-day hearing in Cumberland County Superior Court at which counsel for the board presented its case in support of sanctions against Carey, including disbarment. A hearing on which, if any, sanctions should be imposed on Carey for the bar violations is expected to be scheduled by the court.
The board’s attorneys presented evidence and witnesses, including a woman who claimed that Carey had made persistent unwanted sexual advances and evicted her after she repeatedly rebuffed him and recorded the wrong basketball game for him one time.
Seeking a protection from abuse order against Carey, his then-tenant took him to court in April, when, after a four-hour hearing, she was granted the order after a judge had found by a preponderance of evidence that Carey had engaged in unlawful sexual touching and domestic violence assault. Carey represented himself at that hearing.
Carey, 43, who lives in Auburn but owns a house in Rumford, was suspended from practicing law in Maine in 2016, but was able to get that suspension lifted by agreeing to specific conditions. In April, the board filed a petition for his immediate suspension in connection with the claims made by the woman who lived at his home. The court ordered an interim suspension after reviewing the evidence presented in district court during the protection from abuse hearing.
In his findings Friday, Warren focused on three events at Carey’s Rumford house.
During Thanksgiving 2017, the woman was awakened in the middle of the night to find Carey’s hands touching her legs and between her thighs. He suggested she sleep with him. She told him to leave her room. He did.
In 2018, Carey tried to pull the woman into his bedroom and proposed having sex. Another time, the woman was sitting on the couch when Carey “stepped in front of her, pulled her head against his crotch and in crude terms requested oral sex.”
Warren also ruled that Carey violated bar rules by failing to comply with his interim suspension order when he continued to represent a party in a case against the town of Dexter on two occasions after the date of his suspension even though he claimed he was acting as a paralegal.
In another case, he sent emails in May and June, well past the date of his suspension, under the email address “Seth T. Carey, Esq.” and he was still communicating with opposing counsel on the case.
He wrote checks on his law office account despite the fact a receiver had been appointed to take over his accounts.
On video ads in his bid for the Republican nomination for district attorney, he was referred to as “Republican attorney” even though the ads ran after his suspension.
Warren wrote that if Carey were elected district attorney for Androscoggin, Franklin and Oxford counties in November, and became responsible for making prosecutorial decisions, setting policy and supervising the lawyers in the District Attorney’s Office, he would be practicing law whether or not he appeared in court.
In another violation of bar rules, Carey tampered with a victim when he drafted a nondisclosure agreement for the woman to sign in exchange for the title to his vehicle. The woman would seek to vacate the protection-from-abuse order and file a motion saying she had not been abused by Carey and seek to vacate the board’s complaint against him.
If his license were to be reinstated by Oct. 1, he would give the woman $1,000, Carey had offered.”His conduct was prejudicial to the administration of justice,” Warren wrote.
cwilliams@sunjournal.com
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