Chilling Facebook Message Helps Woman Find Justice Years After Assault

Shannon Keeler went to police immediately after that day in December 2013 when another student forced his way into her dorm room and assaulted her. On Monday, he was finally sentenced after pleading guilty in July 2025 following a four-year search by authorities to find him.

Ian Clearly, now 32, was sentenced to two to four years in prison for the assault.

In an interview given to the Associated Press in 2021 after she found a shocking Facebook messenger from her alleged attacker, Keeler recalled that frightening night, which began innocently with her “dancing and kissing” at a fraternity house party. It was December 14, 2013, she’d finished her last final and was having a great night.

“You know, I didn’t have a worry in the world,” she told the outlet. She then met another student who said she was having a tough time with a guy at the party. The two met up in the bathroom with the other woman telling the AP that she’d been “dancing and kissing” with the male student when ” grabbed my chest and my crotch and told me he wanted to take me away.”

That’s when the other student fled to the bathroom and met Keeler, per the AP, who offered to help this stranger keep him at a distance. Later that same night, Keeler said this same guy started “getting gross” with her.

“He wasn’t getting the hint,” she said. “It was getting creepy. My friend said, ’Do you want me to walk you home?” This male friend walked her home, but the guy followed them, even offering Keeler’s friend $20 to leave them alone, according to her account.

When his offer was rejected, Keeler said he disappeared before returning to her dorm room later that night after she’d gone to bed, knocking on her door. Thinking it was a friend, she opened the door to find the guy from the frat party.

“I opened it and I texted my friends that he was here and I needed help. And he raped me,” Keeler told the AP. “As soon as he did, he started crying after. He said, ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. Did I hurt you?’ And then he ran away.”

She didn’t even know his name at this point.

That night, she was taken to the police station where she gave a report and then went to the hospital for treatment to prevent STDs, infection, pregnancy and nausea, as well as undergoing a rape kit.

The suspect was identified by others who’d been at the party, Keeler said, but he withdrew from the school, denying any wrongdoing in an email to the school, and with that, she said the school concluded its investigation.

She and her parents struggled for years to get someone to prosecute her case, she said, but with so many sexual assault causes on campuses, they found it very difficult to get anywhere.

Then, in 2019, Keeler discovered an unread message in her Facebook by chance six months after it had been sent, but it immediately grabbed her attention.

“So I raped you,” the person had written, per the 2021 interview she gave to the AP. Other lines pulled from the purported message include the line, “I’ll never do it to anyone ever again,” “I need to hear your voice,” and “I’ll pray for you.”

That man was Clearly, who said he sent the messages as part of a 12-step program and claimed he suffered from mental health issues.

After the AP interview with Keeler drew renewed attention to her story, prosecutors reevaluated her case, taking into consideration the direct messages she had received. He was indicted within weeks of the story, but it would be three long years before he was found an extradited from France, where he’d been detained on a vagrancy-related charge in April 2024.

At Clearly’s sentencing on Monday, Keeler spoke out in a 10-minute victim impact statement, telling her attacker, per the AP, “The system meant to protect me protected you instead.”

He said that he’d sent her the messages on Facebook in hopes of seeking atonement, but Keeler said that for her, it only reopened old wounds she’d been carrying for years as he lived free and she tried fruitlessly to see him prosecuted.

“This isn’t just my story, this is the story of countless women,” she told the court.

While her attorney argued that Clearly’s sentence was “less than what we expected and certainly less than he deserves,” she said that at least the case is over after all these years.

In court, Cleary told Keeler, “I’m committed to getting treatment for mental health and stuff like that as I go forward.”

Cleary had been looking at the possibility of up to 10 years, but the judge said that the defendant admitting his guilt “even though 10 to 11 alarming years have passed in the meantime” had to be taken into consideration.

“We wouldn’t be here today but for his hope for some kind of forgiveness and contrition,” said Senior Judge Kevin Hess, per the AP.

“The system that failed me a decade ago finally delivered accountability, but at a cost. Evidence was lost. Time passed,” Keeler said in court, pointing out that the rape kit she was given that night in 2013 had been destroyed by the time she was able to secure an indictment in 2021.

“My life moved on, but the impact never went away, not for me, not for my family, not for anyone who had to watch this unfold again and again,” she said.

Speaking to ABC News on Tuesday, Keeler shared why she’d ultimately decided to forgive her attacker, despite the years of struggle to see him prosecuted. “Forgiveness doesn’t just set him free, it sets me free too,” she said, per People.

“And I don’t want to live with anger and I believe in redemption as well. And he still has the power to live a good life and become a good person … do the right thing, and I hope he does.”