Singer David Daniels and Husband Plead Guilty to Sexual Assault

Renowned opera singer David Daniels and his husband, Scott Walters, have pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting another singer in Houston. Daniels and Walters entered the pleas in a Harris County, Texas, courtroom on Friday, Aug. 4, the same day their criminal trial was scheduled to begin on first-degree felony charges of aggravated sexual assault. The pair pleaded guilty to sexual assault of an adult, a second-degree felony, and were sentenced to eight years probation and must be registered as sex offenders for the remainder of their lives, according to the Houston Chronicle.

The charges stem from an incident in 2010. In a criminal complaint filed in 2018, aspiring singer Samuel Schultz alleged he was a graduate student at Rice University when he met Daniels and Walters at a party following a concert at the Houston Grand Opera. Schultz said he was invited to their apartment, where he was given a drink that led him to slip in and out of consciousness, leading him to believe he had been drugged, and sexually assaulted. Schultz, who said he could remember seeing a glimpse of a pornographic video on TV and another of Daniels assaulting him, alleged that when he woke up naked the next day, Daniels reassured him that he was “totally negative” for sexually transmitted infections. He said he did not immediately report the assault out of fear that it would jeopardize his music career.

After Schultz filed a police report in July 2018, Daniels and Walters were arrested in Michigan in January 2019. Both Daniels and Walters initially denied the charges, but by pleading guilty Friday, they avoided the more serious charge of aggravated sexual assault, which if convicted, could have come with time in prison, per NPR.

“It has been 13 years since I first experienced this trauma and the last five years have been way more difficult than I could have imagined,” Schultz said in an interview with NPR Monday. “A large part of that is the delay tactics the defense used to try to exhaust me, to try to make me give up. And we see people who can’t beat the truth use delay tactics to further malign the people they’ve abused.”

Daniels was fired as a University of Michigan professor and was also removed by the San Francisco Opera from a production of Handel’s Orlando after sexual assault allegations by a student at the university in 2018. Neither Daniels nor Walters have commented on their guilty pleas.