{"id":127606,"date":"2026-03-02T18:41:07","date_gmt":"2026-03-02T18:41:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/127606\/"},"modified":"2026-03-02T18:41:07","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T18:41:07","slug":"kevin-esterly-loses-bid-to-have-sex-assault-case-thrown-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/127606\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Esterly loses bid to have sex assault case thrown out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kevin Esterly, the Lehigh County man who made national headlines in 2018<\/a> for absconding to Mexico with a 16-year-old girl, has lost his bid to have the Lehigh County District Attorney\u2019s Office removed as prosecutor in the sexual assault case against him.\n<\/p>\n

A Lehigh County judge on Monday also denied Esterly\u2019s motion to have the new charges against him thrown out, clearing the way for his jury trial to begin this week.<\/p>\n

Esterly, 53, of Whitehall Township, is charged with rape, child endangerment and other counts. He denies the charges<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Esterly, then a married father of four, pleaded guilty in November 2018 to corruption of minors, a first-degree misdemeanor, admitting that he accompanied a high school girl who had run away from her Allentown home to a resort town near Cancun. The pair were found after Mexican officials issued an Amber Alert. Police said they were staying in a room together and using false names.<\/p>\n

The girl, who was a friend of Esterly\u2019s daughters and often stayed over at his home, told police that she stole money from her mother to purchase her own plane ticket and denied that any sexual contact with Esterly happened on the trip.<\/p>\n

Lehigh County Judge Maria L. Dantos sentenced Esterly to the maximum term of\u00a0 2-\u00bd to 5 years in a state prison in that case.<\/p>\n

Police filed new charges against Esterly in June, accusing him of repeatedly raping a child at his former Lowhill Township home and in an apartment in Allentown. Prosecutors say the alleged assaults started when the girl was 12 years old, and that Esterly gave her alcohol and methamphetamine.<\/p>\n

In a motion filed Friday, Esterly\u2019s defense attorney, Robert Sletvold, argued that although Esterly and the victim both denied that he sexually assaulted her, Dantos cited \u201can enormous amount of circumstantial evidence and direct evidence\u201d to the contrary.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou asked me to make some unreasonable leaps about what was happening with your relationship with [the victim] that I\u2019m not willing to make,\u201d Dantos said at the sentencing hearing.<\/p>\n

Sletvold argued that Dantos\u2019 conclusion that Esterly was untruthful led to him getting the maximum sentence, and therefore he was being prosecuted twice for the same crime, a violation of the Fifth Amendment.<\/p>\n

Judge James T. Anthony disagreed. He also denied Esterly\u2019s request to have his case turned over to the state Attorney General\u2019s Office. In that motion, he argued that a conflict existed because members of the Lehigh County District Attorney\u2019s Office handling his case previously worked in the Lehigh County Public Defender\u2019s Office, which represented Esterly in 2018.<\/p>\n

Esterly is being held in the Lehigh County Jail on $500,000 bail.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kevin Esterly, the Lehigh County man who made national headlines in 2018 for absconding to Mexico with a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127607,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[119,121,120,46,182,139,432],"class_list":["post-127606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-allentown","tag-allentown","tag-allentown-headlines","tag-allentown-news","tag-courts","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-top-stories-tmc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127606\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127607"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}