How a woman who was assaulted by a federal agent sought justice against her abuser

LOS ANGELES — John Olivas’ explosive temper frightened his girlfriend.

In fits of rage, the federal agent would slam her into a wall and choke her, she recently testified. The madness reached new heights one night in September 2012 when she drove him home from a Riverside bar where he had been drinking heavily, she said.

Olivas, sitting in the passenger’s seat, put the tip of his handgun into his mouth and asked what she would do if he pulled the trigger, she said. She begged him to put it down. He waved the gun around “like it was a joke,” then set it on his leg.

On the ride home, he got angry. He pointed the gun at her head and asked again what she’d do if he fired it.

“I was freaking out,” she told the jury.

Once home, she said, Olivas knocked her down, dragged her across the carpet and raped her.

“I was crying, telling him to stop,” she testified. “He kept going.”

The 34-year-old woman, whom the Los Angeles Times is identifying by her first initial, N., was the central witness last month in a federal trial of Olivas, a onetime agent with the Department of Homeland Security. The Times generally does not publish the names of people who say they were sexually assaulted.

The trial was a rare federal prosecution of a domestic violence case under a civil rights law that is typically applied to cops or prison guards who