Wrestling Coach Allegedly Raped 15-Year-Old, Was Registered Sex Offender For Years

A wrestling coach in Edmond, Oklahoma, arrested recently for raping a 15-year-old girl was registered as a sex offender for five years in 2012.

Joseph Dion Martinez, 27, was charged with five counts of second-degree rape and one count of forcible oral sodomy on Feb. 2, and held on $75,000 bond as of Wednesday. NBC-affiliated KFOR confirmed that Martinez worked for a wrestling club, managed by Oklahoma Kids Wrestling Association, at the time of the incidents.

Martinez has a criminal history. After he was accused of having sex with a 14-year-old girl in Porum, Oklahoma, he pleaded guilty to second-degree rape. Although he was originally given a five-year suspended sentence and required to register as a sex offender, it was amended six months later and he was characterized as a level-one offender. Under the amended sentence, he only required to register as a sex offender for a maximum of five years. His name no longer appears on the Oklahoma Sex and Violent Offender Registry.

The police opened an investigation into Martinez after the victim’s father reported his actions. While talking to the authorities, the teenager said she believed that her father had brought her in because she was “sleeping with an older guy” who was mentioned in the police report as a “close family friend.”

The accused first made contact with the victim in February 2018, via social media. The two continued to communicate through Instagram and Snapchat, where Martinez’s messages grew “more than friendly in nature.” According to a probable cause affidavit, obtained by local media, he continuously complimented her looks and became “flirtatious with his conversation.”

When the victim’s parents restricted the teenager’s use of cellphone, Martinez gave her a Samsung smartphone using which they were able to talk privately. The victim allegedly had five sexual encounters with the accused, the first one during a family camping trip at Lake Arcadia in Edmond and another one the very next day when her parents were away at work.

According to her account, Martinez sodomized the victim when she accompanied him for a wrestling tournament in Clinton, Oklahoma, in 2018. Their relationship was exposed when the victim’s father discovered the second phone she was using to send Martinez private messages in her bedroom in January.

“He had noticed that his daughter had two phones and they had only purchased one of them. So, he was going through that second phone,” Jenny Wagnon, with the Edmond Police Department, said on Tuesday regarding Martinez’s arrest, local news outlet News9 reported. “There was proof of a sexual relationship between the two in the phone.”

Wagnon added: “There’s some messages and pictures in the phone that made him believe they had sexual intercourse at Lake Arcadia, so obviously that’s our jurisdiction. There were also other incidents. One in Clinton. The suspect lives in Logan county, so we’ve also had an incident in Oklahoma City. Throughout this initial part of the investigation, we have multiple jurisdictions that are involved.”