Jury selection is set for Oct. 20 in the case of former V.I. Sen. Steven Payne Sr., who faces a felony sexual battery charge in Florida.
Payne, 59, was arrested by the Orlando Police Department on a warrant out of Duval County as he arrived in Orlando on a flight from St. Thomas in September 2023.
According to publicly available documents on the Duval County Circuit Court docket, the incident occurred sometime between Aug. 1, 2018, and Feb. 27, 2019 while Payne was “in a position of familial or custodial authority” of a child who was older than 12 but younger than 18. Previous reports revealed that he had become her guardian after the living situation with her previous caregivers became tenuous.
Payne has pleaded not guilty and is free on $250,003 bond, with an order to have no victim contact.
His 2023 arrest followed his expulsion from the V.I. Legislature in July 2022 after his fellow senators voted to eject him for multiple violations of that body’s rules related to serious accusations of sexual misconduct by three different women — including a staff member and the alleged victim in the Jacksonville case — which he denied. He filed a civil suit in V.I. Superior Court in response, which was subsequently transferred to the V.I. Supreme Court and ultimately dismissed with prejudice.
According to court documents in the Florida case, the alleged victim told officials of two other incidents involving Payne, including in the U.S. Virgin Islands when he called her into a bedroom where he was lying on the bed naked and she left the room and closed the door.
In the fall of 2017, where the girl had relocated after Hurricane Irma, Payne reportedly took her to a theme park in Osceola County, Florida, where they stayed in a hotel room together. Once in the room, he complained of leg cramps, undressed and asked for a massage, then forced the girl into the bathroom, made her take her clothes off, pulled her into the shower, bathed her and forced her to bathe him, according to the document.
The prosecution has also filed notice it plans to introduce evidence of two other incidents, including the legislative staff member’s allegations that he behaved inappropriately while they were on Senate business on St. Croix in 2022, and another by a woman who said Payne tried to force her to touch him and ripped off her underwear before she could escape a St. John beach in 2005, where they had gone so he could help her train for the police academy.
Payne’s attorney, Dale Christopher Carson, has filed motions to exclude mention of the other alleged acts of wrongdoing at trial under the “Williams Rule” of evidence, stating that the uncharged crimes are not relevant and would unfairly prejudice Payne. “Further, the admission of such evidence would promote confusion of the issues before a jury and would become a feature of the trial, thus jeopardizing the reliability of a verdict in the case,” he said.
A pretrial conference is scheduled for Sept. 9, and a final pretrial conference for Oct. 16, according to the court docket.
