A 19-year-old Boulder man has been accused of sexually assaulting one underage girl and blackmailing another with a nude photo.
Rolando Ramirez, also known as Rolando Ramirez-Castro, was charged in one case with sexual assault and unlawful sexual contact on Oct. 12.
He was charged in the second case with sexual exploitation of a child, stalking and extortion on Wednesday.
He is out of custody on a $1,000 cash bond in the extortion case and a personal recognizance bond in the sex assault case, and is set for a preliminary hearing on both matters on Dec. 2.
According to the arrest affidavit in the sex assault case, a 15-year-old girl told police Ramirez groped and then digitally penetrated her against her will at a party in Lafayette on May 23.
The girl told several people at the party what had happened, and the girl’s parents also later found out about the incident and called police.
The girl told police she had not met Ramirez in person before that night, but said Ramirez knew how old she was because he had previously messaged her on Snapchat asking about her age.
In the extortion case, an arrest affidavit said that Ramirez used a nude photo of an underage girl as blackmail to try and get the girl to friend him on Snapchat and send him more photos.
According to the affidavit, the girl lived in Erie and exchanged photos, including one of her topless, on the app Snapchat with a man she believed was named Trent in 2018 or 2019 when she was about 15.
The girl said shortly after sending the photo she stopped talking to the account because she believed Trent to be 23 and was “creeped out” by the age difference.
Sometime in late 2020, the girl said an unknown account tried to add her, and sent her the topless photo with the caption “this is you.”
The girl said she blocked the account, but said she got several requests on different social media platforms, all of them seemingly from the same person and all of them referring to the photo.
The person threatened the girl and said they would release the photo if she did not add their social media account and send more photos, with one message saying, “Answer or I’ll expose you.”
Erie police in July were able to track the accounts to Ramirez, who denied any wrongdoing. But police obtained a warrant to gain access to Ramirez’s cloud storage and found a copy of the topless photo.
