Correction: A previous version of this story said the defendant was charged with kidnapping. He is charged with false imprisonment.
A Gwinnett County judge granted bond to a Duluth man who is accused of holding a teenage girl against her will in his home, controlling her food intake and sexually assaulting her.
Judge R. Timothy Hamil set the bond for Michael Ren Wysolovski at $75,000 on Monday after a hearing last Friday that lasted more than an hour. Wysolovski, 32, faces charges of rape, sodomy, interstate interference of custody, cruelty to children and false imprisonment.
The alleged victim, a 17-year-old girl, was missing from her Charlotte, North Carolina home for more than a year and was found by the FBI in the house on Seneca Trail after she contacted a woman from Romania. That woman alerted the girl’s parents, who then contacted authorities.
A warrant for his arrest from June 2017 said Wysolovski monitored what the girl ate, punished her if she went over her calorie limit and forced her to perform sexual acts against her will.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault.
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Gwinnett assistant district attorney Drew Unger suggested that Wysolovski not be allowed to use social media while on bond because that is how he first encountered the teenager, who was 16 at the time. Both Unger and Matt Crosby, the defense attorney, said that the girl and Wysolovski met in a chatroom through a website called MyProAna.com, a forum for people struggling with anorexia.
“This is not a game,” Hamil said Friday while staring at Wysolovski. “... If people still do MySpace, I’m talking no MySpace, no forums, no chatrooms, none of it. You’re pretty much going to be limited to Wikipedia if you get a bond.”
There is no specific language related to social media in the bond order.
While out on bond, Wysolovski will have to wear a GPS-monitoring ankle bracelet, not possess any weapons, surrender his passport, waive his Fourth Amendment rights and not have any contact with 11 people, including the girl and her family.
The teen, her parents and about 10 other supporters were present at Friday’s hearing in Gwinnett. None of them testified.
When Hamil began discussing the parameters of bond with the attorneys, the girl’s mother began to cry.
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Statements from the lawyers on Friday revealed new details in the case. Crosby argued that Wysolovski and the girl were in a consensual and voluntary BDSM relationship, which is defined by "sexual activity involving such practices as the use of physical restraints, the granting and relinquishing of control, and the infliction of pain."
“She was right where she wanted to be at all times with my client,” Crosby said. “She always had the power to leave. The day she didn’t want to be in a relationship anymore, she was home the next day.”
There were about 25 friends, family, former roommates and co-workers who came to show support for Wysolovski. As he entered the courtroom shackled and wearing green sweats, Wysolovski grinned and winked at a friend who waved at him.
Unger said that the girl was struggling with anorexia at the time and told Wysolovski that she was “unhappy with her home life.” Crosby took that statement a step further and claimed that the teen told Wysolovski that she “had to get out (from her home in Charlotte) or I will kill myself.”
Three people testified on Wysolovski's behalf, including his brother and two former roommates who lived with him and the girl.
During the year that Wysolovski and the girl were together, they lived in homes in Decatur, Norcross and in Duluth where she was found and he was arrested. They shared the Norcross home with Wysolovski’s former roommates, both attorneys said.
In the Duluth home, Unger said that the girl was kept in a room of the house by two large pet gates that went from the floor to the ceiling. Unger claimed that Wysolovski told her that when the police came to look for her, she was to give them the ID of his ex-wife and say that they were in a consensual relationship.
Unger said that sometimes Wysolovski would only provide the girl with food after sex and that every time they had sex she would try to say no. Unger claimed that she was forced to stick to a diet ranging from 200 to 1000 calories per day. Unger said Wysolovski would not buy things like food or clothes until she was under a certain weight. The girl lost 15 pounds in the year she lived with Wysolovski, Unger said.
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The former roommates told a different story.
They said Wysolovski and the girl would go out about once a week, she was often in the home alone, she had a house key to come and go as she pleased and ate whatever she wanted. They also testified that they were aware of the girl and Wysolovski’s BDSM relationship and that she spoke about it in public with “great enthusiasm.”
They also claimed the girl told them she was abused at her home in Charlotte, and had Wysolovski not picked her up, she would have “sold her body, rented a hotel room and then have committed suicide.”
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Unger said that Wysolovski installed app-lockers on all of the girl’s devices so she couldn’t contact anyone. She was able to contact a woman from Romania when Wysolovski gave her a tablet that he no longer wanted that didn’t have the app-locker installed on it, Unger said.
In interviews with women who had previously been in sexual relationships with Wysolovski, seven of them claimed that he had raped them, including his ex-wife, Unger said. Wysolovksi struck one woman he impregnated with a belt, he said.
Wysolovski has no previous criminal record, both attorneys confirmed.
The next court date for his case has not been set.
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