FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — An Olympic track medalist is charged in Florida with punching a woman, a hurdler who also competed in the Olympics.

A Broward County Sheriff’s Office arrest report says that Fred Kerley, 29, allegedly hit Alaysha Johnson with a closed fist at a hotel near Fort Lauderdale on Thursday. Kerley is charged with misdemeanor battery in the incident that left Johnson with a bloody nose.

Kerley won a silver medal in the 100-meter race at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo and a bronze medal in the same event at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, where Johnson also competed. The arrest report says they previously had a relationship and got into a heated argument at the Florida hotel where they were staying before a track meet in the area.

Kerley’s attorney, Richard Cooper, said in an email Saturday that he has “a target on his back” that leads to unfounded allegations by “fierce and sometimes jealous competitors.”

“We ask the public not to rush to judgment as the exculpatory facts eventually come to light,” Cooper said. “Fred looks forward to getting back to competing and away from distractions as his legal team works to resolve these accusations.”

It’s not Kerley’s first brush with the law. This comes just a few months after he was arrested for allegedly punching a Miami Beach police officer on Jan 2., an incident in which police used a Taser on him. He was also charged in May with domestic battery against his wife, according to court records.

His lawyers say he is innocent of those charges as well.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Court records say a passenger on a small regional flight to Miami attacked a flight attendant, kicked and punched the seat of the person in front of him and swallowed rosary beads as pilots returned to the airport in Savannah, Georgia.

The passenger was traveling with his sister, who said her brother told her before the violent outburst to “close her eyes and pray because Satan’s disciple(s) had followed them onto the plane,” according to an FBI agent’s affidavit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

No one was seriously hurt on the Monday night flight operated by Envoy Air, a regional carrier for American Airlines. The 31-year-old passenger was jailed on charges including misdemeanor battery, misdemeanor obstruction of police and a felony count of criminal property damage.

FBI Agent Savannah Solomon described the violent episode in her affidavit, saying there was probable cause to charge the man with a federal crime of interfering with a flight crew.

Solomon wrote that eight passengers were on the plane and flight attendants became concerned immediately after takeoff when they noticed one of them appearing to have a “fit of epilepsy” that included “stomping, incoherent yelling, and shaking.”

When a flight attendant approached the man, he turned in his seat and kicked the attendant in the chest, sending the worker flying into a window across the aisle, the agent wrote. The passenger then started kicking and punching the seat of the person in front of him, who moved before the back of the seat collapsed.

The pilots returned to the Savannah airport. After the plane landed, the man who had kicked the flight attendant charged toward the exit and threw punches at another flight attendant before being subdued by other passengers, the affidavit says.

He was apprehended by airport police and taken to a local hospital for “ingestion of rosary beads,” the affidavit says. Then the passenger was booked into the Chatham County jail.

Federal court records and online jail records did not list an attorney for the arrested passenger.

His sister told the FBI agent that they were traveling to Haiti “to flee religious attacks of a spiritual nature.” According to the affidavit, the woman said her brother had “swallowed the rosary beads because they are a weapon of strength in the spiritual warfare.”

The woman told the agent her brother was not suffering from mental health problems or medical issues.

LOS ANGELES — LOS ANGELES (AP) — A$AP Rocky ‘s lawyers will make their case and try to establish a counternarrative Friday at his trial in Los Angeles, where the hip-hop star and fashion mogul is charged with firing a gun at a former friend on a Hollywood street in 2021.

They plan to call to the stand rapper A$AP Twelvyy, who, like both the defendant and the man he’s charged with shooting, was a member of the A$AP Mob, a group of young artists and creators that formed at a New York high school nearly 20 years ago.

Twelvyy was one of two members of the crew who accompanied Rocky to a meetup with A$AP Relli, with whom he had a long-simmering beef that came to a head, he said, when Rocky fired a gun at him.

Twelvyy is expected to testify that Rocky fired a starter pistol that only shoots blanks, which he carries as a prop for security. The defense contends that the phony gun answers many questions about the case, including why Relli only had grazed knuckles and no other injuries.

The potentially confusing set of “A$AP” names have become familiar to people in the courtroom, and most likely the jury, through the approximately three days of Relli’s testimony, which makes up the bulk of prosecutors’ case, rested on Thursday.

Rocky has pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, and if convicted on both, he can legally get up to 24 years in prison.

Rihanna, the superstar singer who is Rocky’s longtime partner and the mother of their toddler sons, slipped into the courtroom Thursday afternoon and sat in Rocky’s section after several days of absence. She had her hair up and wore glasses with a tan trenchcoat on a rainy day in LA.

The defense has not said whether Rocky will take the considerable risk of going on the stand himself, which he is not legally required to do. He already opted to take a significant risk by turning down the prosecution’s pre-trial offer of a recommended sentence of just 180 days in jail and other relatively minor penalties in exchange for a guilty plea on one count.

Raised in Harlem, the Grammy nominee had his mainstream breakthrough when his first studio album went to No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 2013.

But his role as a fashion maven has almost eclipsed his music. He is set to be a celebrity co-host on fashion’s biggest night, the Met Gala, in May.

The suits he wears in the courtroom and the overcoats he wears outside it have become fodder for discussion and inspired a New York Times story on his style.

A publicist for Yves Saint Laurent sent a news release, of the kind usually reserved for red carpets, saying that one day in court he was wearing an “Yves jacket in wool chine,” a “shirt in silk crepe de chine” and “high-waisted pants in wool chine.”

His fashion sense even came up in phone recordings played in court, in which a person purported to be Relli declares that Rocky was “not a true gangster” and that “this is the case of Dior.”

The defense has already brought one witness it was allowed to call early, an internet branding consultant who worked with both Rocky and Relli. He recorded phone calls, purportedly with Relli saying his main intention was to get millions from Rocky, and the criminal case didn’t matter.

Relli said in his testimony that the recordings were fake.

But prosecutor John Lewin established that everything Relli said in them was consistent with his testimony.

PARIS — French Appeal Court prosecutors said an American man accused of sexually assaulting a Pennsylvania college student in 2013 and later sending her a Facebook message that said, “So I raped you,” was being extradited Thursday to the United States.

The Appeal Court prosecutors’ office in Metz, in northeastern France, said Ian Cleary was handed over to U.S. authorities at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

Cleary, 31, of Saratoga, California, was detained in April in Metz after a three-year search. He has been held in custody pending extradition proceedings since his arrest. The Appeal Court in Metz ruled in July that he could be extradited.

Cleary had been the subject of an international search since authorities in Pennsylvania issued a 2021 felony warrant in the case weeks after an Associated Press story detailed the reluctance of local prosecutors to pursue campus sex crimes.

The arrest warrant accuses Cleary of stalking an 18-year-old Gettysburg College student at a party in 2013, sneaking into her dorm and sexually assaulting her while she texted friends for help. He was a 20-year-old Gettysburg student at the time, but didn’t return to campus.

The accuser, Shannon Keeler, had a rape exam done the same day. She gathered witnesses and evidence and spent years urging officials to file charges. She went to authorities again in 2021 after discovering the Facebook messages that seemed to come from Cleary’s account.

“So I raped you,” the sender wrote in a string of messages.

“I’ll never do it to anyone ever again.”

“I need to hear your voice.”

“I’ll pray for you.”

According to the June 2021 warrant, police verified that the Facebook account used to send the messages belonged to Cleary.

The AP doesn’t typically identify sexual assault victims without their permission, which Keeler has granted.

NEW ORLEANS — The second-guessing began before the bodies had been cleared from the debris of the deadly Bourbon Street truck attack.

A law firm signed up survivors of what it called a “predictable and preventable” tragedy. Politicians parried blame for the latest mass-casualty event in New Orleans’ infamous adult playground. And investigations targeted the ill-fated removal of the street’s bollards, steel columns designed to restrict vehicle access.

But as the city seeks to recover and beefs up security ahead of next month’s Super Bowl and Carnival season, law enforcement and community leaders are confronting an existential question as old as the entertainment district: Can Bourbon Street be protected in a way that preserves its unique, round-the-clock revelry?

“Once we start to hear what it’s actually going to take to secure the French Quarter and the Mardi Gras parade routes, I don’t know if this city is going to have an appetite for all that,” said Rafael Goyeneche, a former prosecutor who is president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission watchdog group.

“If we try to make New Orleans as secure as an airport, people aren’t going to like it,” he said. “This isn’t Disney World.”

Shock and grief have given way to finger-pointing over whether additional security could have stopped — or mitigated — the Islamic State group-inspired attack, which killed 14 people when Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a pickup through a New Year’s crowd.

In the difficult days since, proposals for new safety measures have ranged from banning vehicular traffic in the French Quarter to turning the historic neighborhood into a state park.

Many locals who depend on tourism agree that something has to give.

“It’s just too wide open. It’s too trustworthy down here,” said Bryan Casey, 53, a native New Orleanian who has worked on Bourbon Street since the late 1990s and waits tables at Galatoire’s, an upscale restaurant that opened in 1905. Casey and his colleagues wiped blood off the wall after the attack as bodies lay mangled in front of the establishment.

Bourbon Street should have been made into a pedestrian mall long ago, Casey said: “There’s people watching and they’re going to get you, so you got to be careful.”

Much of the immediate focus has centered on the absence of the bollards, which had stopped working reliably and were being replaced ahead of the Super Bowl.

City leaders have been criticized for the timing of that project and failing to implement a suitable replacement during their repair. A lawsuit filed Thursday on behalf of victims alleged the city “had years of opportunities” to patch up vulnerabilities.

But a half dozen current and former law enforcement officials in Louisiana described the bollard issue as a red herring, saying that even if they had been functioning they may not have prevented the attack given how hell-bent Jabbar appeared on creating carnage.

The broader safety conundrum is more complex, they said, given the quarter’s dense, alcohol-fueled crowds and structural challenges inherent to an early 18th-century neighborhood built for horse-drawn buggies. Policing here is even more complicated in a city with notoriously high crime, a chronic shortage of officers and a new state law allowing permit-less concealed carry of firearms.

“I don’t know of another place that has the same challenges for protecting people,” said Ronnie Jones, a public safety consultant who served in the Louisiana State Police for 32 years, including as deputy superintendent.

“A lot of people in public safety don’t want to talk about it, but we just can’t guarantee that everybody going to the French Quarter is going to be safe,” Jones said. “There’s a tradeoff here, and we’ve never, ever, found that balance.”

The city’s newly hired security consultant, William J. Bratton, a former New York City police commissioner, said he recognizes the importance of maintaining a festive atmosphere during carnival even as he works with city police to bolster security over the next few months.

“One of the things I talked about is developing security provisions that don’t change Mardi Gras, don’t change the flavor of it, the excitement of it and the nature of it,” Bratton said at a news conference this week. “To develop security protocols that don’t become so intrusive, so disruptive.”

The New Year’s attack was far from the first deadly vehicle incident on Bourbon Street.

In 1972, one person died and 18 were injured when a teenager fleeing police in a stolen car crashed through metal barricades and sped down the thoroughfare at 70 mph (about 113 kph). Ten years later a man smashed through steel barricades and careened down nearly seven blocks, injuring at least 11. And in 1995, an intoxicated 63-year-old man drove a beer van through a crowd attending a St. Patrick’s Day parade, killing one and injuring 38.

More recent Bourbon Street tragedies have involved gun violence, including multiple fatal shootings last year. In 2014, a mass shooting killed a 21-year-old woman and wounded nine others, including a bystander shot through her cheek. Two years later a person was killed and nine others were wounded in a shooting.

Many of those incidents prompted similar calls for change and accountability, raising questions about civil liberties and what, if anything, the city is willing to sacrifice in the name of public safety. City, state and federal law enforcement officials have offered varying solutions that critics have said were mere stopgaps, likening them to putting Band-Aids on a wound that has never quite healed.

“I was part of those conversations when we were looking to create a very robust security package, including metal detectors and infrared technology that could alert if something metal was in someone’s clothing — none of that ever materialized,” said Michael Harrison, a former head of New Orleans police who later became commissioner in Baltimore. “There are ways to prevent ramming attacks. There’s not yet a way to prevent people from walking on Bourbon Street and doing bad things.”

Pedicab driver Jody “Cajun Queen” Boudreaux, 65, said Bourbon Street has always embodied New Orleans’ laissez-faire charm and she is not sure whether the city has the will to shore up its lax security.

“We’re a target, clearly. They know we have holes, they know we are all scrambling and they also know that our vibe is ‘Laissez les bons temps rouler’” she said, invoking the famous Cajun French saying that means, “Let the good times roll.” “I think it can be balanced, I truly do.”

Andrew Monteverde, co-vice president of the New Orleans Firefighters Association, said first responders and law enforcement deal with a raft of emergencies, from extinguishing fires to saving people in cardiac arrest. The more that limited resources are dedicated to one part of the city, he added, the less is available to deal for elsewhere.

“Could you possibly make the French Quarter so secure that you couldn’t even spit on the sidewalk?” he said. “Maybe, but then what would you trade off?”

At The Beach on Bourbon Street, where workers screen clubgoers at every entrance with handheld metal detectors, general manager Woody Ryder has become inured to the frequent shootings after working there for seven years. “There’s crazy people out there,” he said.

But the recent attack has made him uneasy. Ryder and his staff are still recovering from witnessing what he and others likened to a “war zone.”

“The city has already failed us,” he said. “I’m hesitant as soon as I turn on Bourbon Street.”

___ Mustian reported from New York, and Cline from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Associated Press reporter Michael Kunzelman in Washington contributed.

President Joe Biden is decrying what he calls an “unrelenting effort” to downplay a mob of Donald Trump supporters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block certification of the 2020 election — seeking to contrast that day’s chaos with what he promises will be an orderly transition returning Trump to power for a second term.

In an opinion piece published Sunday in The Washington Post, Biden recalled Jan. 6, 2021, writing that “violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol.”

“We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault,” Biden wrote. “And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.”

Congress will convene amid snow in Washington on Monday to certify Trump’s victory in November’s election — in a session presided over by the candidate he defeated, Vice President Kamala Harris. No violence, or even procedural objections, are expected this time, marking a return to a U.S. tradition that launches the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

That’s despite Trump continuing to deny that he lost to Biden in 2020, already musing publicly about staying beyond the Constitution’s two-term White House limit, and promising to pardon some of the more than 1,250 people who have pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes for the Capitol siege.

In his opinion piece, Biden says of the certification process, “After what we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, we know we can never again take it for granted.” He doesn’t mention Trump directly but says “an unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day.”

“To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes,” Biden wrote. “We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

He vowed that the “election will be certified peacefully. I have invited the incoming president to the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, and I will be present for his inauguration that afternoon,” even though Trump skipped Biden’s inauguration in 2021.

“But on this day, we cannot forget,” Biden added. “We should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy — even in America — is never guaranteed.”

The published piece followed Biden telling reporters at the White House earlier Sunday that the history of what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, “should not be rewritten” and adding, “I don’t think it should be forgotten.”

Biden spent much of 2024 warning voters that Trump was a serious threat to the nation’s democracy. And this past week, the president awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, leaders of the congressional investigation into the Capitol riot.

As he did with his opinion piece, Biden used his Sunday comments to reporters to stress that his administration is overseeing a peaceful handover of power — unlike the last one.

”I’ve reached out to make sure the smooth transition,” Biden said of Trump’s incoming administration. “We’ve got to get back to basic, normal transfer of power.”

Asked if he still viewed his soon-to-be successor in the White House as a threat to democracy, Biden responded, “I think what he did was a genuine threat to democracy. I’m hopeful we’re beyond that now.”

SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — A woman told police that she was sexually assaulted in 2017 by Pete Hegseth after he took her phone, blocked the door to a California hotel room and refused to let her leave, according to a detailed investigative report made public late Wednesday.

Hegseth, a Fox News personality and President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to be defense secretary, told police at the time that the encounter had been consensual and denied any wrongdoing, the report said.

News of the allegations surfaced last week when local officials released a brief statement confirming that a woman had accused Hegseth of sexual assault in October 2017 after he had spoken at a Republican women’s event in Monterey.

Hegseth’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday. He has said Hegseth paid the woman in 2023 to head off the threat of a baseless lawsuit.

The 22-page police report was released in response to a public records request and offers the first detailed account of what the woman alleged to have transpired — one that is at odds with Hegseth’s version of events. The report cited police interviews with the alleged victim, a nurse who treated her, a hotel staffer, another woman at the event and Hegseth.

The woman’s name was not released, and The Associated Press does not typically name people who say they have been sexually assaulted.

A spokeswoman for the Trump transition said early Thursday that the “report corroborates what Mr. Hegseth’s attorneys have said all along: the incident was fully investigated and no charges were filed because police found the allegations to be false.”

The report does not say that police found the allegations were false. Police recommended the case report be forwarded to the Monterey County District Attorney’s Office for review.

Investigators were first alerted to the alleged assault, the report said, by a nurse who called them after a patient requested a sexual assault exam. The patient told medical personnel she believed she was assaulted five days earlier but couldn’t remember much about what had happened. She reported something may have been slipped into her drink before ending up in the hotel room where she said the assault occurred.

Police collected the unwashed dress and underwear she had worn that night, the report said.

The woman’s partner, who was staying at the hotel with her, told police that he was worried about her that night after she didn’t come back to their room. At 2 a.m., he went to the hotel bar, but she wasn’t there. She made it back a few hours later, apologizing that she “must have fallen asleep.” A few days later, she told him she had been sexually assaulted.

The woman, who helped organize the California Federation of Republican women gathering at which Hegseth spoke, told police that she had witnessed the TV anchor acting inappropriately throughout the night and saw him stroking multiple women’s thighs. She texted a friend that Hegseth was giving off a “creeper” vibe, according to the report.

After the event, the woman and others attended an afterparty in a hotel suite where she said she confronted Hegseth, telling him that she “did not appreciate how he treated women,” the report states.

A group of people, including Hegseth and the woman, decamped for the hotel’s bar. That’s when “things got fuzzy,” the woman told police.

She remembered having a drink at the bar with Hegseth and others, the police report states. She also told police that she argued with Hegseth near the hotel pool, an account that is supported by a hotel staffer who was sent to handle the disturbance and spoke to police, according to the report.

Soon, she told police, she was inside a hotel room with Hegseth, who took her phone and blocked the door with his body so that she could not leave, according to the report. She also told police she remembered “saying ‘no’ a lot,” the report said.

Her next memory was laying on a couch or bed with Hegseth hovering over her bare-chested, his dog tags dangling over her, the report states. Hegseth served in the National Guard, rising to the rank of major.

After Hegseth finished, she recalled him asking if she was “OK,” the report states. She told police she did not recall how she got back to her own hotel room and had since suffered from nightmares and memory loss.

At the time of the alleged assault in 2017, Hegseth, now 44, was going through a divorce with his second wife, with whom he has three children. She filed for divorce after he had a child with a Fox News producer who is now his wife, according to court records and social media posts by Hegseth. His first marriage ended in 2009, also after infidelity by Hegseth, according to court records.

Hegseth said he attended an after party and drank beer but did not consume liquor, and acknowledged being “buzzed” but not drunk.

He said he met the woman at the hotel bar, and she led him by the arm back to his hotel room, which surprised him because he initially had no intention of having sex with her, the report said.

Hegseth told investigators that the sexual encounter that followed was consensual, adding that he explicitly asked more than once if she was comfortable. Hegseth said in the morning the woman “showed early signs of regret,” and he assured her that he wouldn’t tell anyone about the encounter.

Hegseth’s attorney said a payment was made to the woman as part of a confidential settlement a few years after the police investigation because Hegseth was concerned that she was prepared to file a lawsuit that he feared could have resulted in him being fired from Fox News, where he was a popular host. The attorney would not reveal the amount of the payment.

___

Slodysko reported from Washington and Linderman reported from Baltimore.