A second victim has publicly come forward saying she was sexually assaulted after going to a bar in Chicago's River North neighborhood.
Liz Capra said she was drugged after ordering a drink at El Hefe five years ago, marking the second woman to come forward with such an allegation after going to the bar.
“My two girlfriends who were with me at the time told me I was acting extremely out of the ordinary, extremely intoxicated, very fast,” she said in a press conference Monday.
Capra said her friends went to the bathroom and when they returned, she was gone. Capra doesn’t remember what happened to her or where she went.
“All of my credit cards were stolen, my phone was stolen, they were used for thousands of dollars. The next thing I remember is running home to my house, which was over four miles away,” she said.
She then filed a police report and went to a hospital where she said she was told she had been drugged and raped.
Capra said she decided to come forward after recent video surfaced showing another woman, 22, who said she was sexually assaulted in an alley outside the bar in October.
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Police said at the time that a woman at Northwestern Memorial Hospital had no recollection of the night and her memory was “very unclear.”
“Her male friend says she was coherent and with him most of the night except when they were in a bar, an unknown black male, made her feel uncomfortable and she relocated to the other side of the bar,” police said. “Then a short time later the victim was reported laying in the alley behind the bar and was responsive.”
That woman, whose name has not been released, filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court alleging the bar “willfully and wantonly failed to protect its patrons, including Jane Doe, from sexual assault.”
Surveillance video showing her at the bar the night of the alleged attack was released last week.
“I know it wasn’t an isolated incident and I know that it’s happened to other women and I can’t sit back and live with myself knowing that I’m not doing anything to stop it,” Capra said.
Her attorneys noted that the bar said there is no surveillance footage if the incident Capra says happened.
A spokesperson for El Hefe’s parent company, 15 Hubbard LLC, said ownership is “very concerned about this because any report not only affects the city of Chicago and River North area, it affects all of us.”
“So anything like this really needs to be examined and that’s why we’re working very closely with the Chicago Police Department and the city to really uncover the facts,” spokeswoman Lissa Druss said.
Druss declined to comment on accusations from attorneys who allege the bar was “involved in this.”
