CHAPTER ONE

The Plea

Innocent.

That's what Marine Maj. Mark Thompson declared the first time we met.

He'd been fighting to prove it ever since two young women accused the former history instructor at the U.S. Naval Academy of having sex with them while they were students. One of the women said the 2011 liaison — amid a drunken night of strip poker at his Annapolis home — was consensual and part of an ongoing relationship. The other called it rape.

None of it was true, Thompson said as we sat at a quiet table inside the Hay-Adams hotel bar called Off the Record — ironic, considering how eagerly he wanted The Washington Post to write about the way the military had handled his case.

"They railroaded me," he would say later.

Mark Thompson

At his court-martial, a nine-member jury had acquitted Thompson of the sexual assault charge but still found him guilty of five lesser offenses, including conduct unbecoming an officer, indecent conduct and fraternization.

The verdict devastated him, marring a career and reputation he'd built for more than two decades. On June 3, 2013, the combat veteran was sentenced to two months' confinement in a military prison and fined $60,000, though his jurors stopped short of kicking him out of the service.

But Thompson's story didn't end there — and what happened to him next made it unlike any I'd heard before.

After he'd served his sentence, the government got a second shot to end his career with what's known as a board of inquiry. Three Marine Corps officers were assigned to decide whether Thompson should be discharged for his crimes.

It was at that hearing — in March 2014, at a time when the armed forces were under unprecedented pressure to eradicate an epidemic of sexual misconduct — that something remarkable happened: The board saw no proof that Thompson had done anything wrong and concluded he should not have been found guilty.

The officers had no power to reverse Thompson's convictions, but their ruling was still a momentous victory, saving his job and a generous pension.

It also fueled his desire for vindication, which prompted him to ask a friend to approach The Post on his behalf in late 2014.

And now, at the bar, I listened as he listed all who had wronged him: the accusers, the investigators, the prosecutors, the academy, the military justice system.

He was convincing. Thompson, a divorced father of two, had a dazzling command of his case's intricacies, able to quickly recall obscure details and testimony. He spoke with a slow, deliberate tone, selecting just the right language to illustrate his points.

About the women: "I hardly knew either of them."

About the academy: "It's a system built on nepotism and patronage."

About the Naval Criminal Investigative Service: "NCIS avoided the truth. They hid it when they could."

Despite those assertions, prosecutors had always maintained that their case against him was strong.


Mark Thompson in San Diego in 1988. (Courtesy of Mark Thompson)

Thompson, who'd grown up in a rural Oklahoma town of about 3,000 people, had wanted to be in the Corps since third grade, when a math teacher described fighting for the Allies on D-Day. Thompson enlisted at 17 and served for four years before leaving to start a family, join the Marine Reserve and go to college. He reentered the service as an officer in May 2001, just months before the twin towers collapsed and the Pentagon burned. He stood 5 feet 7 but appeared taller, largely because he looked the way you expect a Marine to look: square jaw, strong chin, crew-cut hair.

Thompson risked his life during deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan, taking fire on his way to Baghdad and once narrowly escaping an explosive that detonated behind his unarmored vehicle. While serving, he also earned a master's degree in history that led to an extraordinary opportunity: a three-year stint teaching at the renowned service academy.

The tale of his life sounded inspiring, until the day it didn't.

During that first meeting at the Hay-Adams in April 2015, Thompson, now 46, came across as determined, intelligent and, at moments, desperate. Even with the board's decision, he explained, the convictions were unlikely to be overturned because his lone opportunity for exoneration was through a military appellate system that critics have long branded as tough for defendants.

He hoped The Post could bring new attention to his case and, perhaps, uncover something revelatory that would lead to a retrial.

He'd already studied the work of experts who had detailed faults in the military justice system, reviewed accounts of service members wrongly accused of crimes and spent hundreds of hours analyzing the evidence against him — all in an intense effort to clear his name.

I didn't know it