WASHINGTON — The Army has exonerated a deceased four-star general who had been reprimanded for allegedly groping the wife of a subordinate officer in a decades-old case that tested the boundaries of memory and the military's attempts to hold senior officers to account for sexual harassment and assault.
In 2019, retired General Leon Salomon over allegations that he grabbed the breasts of Camilla Vance Shadley and made crude remarks to her twin sister during a party at his house on a fall afternoon in 1994.
At the time, Salomon was the Army's top officer for logistics.
Vance Shadley, the daughter of the former secretary of the Army and State, Cyrus Vance, and her sister, gave statements to Army investigators about the alleged incident in 2019.
The Army reconsidered his punishment based on a petition filed on Salomon's behalf, said Cynthia Smith, an Army spokeswoman.
"In balancing all available information, and given the passage of time and scarcity of evidence, an all-civilian board determined that removal of the formal reprimand and its allied documents was consistent with regulatory standards," Smith said.
Prep for the polls:
On Feb. 10, three members of an Army board charged with correcting military records unanimously approved the request to remove the reprimand in part because "there was insufficient probable cause that supported the allegations." Salomon died last year at the age of 87. Two of the board members were women, according to a Defense Department official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deliberations.
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