FRIDAY, OCTOBER 25 | 12:00 PM

LOS ANGELES — A Riverside County grand jury formally indicted famed Gravity Payments CEO Dan Price yesterday on a rape charge stemming from an incident that allegedly occurred on April 15, 2021.

According to the official indictment, Price is facing one charge of felony rape upon an unconscious victim. Another charge of felony rape upon an intoxicated person was dismissed.

California penal code defines the rape charge against Price as “If a person is at the time unconscious of the nature of the act, and this is known to the accused.” Unconscious of the nature of the act means incapable of resisting because the victim was unconscious or asleep, not aware, knowing, perceiving, or cognizant that the act occurred or cognizant of the essential characteristics of the act due to the perpetrator’s fraud.

If found guilty, Price could face up to eight years in prison and lifetime registry on the sex offender’s list. He is currently out on bail and will be arraigned on January 10, 2025. the Riverside County District Attorney’s office has yet to respond to our inquiries.

In April of 2015, Price stood before a coterie of broadcast news cameras in a conference room where he announced to a carefully staged assemblage of employees that he was establishing a $70,000 minimum wage for the entire Seattle-based credit card processing company that he founded more than a decade earlier.

Thanks to same-day coverage by NBC and the New York Times, Price became an overnight sensation if not the Millennial torchbearer for the Occupy Wall Street movement that had railed against economic inequality since 2011.

Presidential candidates, high-profile politicians and entertainers, major news networks, talk shows, lifestyle magazines, Ivy League universities and corporate titans hoisted Price on their shoulders as the voice for a new generation of pay equity advocates. But by the following spring of 2015, we aggregated an abundance of information that painted Price in an entirely different light.

While the $130 billion credit card processing industry was thriving, Gravity Payments had been reeling under Price’s leadership. Numerous employees accused Price of low wages, excessive hours and abusive behavior.

Price’s older brother Lucas, a founding partner in Gravity Payments, filed a lawsuit in 2015 claiming Price had unjustly enriched himself. Price had purchased a multi-million dollar house, a yacht and actively shared his lavish lifestyle through frequent Instagram posts.

We discovered that Price had apparently knowingly misreported upwards of $100 million in processing fees to banks and the IRS. For years, he claimed he structured contracts with his army of small business clients so that they were treated far more fairly than industry titans whom Price accused as price-gougers. According to an abundance of evidence, however, Price made these overtures as nothing more than a ruse for public attention and self enrichment.

Price’s legal troubles began as far back as 2004. We uncovered a case wherein Price, Lucas and their father Ron had been working for a card processing company that accused them of stealing clients and proprietary information to establish their own processing startup, which eventually became Gravity Payments.

One of Price’s first sales employees sued Price for stealing commission money and unlawfully tapping her phone.

One of Gravity’s early clients sued Price for breach of contract, unjust enrichment and a consumer protection claim.

The City of Seattle arrested Price for assault, criminal trespass and property destruction.

Dan Price’s former wife Kristie Colón originally afforded us extensive accounts of his alleged domestic violence and sexual abuse through a 200-page compendium that she contemplated releasing as a personal memoir. Colón has since gone on record in a New York Times article spawned by our reporting.

More than a dozen women contacted us since 2018 to allege a range of physical and sexual assault claims against Price. Two of the women alleged that Price raped them while they were unconscious. Another two alleged that Price videotaped sexual encounters without their knowledge.

Price has received numerous violations for speeding and other driving issues. And in January of 2022, Washington state artist Shelby Hayne accused Price of assaulting her while drunk then recklessly driving more than 100mph with her in the car after she refused his advances. Seattle prosecutors dropped the case due to questionable handling of Hayne’s charges.

Months later, model Kacie Margis contacted us about her alleged rape at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. Margis said she and Price had been dating on and off for a few months. During a weekend escape, she said she told Price that she did not want to engage in any sexual intercourse unless they resolved issues they were having, primarily Price’s abusive comments. She later awoke in her Ace Hotel room to find Price sexually penetrating her after she had taken a sleep aid for chronic insomnia. Margis developed the condition after she had been an attendee of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.

We contacted a variety of broadcast and print media outlets about all of our fiscal, physical and sexual allegations. None of them wanted to entertain a story until a few victims eventually appeared in a New York Times article in August of 2022. The article mentioned our involvement but did not mention that we had uncovered all of the allegations over a 7-year span.

Price is represented by longtime California criminal defense attorney Vicki Podberesky, a founding partner of Andrues Podberesky based in Los Angeles. Podberesky recently represented Dixon Slingerland, the disgraced CEO of Youth Policy Institute and a White House insider during the Obama administration. Slingerland’s embezzlement conviction led to a federal prison sentence and $750,000 fine.

This is a breaking story. We expect to release more information over the coming days.