When they first met Jonathan Batt, mostly through dating apps, it was exciting and promising, the women testified.

He seemed like a good guy, a well-sculpted military officer with an inviting smile who kept a boat on the Potomac River in the United States.

As things turned intimate though, they said, they saw another side of Batt.

One by one, in a military courtroom on Fort Meade in Maryland, they have offered disturbing accounts about being violently choked during sex, having a pillowcase placed over their head or around their neck, and in several cases tied with ropes or bitten, all without their consent.

Many testified that they hoped things would still work out and that they continued a sexual relationship with Batt, sometimes enduring more abuse.

Now he’s being court-martialled. The US Army says it was rape and aggravated assault; the defence says it was consensual conduct between adults.

Fifteen women are expected to testify against Batt before the Government rests its case, as prosecutors seek to prove six rape counts, seven aggravated assault counts and 10 sexual assault counts among 43 total charges. Batt pleaded not guilty to the charges.

More than 30 other counts have been dismissed since Batt’s initial arrest in the last northern autumn, as five victims have decided not to testify and prosecutors have combined some charges.

Batt is assigned to an artificial intelligence division of the Army in Arlington.

His lawyer, Nathan Freeburg, argued that the sex was always consensual and that choking is actually “a pretty common sexual act”. Freeburg said Batt’s text messages – “the receipts”, he called them – after the alleged attacks will show the women did not think the major had violated them.

The trial of Batt, 40, is an early, high-profile test for the Army Office of Special Trial Counsel, formed in December 2023 to create a more transparent means of prosecuting military crime besides letting a soldier’s commanding officer decide whether to prosecute.

In its first year, the special trial counsel said, it prosecuted 151 cases, including 65 cases for rape, sexual assault and other sexual misconduct and 63 for domestic violence.

Under the military system, a colonel is the judge in Batt’s case and the jury is composed of four lieutenant colonels and four colonels.

Facebook clues to case

A Facebook page broke the case open.

Someone in the group “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” posted Batt’s photo in August 2022, and a number of women joined the discussion.

One went to the Alexandria Police Department, which began tracking down complainants and then joined forces with the Army Criminal Investigation Division to compile the sprawling case.

The allegations of rape arose from multiple jurisdictions around the DC area and also at Fort Benning in Georgia, where Batt was once stationed, and span a period from late 2019 to early 2023.

Batt’s charges were first imposed by the special trial counsel last October. He was jailed for a month but then released by the judge in his case, Colonel Adam Kazin. Batt is married and has a small child.

None of the women who have testified so far served in the military, and prosecutors say Batt met most or all of them through online dating apps such as Hinge and Tinder.

“The evidence in this case is that a selfish, sadist, and sexually obsessed Major Batt exploited his uniform and his rank to exploit his victims,” Captain Stephanie Ryder of the special trial counsel’s office said in her opening statement.

“He never asked for permission, he never took no for an answer. He only cares about his own sexual satisfaction.”

Freeburg said the soldier was “wrongly accused in a rush of social media. Their stories are exaggerated. Their stories are false. They are stories of retaliation.”

He said Batt had kept his phone, which the Government apparently didn’t seize, and he showed witnesses some of their texts they hadn’t seen in years, saying they had a good time with Batt on dates they now say ended in sexual assault. One witness was shown a video from Batt’s phone apparently depicting her having consensual sex with Batt.

Anticipating this defence, the prosecution opened the trial not with one of the accusers but with an expert witness to explain why the women might return to their attacker.

“Women are socialised to be nice, even when they are being sexually assaulted,” said Mindy Mechanic, a forensic and clinical psychologist who specialises in the effects of trauma and counterintuitive victim behaviour.

She said trauma responses are different when the attacker is someone the victim knows, as opposed to a stranger.

“Often people don’t want to see themselves as a victim,” Mechanic testified. “They don’t want to see their partner as a rapist, a perpetrator.”

She said “victims often respond in ways we don’t expect”.

“Several studies show moderate to high rates of continued relationship resumption, whether social, professional or sexual.”

She said “victims will say, ‘Oh, he didn’t mean it. Maybe I misinterpreted, it wasn’t that bad.’ Any number of things that minimise what happened.”

In state or federal criminal cases, the women would have had support from victim assistance groups, but that is not available to civilians in military court, said lawyer Ryan Guilds of Arnold and Porter, who is representing five of the women pro bono.

“It’s noteworthy that every victim service provided in this prosecution,” Guilds said, “is provided by either a private non-profit organisation or pro bono legal counsel.

“That’s a problem. For victims who are active duty, there are some services, but they’re not adequately supported. Here, none of the victims had any of that.”

Guilds said it was also problematic that huge cuts to victim services are being imposed by the Trump Administration. In April, the Administration rescinded nearly US$50 million ($82m) in grants to victims and survivors of crime, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.

“Victims need support and services to encourage them to report,” Guilds said, “to make sure as many bad men as possible pay the price for the consequences of their acts.”

Batt grew up in a military family, was an enthusiastic supporter of Rotc when he attended Herndon High School in Fairfax County, Virginia, and then enrolled in the US Military Academy, graduating in 2007.

He then completed Ranger school, rose up the ranks while also attending various command programmes, and was selected last year for lieutenant colonel.

The Army said Batt deployed to Afghanistan four times, including as a platoon leader with the 82nd Airborne Division in 2009, and then three more times in 2019 and 2020 with the 75th Ranger Regiment.

He was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Regiment, called “The Old Guard”, at Fort Myer in Arlington beginning in 2020, Army records show, before joining the Army’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office in 2022 as an “algorithmic warfare planner”.

While working in Arlington, Batt posted profiles of himself on various dating apps.

In the summer of 2021, he connected with a college student from Pennsylvania and began texting with her, the student testified. The Washington Post generally does not name victims of sexual assault.

She agreed to drive to Batt’s home in Arlington, and the two took a ride on his boat, the “Batt Boat”, where she said Batt grew increasingly aggressive.

The woman is transgender, had recently undergone a related surgery, and testified that she told Batt repeatedly she did not want to have sex. She did not tell Batt she was transgender.

She went back to his home, and she said he unexpectedly used a rope to tie one of her hands to the bed, and then repeatedly forced himself on her.

The woman wept as she told the jury that Batt “started choking me aggressively around my neck” without any discussion or consent.

“He was very forceful. I could feel myself not able to breathe … I was pleading with him. I didn’t want to have sex.” She said Batt bit her near her breast.

The woman spent the night, drove home the next morning, then returned to Northern Virginia to have a rape examination and make a report to the Alexandria police, which has jurisdiction over a small part of Arlington where Batt lives.

She said that she later accidentally posted a private email about the incident on Instagram and that Batt quickly contacted her and apologised. She agreed to meet him at his home again.

“I wanted to hear him apologise in person,” she testified, “and I wanted to re-establish the connection I had with him and retake ownership of my body.”

She said they engaged in “heavy petting” and some consensual bondage but no sex. Then she called the Alexandria police and told them she didn’t want to prosecute him.

“Maybe him raping me was a one-time incident,” she said, “so I decided not to report him.” The police dropped the case.

But a year later, in August 2022, the woman came across the Facebook group “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” that was launched in cities across the country to allow women to discuss men they suspect of cheating on them.

Someone had started a thread about Batt. The Pennsylvania woman began contacting some of the posters in the group, then went back to the Alexandria police and said she now wanted to prosecute.

Alexandria Detective Brandon Smith began contacting the Facebook posters and, with help from the Army CID, found 20 women who said they experienced violent sexual episodes with Batt.

A lawyer from the District testified that she matched with Batt on the dating app Hinge in June 2020.

After several dates on his boat, they returned to his home one night, and as events turned sexual, she said she put her hands on Batt’s shoulders and told him, “You do not have permission to enter”. But he entered her anyway, she said, followed by strangulation, “cutting off my circulation. I wasn’t able to speak.”

She said the pressure caused her to have broken capillaries around her eyes.

The two stayed in contact after the incident, with the woman insisting he did not choke her violently, and they decided to see each other again.

“Just trying to give him the benefit of the doubt,” the woman testified. “He seemed like a nice guy. I was trying to see if he was the guy I thought he was.”

Freeburg showed her a text in which she wrote, “But I’m not offended. Figuring it out is part of the fun.”

A second sexual encounter resulted in even longer choking, the woman testified.

“Why isn’t he stopping?” she said she thought to herself. “I was sort of in shock. Why is this happening?”

She said blood vessels in her eyes were broken. But she saw him a third time and had non-violent sex before ending the relationship.

A Fairfax woman testified that she agreed to have sex with Batt at his home in the summer of 2022, but that he slapped her in the face and then strangled her with a pillowcase.

“I was not okay with being slapped or choked,” she said. “My vision was blurry, I thought I was going to pass out.”

Then she went back for another encounter.

“I thought if I gave him another chance and that stuff didn’t happen,” she said, “it might be a good experience.” She said that time Batt choked her with a pillowcase and slapped her.

She was done with him. “I realised nothing had changed from all the conversations that had occurred,” she said. “My face stung, my neck was sore.”

Prosecutors estimated the trial would last until late June, but witnesses have moved quickly, and the trial could end sooner. The punishment for rape under military law can be up to life in prison without parole.