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SALT LAKE CITY — A registered sex offender in Utah, who has been in and out of jail frequently for at least the past 10 years, has been arrested again and accused of recording a woman using the bathroom at the Salt Lake City Main Library.
Jacob Allen Rye, 48, was booked into the Salt Lake County Jail on Monday. On Wednesday, he was charged in 3rd District Court with three separate cases. In total, Rye, of Ogden, was charged Wednesday with three counts of lewdness by a sex offender and two counts of voyeurism by electronic equipment, all third-degree felonies.
Rye was spotted Monday in the women's restroom at the library at 210 E. 400 South. When an officer stopped Rye and asked to check his phone, "I was able to see the video of him holding his phone above the wall of the stall he was in and did record a woman who was naked in the stall next to his," the officer wrote in a police booking affidavit.
He is also facing charges for allegedly exposing himself at a Salt Lake City health care clinic on July 1, and outside an apartment door in Salt Lake on June 21, according to charging documents.
Rye is currently on the Utah Sex Offender and Kidnap Registry and is listed as "noncompliant," meaning investigators believe he has violated the conditions of being a registered sex offender.
This year alone, Rye has been charged in four cases, according to Utah court records. He was charged in February and March with lewdness by a sex offender after exposing himself on a TRAX train and inside a Salt Lake store. In both cases, he was convicted and sentenced to 90 days in jail with credit for time already served.
He was charged again in April in Utah's 3rd District Court with exposing himself to two women in a stairwell of a building and then resisting arrest. Rye was convicted of lewdness by a sex offender and assault on a police officer in June and was again sentenced to time he had already served in jail.
In 2011, Rye made headlines for groping a woman during a job interview. He was convicted of an amended charge of attempted forcible sexual abuse and, after initially being placed on probation, was ordered to serve his original sentence of up to five years in prison for violating the conditions of that probation. As that case was going on, Rye was already facing other charges accusing him of using his phone to record up a woman's skirt in an elevator in Salt Lake City. He was convicted in that case in 2011 of voyeurism by electronic equipment.
