Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
- Calvin Spencer Rawe is charged with hate crime, harassment in Park City.
- Rawe allegedly used slurs in calls to a Summit County sheriff's sergeant.
- Rawe is also a defendant in a federal cryptocurrency case.
PARK CITY — A man was charged Friday with a hate crime after police say he went on some tirades over multiple phone calls, allegedly using slurs surrounding the gender, sexual orientation and race of a Summit County sheriff's sergeant and someone involved in the recent ski patrol strike at Vail Resorts.
Calvin Spencer Rawe, 35, with a last known address in Alpine, Wyoming, faces a class A misdemeanor charge of electronic communication harassment, with a hate crime enhancement. Other federal court documents show he was previously a Michigan resident but lived in Park City during the accusations in question.
Summit County Sheriff's Sgt. Zach Nakaishi first began investigating a phone call in December 2024 after a witness "involved in the recent labor dispute with Vail Resorts" received a call "during which the caller had become enraged and used vulgar words for female body parts and threatened to travel to Vail Resorts and cause harm to transgendered people and those involved with the strike," according to charging documents.
Nakaishi called the number, confirming it belonged to Rawe, the charges state. The man "at first, feigned mistake" before "his words devolved into anti-police calumnies and a tirade of epithets" that were homophobic.
Over the next week, Rawe left four messages claiming he was threatened by Nakaishi, using racist slurs and making a statement, "Do you think it is funnier that we put all the Japanese people into internment camps or that we dropped an atom bomb?" according to court documents.
He ridiculed police in his last message, saying officers appeared at his Wyoming house, charges say, but "he was in Park City the whole time," calling Nakaishi a racist slur.
Rawe was issued a summons to appear on April 18 at 3rd District Court for his first hearing. The man is also a defendant in an ongoing federal cryptocurrency case out of New York, filed in July 2024, court records show.
Rawe was allegedly a customer of Celsius, a cryptocurrency company that lost "billions of dollars because of risky investments and grave mismanagement" until the cryptocurrency crashes of 2022, litigators say.
"As a result of Celsius' staggering and widespread fraud, many of the company's customers lost their life savings and faced financial ruin. Customers who trusted the lies propagated by management and did not withdraw the assets they had transferred to Celsius found those assets trapped on Celsius's platform, and themselves embroiled in an 18-month bankruptcy," according to the complaint.
Less than 2% of Celsius' customers were able to withdraw more than $100,000 from the company in the 90 days before the company went bankrupt, the complaint says.
Debtors are suing for the return of that money with interest, claiming they were "preferential transfers," recoverable under bankruptcy code "to put as many Celsius customers as possible on equal footing."
Thousands of those customers are defendants in individual suits, a February filing indicates, including Rawe who allegedly transferred "no less than approximately $13,848,384.023" from the company, court documents claim.
