Lawsuit on…
Michael and Tammy Bethel have an unusual marriage. She can have sex with anyone she wants. He can’t.
Now they also have an unusual federal lawsuit.
In enough detail to make even the most staid federal judge blush, Michael Bethel, a former Pueblo police sergeant, claims he was fired because he and his wife engage in a “cuckold” sexual relationship.
Tammy Bethel is free to have sex with other people, provided they are not married or minors, and she tells her husband about it, the lawsuit states.
Michael Bethel is allowed to have sex only with his wife, though he sometimes joins her while she has sex with others. He sometimes videotapes or photographs the encounters, according to the document.
The lawsuit also claims the city and Police Chief James Billings wrongly accused Bethel of witness tampering and using his job to scout sex partners for his wife.
Bethel was acquitted of the charges in March.
According to the lawsuit, the Bethels have been married for about 20 years, and Tammy Bethel has been having sex with other people for the past 10.
The arrangement was rumored but not widely known in the Pueblo Police Department for most of the time Bethel worked there, the Pueblo Chieftain reported.
But it became common knowledge shortly after Bethel was dispatched to a Pueblo apartment in September 2005.
In the lawsuit, Bethel said he went to the apartment to stand by as the girlfriend of the 23- year-old tenant removed her belongings. The next day, he realized he might have left a notebook at the apartment. Because he was off that day, he stopped by the apartment with his wife. While there, the tenant, Jamarlon Keys, invited Tammy Bethel to return “anytime she wished,” the lawsuit states.
The couple returned a few weeks later and engaged in sex, which was videotaped, according to the court filing.
A month later, Keys’ ex-girlfriend was charged with burglarizing the apartment. Among the items authorities said she took was the videotape.
Keys later told police that Michael Bethel tried to get him to drop charges or not testify against his ex-girlfriend in order to keep the district attorney’s office from viewing the videotape.
Bethel denied the allegation.
According to his lawsuit, police secretly recorded conversations in which he and his wife told Keys they weren’t concerned about anyone seeing the tape. They also claim that prosecutors dropped or reduced charges against Keys in exchange for his testifying in court against Bethel.
Bethel was fired from the department in June 2006. Four days later, he was charged with felony witness tampering and official misconduct. A judge threw out the felony charge in March, saying Keys was a victim, not a witness. A jury returned a not-guilty verdict on the misconduct charge that month.
The Bethels, who have three sons, told the Pueblo Chieftain in March that -Michael Bethel was working at a grocery store.
Michael Bethel told the newspaper that being fired and prosecuted was “the toughest thing that I have ever had to deal with.”




