Five months after he was arrested in Florida, former Auburn lawyer and one-time district attorney candidate Seth Carey was indicted on a slew of charges stemming from allegations that he sexually assaulted a woman living at his Rumford home in 2018.

Carey was indicted by the Oxford County grand jury this week on charges of attempted gross sexual assault, attempted aggravated sex trafficking, unlawful sexual contact, engaging in prostitution and two counts of domestic assault.

Seth Carey Orange County Jail photo

In March, Carey was arrested in a Walmart parking lot in Orange County, Florida, by a team of police officers who had been investigating the allegations for three years.

Police began investigating Carey in March 2018, when a 34-year-old woman reported to the Rumford Police Department that Carey had sexually assaulted her the previous month, according to Maine State Police.

According to court records, the woman had been living with him in his Rumford home at the time. The indictment states that Carey attempted to force the woman into a sex act by grabbing her hair and pulling her face toward his crotch.

It was later reported during civil court hearings that Carey had tried to pay for her silence about the matter.

His arrest in March came just over a year after Carey reached an agreement with prosecutors on a misdemeanor criminal charge of unauthorized practice of law.

In February 2020, Carey signed off on papers in Androscoggin County Superior Court in Auburn that promised over the next year he would not engage in new criminal conduct and would comply with the conditions of the three-year suspension of his law license imposed in December 2018 by a Maine judge.

Maine Superior Court Justice Thomas Warren had ordered Carey’s suspension, ruling he had committed sexual assault, tampered with a witness and failed to comply with a previous interim suspension order, among other violations.

Since Carey was admitted to the Maine Bar in 2006, his license to practice law in Maine has been suspended four times for violations of the rules of ethics governing attorney conduct.

After his arrest in March, Carey was ultimately returned to Maine and released on bail.

In response to his arrest on charges filed against him, Carey filed for a protection from abuse order against his accuser, saying the woman “has abused me and torn my life apart” and calling the accusations against him groundless.

In June, the Rumford District Court granted a protection from abuse order to Carey that requires the woman to stay away from him and also bars her from possessing a firearm.