A man once touted by a Trump official as a victim of #MeToo overreach has been accused of dismembering his fiancée, reports say

• Joseph Roberts has been accused of killing and dismembering his fiancée.
• Roberts was touted by the Trump administration as a victim of false allegations in the #MeToo movement.

A man once touted by the Trump administration as a victim of the #MeToo overreach has been accused of killing and dismembering his fiancée, reports say.

Navy veteran Joseph Roberts, 42, was arrested on September 6 in California after his DNA was found on duct tape and bags that a woman's body was found in, per Mercury News.

The bag of human remains had been discovered on the shoreline near the Bay Farm Island bridge in Alameda county in July, Alameda Police Department said.

Her body was headless and also missing hands and feet, which initially made it difficult for police to identify her, per Mercury News.

The victim was eventually identified as Roberts' fiancée Rachel Elizabeth Imani Buckner, 27 — her cause of death was determined to be homicide. Buckner had just graduated from San Francisco law school and was a mother and a spoken-word poet, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Roberts gained a public profile after claiming that he had been falsely accused by three students of sexual harassment while attending Savannah State University in 2009, leading to him being suspended.

In 2017, Roberts spoke about his story with Betsy DeVos, then Trump's Secretary of Education, as part of a series of talks on the Title IX guidelines around sexual harassment on college campuses.

DeVos said about him: "This young man was denied due process. Despondent and without options or hope, after five years of sobriety, he relapsed and attempted to take his own life."

Roberts went on to become active in San Francisco politics. He won a Republican party committee seat in his district, and his online campaign profile claimed that he had "successfully advocated for equal treatment and due process for those affected by inequitable Title IX campus disciplinary processes."

In 2020, DeVos unveiled new protections for students accused of sexual assault, which Roberts spoke in support of.

Roberts and Buckner began a relationship in 2019, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Their relationship started to break down, and between January 2022 and June 2023 police responded to 17 calls at the couple's apartment, for "welfare checks, disturbances, reported domestic violence and suspicious circumstances," according to records obtained by the paper.

After obtaining a search warrant for his apartment on September 6, police saw freshly removed carpets and an open bottle of Drano, which they interpreted as signs of a crime scene that had been cleaned up, per Mercury News.

Roberts denied knowledge of her death and told police that he did not report her missing due to mental health issues, and she would sometimes leave home for days at a time.

When detectives told Roberts that Bucker was dead, he speculated it was by suicide, but he could not explain why his DNA was on duct tape found with her remains, the outlet said.

He is currently being held in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, California. He is yet to enter a plea for the murder charge, Mercury News reported.

A GoFundMe page for Buckner set up by her family describes her as a "beautiful and radiant light" who had "so much more life to live."