A 33-year-old man who was due to be sentenced Friday for sex trafficking told a federal judge in Santa Ana that he wanted to withdraw his plea because he claimed his attorney signed it for him and now denies raping a victim in the Angeles National Forest.

In court docunments, Leslie Anthony Bailey had appeared to admit that he had picked up a woman from a “fentanyl treatment facility” on Feb. 5, 2022, supplied her with the drug and then “forced” her to work as a prostitute in Anaheim. Prosecutors said when the woman said she wanted to go back to the drug treatment facility he instead took her to the forest “where he sexually assaulted her and abandoned her on the side of a remote mountain highway.”

But at his sentencing hearing Bailey told U.S. District Judge John Holcomb ”I didn’t sign

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