Allegations by a woman who said longtime jam band bar owner Jay Bianchi sexually assaulted her last month are similar to public accusations made by other victims in 2021, according to a Denver police arrest affidavit.
Jay Bianchi (Courtesy of Denver Police Department)
Bianchi was arrested in April and charged with six felony counts of sexual assault and three misdemeanor counts of unlawful sexual contact for incidents in 2020 and 2024.
Bianchi faces two counts each of sexual assault — no consent, sexual assault — victim incapable and sexual assault — victim helpless.
Bianchi was first publicly accused of sexual assault in 2021, when two women claimed he drugged and assaulted them during and after a 2020 Halloween party at his bar, Sancho’s Broken Arrow, and at So Many Roads Brewery, both in Denver.
Both women described being served drinks they did not open or make and quickly losing their memories at the Halloween party. One woman told police she woke up the next day without pants on in the basement of Sancho’s Broken Arrow and almost no memory of what happened the night before. The second woman, who left Sancho’s to go to work sound at So Many Roads the next morning, said Bianchi assaulted her in an office there that day after being relieved from sound booth duties because she “couldn’t form coherent sentences” and felt “like time had slowed down.”
A third woman contacted Denver police to report her assault on April 8, according to the affidavit.
The woman arrived alone at So Many Roads at 8 p.m. April 7 to have a beer. After she ordered her second drink, Bianchi sat down next to her at the bar and started talking to her, she told police.
A different bartender served her a third beer, and the woman had almost no other memories of the rest of the night until she woke up in her apartment at 7 a.m. the next day with pain in her hips and genitals.
The woman remembered flashes of Bianchi having intercourse with her in a dark room and feeling disoriented, scared and confused about how she got there, she told investigators.
She also remembered crying and struggling to walk out of the brewery when the bartender who served her a third beer called an Uber to take her home. The woman remembered being in a dark room with strange paintings on the wall, later identified as a museum inside the brewery, but the bartender “kept telling her that nothing like that happened.”
Surveillance footage from a business near So Many Roads and the woman’s apartment complex shows her being picked up and dropped off by an Uber driver.
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Police investigating the 2020 incidents matched Bianchi’s semen collected during a sexual assault examination to a 2016 Boulder sexual assault case also connected to Bianchi, according to the affidavit.
The woman in that case also reported having a drink with Bianchi, blacking out and being assaulted by him at the now-closed Boulder bar Owsley’s Golden Road. The case was closed because the woman did not want to press charges, the affidavit states.
Denver police believe there may be additional incidents involving Bianchi and victims who have not reported the information to police.
Anyone who believes they may have been a victim of Bianchi can call the Denver Police Sex Crimes Unit at 720-913-6040.
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