Actor Scott Bairstow charged with child rape

EVERETT — Scott Hamilton Bairstow, a television and movie actor who formerly lived in Mukilteo, has been charged with having sex in 1998 with a then-12-year-old relative of his wife.

A charge of second-degree rape of a child was filed Tuesday in Snohomish County Superior Court against Bairstow, 33, who now lives in Los Angeles. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Arraignment was scheduled June 3.

Bairstow, a native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, has appeared in nine feature films, including “Tuck Everlasting” and “New Best Friend.” His television roles included appearances in “Touched by an Angel,” “Party of Five,” “Wolf Lake” and “Lonesome Dove: The Series.”

Neither the prosecutor’s office nor the court clerk’s office knew whether Bairstow had obtained a lawyer, and it was not immediately clear how to contact him.

The girl told authorities she also had sex with Bairstow in the county sometime in the first 10 months of 1998 and three more times outside Washington state, most recently in the summer of 2001, deputy prosecutor Janice Albert wrote in court papers.

After the final episode, the girl became ill, Albert wrote.

“The defendant apologized and asked her not to tell anyone,” the prosecutor told The Herald of Everett.

Earlier this year, according to court documents, Bairstow began calling the girl for telephone sex, asking “her to tell him that she was a little girl,” Albert said.

Before April, when the girl told relatives what had happened, her family believed her relationship between Bairstow was inappropriate but didn’t know there had been sexual contact, Albert wrote.

This month police in Mukilteo, a suburb between Everett and Seattle, obtained a court-authorized one-party consent order to tape-record a telephone conversation between Bairstow and the girl. (Without a court order, Washington state law bars the taping of phone conversation without both parties’ consent.)

During the conversation, the girl said she was considering telling somebody about the sexual intercourse, according to court documents.

His response, as quoted by Albert: “Well ... I’m a dad and I’ve got a job, and if you were to tell anyone I would be thrown in jail for 10 years.”