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The gruesome discovery spoke to a ghastly crime.

On the afternoon of July 20, someone using a waterfront trail in Alameda spotted a large garbage bag wrapped in duct tape that smelled as if it was full of dead fish from the bay. When responding officers looked inside, they found the dismembered remains of a young woman whose head, hands and feet had been removed.

Investigators would extract a pair of DNA profiles from the duct tape on the bag. One belonged to Rachel Imani Buckner, a young mother and spoken-word poet who had just graduated from a San Francisco law school. The other, police now say, belonged to her killer — her boyfriend and onetime law school classmate Joseph Carl Roberts, suspected of using an electric saw to try to obscure his victim’s identity.

But as shocking as the crime was, the back-story was even stranger.

Roberts, it turns out, was once touted by the Trump administration as a poster child for the purported excesses of the “#MeToo” movement and the reckoning over sexual assault at American colleges. Kicked off the campus of Savannah State University in Georgia, the U.S. Navy veteran not only survived but turned the episode into a dramatic story about a different kind of victim: himself.

He earned entry to law school, won elected office in San Francisco and was featured in sympathetic coverage by national media outlets including ABC and USA Today, who allowed him to explain how his life was nearly ruined due to women making false allegations against him.

Roberts was still fashioning his unlikely comeback when he met Buckner at Golden Gate Law School. They fell in love, moved in together in Pleasanton and got engaged. She was a brilliant Howard University graduate who grew up in the East Bay and was pregnant with a daughter. He was known as “MAGA Joe” due to his outspoken support for then-President Donald Trump.

It was a toxic pairing, friends and classmates said. Eventually Buckner stopped communicating with her family and friends, before the couple, last year, broke into Buckner’s family home in San Ramon and assaulted her mother and grandmother.

Roberts was formally charged with Bucker’s killing and dismemberment on Sept. 7. It’s not clear whether the pair were engaged at the time of her death. He has pleaded not guilty and is being held without bail at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. His attorney, Anne Beles, declined to comment after being assigned the case Friday.

Now, people who knew Buckner are trying to understand what happened to her — and how, for so long, her alleged murderer managed to turn trouble into advantage.

Big ambition, early trouble

A Georgia native, Roberts enlisted in the Navy in the spring of 1999, then served on the USS Kearsarge, an amphibious assault ship, from 2000 to 2003. He spent his last two years at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, finishing his military career in 2005 as an electrician’s mate fireman recruit, according to Naval records.

There were early signs of trouble. Virginia prosecutors filed two counts of trespassing against him in October 2000, documents show. The details are unclear.

Roberts said in a later interview that he spent five years as a railroad conductor for Norfolk Southern before being laid off. A company spokesperson told the Chronicle it had no record of Roberts as an employee.

He then decided to attend college, saying in interviews he was the first person in his family to do so. He walked onto the campus of Savannah State in 2009 as a 28-year-old freshman studying English. In court records, Roberts said he pledged Omega Psi Phi, campaigned for student body vice president and joined the “Quiz Bowl” team.

On Feb. 18, 2011, Navy Federal Credit Union sued Roberts for $4,689 over delinquent payments on a used Mercedes. Financial woes would follow him the next decade.

Savannah State officials have never said why the university came to investigate him. But in April 2011, an ex-girlfriend told campus police that Roberts was “spreading rumors on Twitter that she infected Mr. Roberts with a venereal disease,” according to records reviewed by the Chronicle. The woman said they were no longer dating, but that he was still texting her; she wanted him to stop and to quit spreading rumors about her.

Police told the former couple not to communicate, records show, but the woman said Roberts continued to make comments about her — and that she resorted to remotely deleting his Twitter and Yahoo email accounts. Roberts sought tampering charges against the woman, but police dropped the case. Roberts, in a foreshadowing of what was to come, believed this was evidence of sexism.

By his senior year, Roberts found himself in deeper — and more bizarre — trouble.

‘Afraid for her life’

In February 2013, Roberts filmed himself sneaking into the Super Bowl halftime show at the Superdome in New Orleans to watch Beyoncé perform. In a subsequent Reuters article, Roberts said he was an aspiring screenwriter and hoped a video taken with a camera strapped to his forehead would be used to improve security and “spark the dialogue.” He said he wanted to work in legislative affairs in Washington, D.C.

“I want to be that impartial voice of reason,” Roberts told the reporter.

Two months later and three weeks before graduation, Roberts asserted in a lawsuit that three women had leveled sexual harassment claims against him that got him kicked off campus. What the allegations entailed is not clear; the school and the accusers named by Roberts declined the Chronicle’s requests for comment.

In court records, Roberts said that one woman told school officials she was “afraid for her life.” Roberts said the school supported its decision to expel him in an incident report that included text messages, Facebook messages and Instagram posts. He said the university’s charges against him included damage to property and disorderly conduct.

On March 27, 2013, Roberts said, he was suspended. Officials emailed an alert with his photo across campus, he said, after deciding that his “presence on campus constituted a serious threat of harm to the campus community.”

Roberts said he was allowed to finish his studies remotely and to graduate, but two years later, in April 2015, he sued the university and several of its leaders in federal court, acting as his own attorney. In his version of events, the women were actually harassing him with text messages over a student election beef. He contended that administrators did an “excessively hurried investigation” and discriminated against him “on the basis of his male sex.”

Savannah State officials have declined to address the specifics of the case, saying only that they “give every student due process.”

Roberts became depressed, according to his account in court papers, and self-medicated with drugs and alcohol. On April 19, 2013, he said, he was found unresponsive after a suicide attempt and hospitalized. His lawsuit — later dismissed by a judge — sought $15 million in damages.

The Chronicle spoke to one of the women named in the lawsuit as an accuser. She said she was confused by the whole episode. She barely knew Roberts, she said, and had never made an accusation against him.

Embracing a new fame

Speaking to a crowd at George Mason University in Virginia on Sept. 7, 2017, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos spoke of a young Navy veteran who’d nearly lost everything after being accused of sexual harassment.

“This young man was suspended via a campus-wide email which declared him a threat to the campus community,” DeVos said. “When he tried to learn the reason for his suspension, he was barred from campus … 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.”

The Trump cabinet member referenced Roberts as she announced sweeping rollbacks of Obama-era reforms to Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funding. High-profile sexual assaults at universities had prompted the Obama administration to strengthen enforcement in 2011 and 2014, but critics like DeVos said the rights of the accused were being trampled.

It was a controversial push, especially after DeVos’ head of the Office for Civil Rights told the New York Times that “90 percent” of sexual assault allegations on campus “fall into the category of ‘we were both drunk,’ ‘we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation because she just decided that our last sleeping together was not quite right.’” The official apologized, but the comments led to protests at Education Department headquarters.

Two months before the George Mason speech, DeVos had met with Roberts and other men accused of campus assault and harassment. She singled out Roberts in her speech as particularly aggrieved.

“That is the current reality,” she told the crowd.

DeVos did not respond Friday to a message to her press team.

Roberts leaned into his newfound fame. He said he began working for Families Advocating for Campus Equality, or FACE, a D.C. advocacy group pushing for stronger protections for men accused of assault at schools. The organization did not return a request for comment.

As Roberts gained prominence in men’s rights circles, his private life and finances remained in turmoil. He had in November 2015 married Jasmine Danyelle White, an Army soldier stationed in Germany, records show, but she later alleged he cheated on her during his tenure in D.C. and misspent money she gave him.

Roberts moved back to Germany to be with his wife, but then he caught a break: On May 1, 2018, he said, Golden Gate University School of Law in downtown San Francisco offered him a Presidential Scholarship covering all of his tuition.

She moved ‘like water’

Rachel Buckner, whose close friends and family members called her by her middle name of Imani, grew up attending Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland and singing in the children’s choir. As part of the AB Girls of Joy & Faith, she attended church trips and developed a close group of friends.

On weekends, she’d play basketball on a traveling Amateur Athletic Union team when she wasn’t enjoying Girl Scouts. As she finished high school, she received a full scholarship to Howard University in Washington, D.C.

“No one was shocked because she was so smart,” said Lyniece Hill, 26, who attended church with her.

After graduating, Buckner returned to the Bay Area and discovered a new pursuit. While she wrote poems at Howard, she’d kept them to herself. Now, in 2018, she burst onto stage at the Liege Spirits Lounge in downtown Oakland for its weekly Speak On It sessions.

“She was not just self-confident, she was self-assured,” recalled Alie Jones, a poet who befriended Buckner. “When she’d come to the mic, you’d take a deep breath.”

Each Wednesday night, Buckner would hold forth on femininity, divinity and other topics, Jones said. “We talked about black women’s pain and she talked a lot about pleasure in a very human way,” Jones said. “When she moved there was a lot of poise and confidence and ease. She moved through like water.”

In fall 2019, she began law school at Golden Gate, four months pregnant. A second-year classmate, Alva Ogletree, recalled walking to her torts class one day when she recognized Buckner wearing a Howard University hoodie. Ogletree, also an alum, cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled: “H.U.!” Buckner swung around and yelled back the requisite reply: “You know!”

“We became really close after that,” recalled Ogletree. Buckner would give birth to her daughter, Indigo, that first year. Ogletree had a son while at Howard. They bonded over their challenges as Black students and mothers — and the difficult births they’d endured. Ogletree helped Buckner clean the front room of her mother’s house for a nursery.

Also in fall 2019, Roberts restarted his coursework at Golden Gate.

He’d abruptly dropped out the year before — but not before leaving a distinct impression with his classmates. That was the year that Christine Blasey Ford testified that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were in high school. The hearings polarized Americans and fueled the Trump administration’s suspicions that accusations against men had gone too far. “It’s a very scary time for young men in America,” Trump said after Kavanaugh’s testimony on Oct. 2, 2018.

Days later, wearing a “Make America Great Again” ballcap, Roberts was featured in a sympathetic story on ABC News’ “Nightline” that said Savannah State had “derailed his dream of graduating.”

The Kavanaugh hearings were hot discussion topics in Golden Gate classes, recalled Ogletree, who shared classes with Roberts in the fall of 2018. “In certain classes in criminal procedures,” she said, “his whole arguments were about how there wasn’t due process.”

Meeting at a troubled time

What many other students didn’t see was that Roberts’ life was falling apart. In late October of 2018, according to court records, he texted his wife: “Dropping out of law school. Adjusting to a new city. No money. No food. Divorce.”

On Nov. 1, 2018, he was placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, known as a 5150, after considering suicide, he later wrote. He said he’d been overwhelmed by the stress of law school, a disintegrating marriage and a potential eviction from his home. He was discharged with antipsychotic medication.

Roberts said he spoke to a law school administrator who recommended a leave of absence that would allow him to return the next year with his scholarship intact. He left school Nov. 7, telling classmates he was going on sabbatical, Ogletree recalled. A Golden Gate official declined to answer questions about Roberts’ tenure at the school.

That month, Roberts returned to his family in Atlanta, where he was again hospitalized after becoming suicidal, according to his court filings. He said he was later diagnosed with “unspecified depression, acute stress disorder and elevated blood pressure.”

In January 2019, Roberts was back in San Francisco, scraping by on food stamps and support from his wife that was nearing an end. By that July, he was taking out payday loans to support himself, by his account. In August, he returned to Golden Gate. He would meet first-year student Buckner and the pair would start dating.

Around Halloween, Roberts filed for divorce from his wife. He wanted nearly $2,700 in monthly spousal support; she said she’d already paid him nearly $28,000 and that he was “recklessly spending money” on Ubers, restaurant meals, a gym membership and switching to an expensive single-student living arrangement.

White, the ex-wife, and her attorney did not respond to requests for comment. But in a court filing, White said Roberts was a “narcissistic” serial adulterer. At one point, she said, she went into his Instagram account and discovered he had been “communicating with several different women and asking questions like, ‘when are you gonna be my wife.’”

When confronted, White said, Roberts admitted he had a “problem.”

A run for office

By the end of his first full school year at Golden Gate, Roberts, a registered Republican, decided to run for a seat on the San Francisco Republican Central Committee, representing Assembly District 17.

In his campaign profile, he touted his past work in Title IX reform.

“Joseph successfully advocated for equal treatment and due process for those affected by inequitable Title IX campus disciplinary processes,” his online profile stated. He said he was endorsed by the San Francisco GOP, Republican Women of San Francisco and the San Francisco Log Cabin Republicans.

He won the seat in the March 3, 2020 election, garnering nearly 2,000 votes and finishing fifth in voting for 11 seats. As a delegate, he continued pushing his Title IX grievances, sitting for two interviews on The Exceptional Conservative Show, a YouTube program hosted by Kenneth McClenton.

In his first interview on April 17, 2020, Roberts called his Savannah State accusers “total liars.” He compared his activism to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. His opportunity to sit across from DeVos was akin to King meeting with President Lyndon Johnson to discuss the Civil Rights Movement, he said. At one point, McClenton asked Roberts what he would tell sons who left for college.

“They’re going to be tall and handsome and get attention from the opposite sex,” Roberts said. “Don’t take multiple women.”

As DeVos unveiled new protections that year for students accused of sexual assault, Roberts told Politico that the new rules were a “reaffirmation of what I and other families knew the entire time: We were just victims of the previous administration’s policy.”

In December 2020, Roberts posted an unusual photo on social media. He wore a tuxedo as he posed with San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and he said they had dined together at the exclusive French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley.

Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Breed, said such a dinner never happened and that the photo was from a San Francisco Symphony event. Roberts, Cretan said, had approached the mayor at a few different events.

“The posts on social media, because of their nature, were flagged for her security detail which is SFPD,” Cretan told the Chronicle, calling the episode “disturbing.” He said, “SFPD agreed and was looking into it.”

‘She went off the map’

As the COVID lockdown took hold, friends and family said, Buckner slowly faded from view. But when she stopped showing up for the weekly spoken-word performances, her friend and fellow poet Jones wasn’t overly concerned. They remained in touch via text and phone calls.

In some respects, Buckner was thriving. She worked as a summer associate at the Hanson Bridgett law firm in San Francisco for a month in 2020 and again in 2021, when the firm offered her a full-time position following her graduation. She accepted, said Managing Partner Kristina Lawson.

Buckner was an “amazing young woman” and “superstar summer associate,” Lawson said. “I personally remember my conversations with her about practicing law as a working mom, as she was a young mother looking forward to a promising career as a lawyer. Our thoughts and prayers are with Imani’s young daughter, and with her family.”

Buckner’s Instagram account during the COVID years showed her and her new boyfriend playing golf, sailing on a yacht and attending a Warriors game, her childhood friend Hill recalled. She saw Buckner with her daughter at a holiday event with no signs of trouble. Still, her friends spoke of concerns.

“She went off the map with everybody,” Ogletree said, “which was strange and unlike her.”

Roberts continued his Title IX mission as “Trust and Belief coordinator” at Stop Abusive and Violent Environments, or SAVE, a Maryland organization which believed that “dubious claims” of a rape culture created “moral panic” on college campuses. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

He penned op-eds that appeared in the Washington Examiner and USA Today. The former was titled: “If Black Lives Matter, due process must matter.”

At that time, the Trump administration’s changes to Title IX remained in effect — and they do so today. President Biden campaigned on “immediately” overturning DeVos’ regulations and reinstating Obama-era reforms, but the effort has taken time. The Biden administration has said it hopes to finalize new rules in October.

Shiwali Patel, senior counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, who was quoted along with Roberts in the 2018 “Nightline” report, said the changes that Roberts helped establish have led to “hostile and unfair rules” on campuses, with sexual harassment cases turned away due to high thresholds for proof. In an interview Friday, she called his murder charge “shocking.”

“They painted a picture of MeToo going too far and campuses being unsafe for men, but that was not what was actually happening,” Patel said. She said false accusation rates are “very low,” while campus sexual assaults are often not reported.

By 2022, the relationship between Roberts and Buckner began to veer into chaos. Between Jan. 21, 2022, and June 3, 2023, police responded to 17 calls for service at their Pleasanton apartment, for welfare checks, disturbances, reported domestic violence and suspicious circumstances, according to records obtained by the Chronicle.

On Feb. 28, 2022, the couple broke into Buckner’s mother’s house in San Ramon and beat up her mother and grandmother. The grandmother suffered a broken arm, records show. A judge issued a protective order to keep Roberts and Buckner away from the two women. On June 1, public defender Evan Kuluk, who represented Buckner, petitioned the court for a mental health diversion, saying his client “suffers from a qualifying mental disorder” that played a significant role in the charged crime.

Reached by phone, Kuluk declined to comment on any mental health issues, but issued a statement about Buckner’s death.

“Imani was an intelligent, thoughtful, hard-working person with so much promise for a bright legal career,” he said. “Her loss is devastating to all those who knew her.”

The case ended with the couple taking plea deals that left them both with probation. Later in the year, Alameda County’s child support department sued Buckner and a judge ordered her to pay $724 a month to support her daughter. On Dec. 15, Discover Bank sued Buckner as well, saying she failed to pay almost $7,000 in credit card debt.

On May 30 of this year, Pleasanton police responded to a domestic violence call from the Pleasanton apartment. Less than a week later, police responded to a welfare check at the apartment. The next month, according to court records, police believe Roberts killed Buckner in the apartment.

Following the suspect

On July 13, six days before Buckner’s remains were found, Roberts’ cell phone abruptly stopped communicating with Buckner’s phone after nine months of consistent communication, according to search warrant records. But he did begin talking with at least three new women, records show. One left a voicemail saying, “Hey handsome.”

Detectives said Roberts kept Buckner’s cell phone “long after the victim was dead,” drove her car and never reported her missing. Based on the condition of the body parts and the bag, investigators believe Roberts left the bag under the cover of darkness on the night of July 18.

On Aug. 30, officers started surveilling Roberts. A FBI team watched him drive Buckner’s car, golf, smoke cigarettes and eat Mexican food, records show. After a judge approved a search warrant, investigators on Sept. 6 entered the Pleasanton apartment — and reported immediately spotting signs of a cleaned-up crime scene, including an open bottle of Drano on the edge of a bathtub and freshly removed carpets.

In a police interview, Roberts denied knowing Buckner was dead, saying her mental health had deteriorated in the pandemic and that it was not unusual for her to leave for days at a time. He didn’t report her missing, he said, because he thought she would come back. When detectives told him Buckner was dead, Roberts speculated she may have died by suicide.

A GoFundMe for Buckner’s family has since raised more than $80,000. Her mother said on the fundraising page that despite her domestic troubles, she graduated.

“To anyone that got to know and be around Imani, she was a beautiful and radiant light,” her mother, S. Jamila Buckner, wrote. “She had an infectious spirit that you could not help but smile when around and gravitate towards … She was at the beginning of her life and her journey and had so much more life to live.”

‘How dare you’

Alie Jones started the vigil by reciting some statistics: Black women make up 40% of people trafficked in the United States. In Oakland, of 1,500 missing persons, more than 400 were Black women.

She recited a poem:

I dare you to HOLD SPACE
for Black girls who
bloom in a drought
Black girls who
ask too many questions and
don’t learn from our mistakes
From the sweetest sunflower to
the thorniest rose
I dare you to
EMBRACE Black girls

A little more than a week had passed since authorities identified Buckner as the woman who had been murdered. Just over a mile away on Alameda’s South Shore Beach, friends and classmates met for a memorial.

About 30 people formed a circle in the sand, spreading bubbles, playing music and sharing stories. As the sun set, the attendees walked to the shoreline and laid flowers in the shallow water.

Buckner’s friends spoke about her final months. The hashtag #PrayForImani had been circulating. Despite her estrangement from many of them, they had heard through the grapevine that she might be in an abusive relationship.

Ogletree, who lives 10 minutes from where Buckner’s body was found, said her friend had been seen with her arm in a sling and other mysterious injuries. Neighbors at their apartment would hear frequent fighting, she said.

Around June, a month before investigators believe she was killed, Ogletree said Buckner told a close friend that her boyfriend was trying to kill her and that she had tried to get to a domestic violence shelter.

When Hill’s father, a deacon at their Oakland church, called her with the news of Buckner’s death, she said she “didn’t really need him to say how it happened.”

Ogletree said she found out about Buckner’s death from a fellow Howard alum. “Imani was so full of love. She loved him through his inefficiencies and his flaws,” she said of Roberts. “She was able to have a child, successfully be a mother, be in an abusive relationship, withdraw from law school, get away from him, get back together and still graduate.”

She’s furious at Roberts — and his efforts to reframe his history.

“When I saw who it was, I broke. I was just in disbelief. It was so gruesome and I knew him and spent time with him,” she said. “How dare you play victim.”