Former Disney Vice President Sentenced To Prison For Raping 7-Year-Old

A former Walt Disney Company Vice President was sentenced Friday to nearly seven years in prison for sexually abusing a 7-year-old girl following a child abuse investigation.

According to court documents, Laney, 73, began abusing the victim in 2009, when she was about 7-years-old, and there were multiple incidents of abuse spanning about two years

Laney will serve 81 months for four counts of first-degree child sexual abuse.

Judge Benjamin Souede had previously acquitted Laney of three counts of first-degree rape and three counts of first-degree sex abuse.

Michael Laney attempted to wriggle out of the prison sentence by claiming that his wife is too sick to be left alone.

OregonLive reports: Laney’s attorneys, Stephen Houze and Jacob Houze, on Thursday asked the court to postpone enforcing any part of his sentence that would send him into custody while Laney appealed part of the sentence. In a supporting statement, Jacob Houze said the claims against Laney were contradictory and inconsistent, and that there was no physical evidence.

“The character of the evidence is just stories, and the strength of those stories is exceedingly low,” Houze wrote in a statement.

Laney’s attorneys also cited some of Laney’s personal circumstances, noting that he is the caretaker for his wife, who has Parkinson’s disease.

“Sentencing Mr. Laney to any amount of incarceration, much less an actuarial true life sentence, disproportionately impacts him more than a defendant without those personal characteristics,” they said in a statement.

Laney’s wife’s doctor, Blain Crandell, submitted a letter on Laney’s behalf, saying his wife “could be expected to suffer serious consequences to her health and well-being” without an in-home caregiver, a role her husband had been filling.

In a response to Houze’s statement, Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney Charles Mickley called the claims “peculiarly offensive and insulting.”