Chelsi Way and her wife, Celia Haueter, were waiting on a valet outside the MGM Grand Detroit around 1 AM on July 13, 2025. That’s all they were doing — standing on the sidewalk at the end of a birthday night out with Way’s brother, Zac Chearhart, and his partner, David Supal, waiting for someone to bring their car around.
Two men saw the couples holding hands and decided that was a problem. One of them, later identified as 26-year-old William James Wilson of Fort Worth, Texas, pulled out his phone and started recording them while shouting homophobic slurs and mocking Way’s gender.
Then he punched her in the face. Chearhart ran inside to get casino security.
According to the lawsuit the couples filed last month against MGM Resorts International, security did come outside — but they didn’t stop the attack. They took out their phones and filmed the assault.
Nobody stopped it. Wilson punched Chearhart, then turned on Haueter. He knocked her unconscious and, by Way’s account to reporters at the time, kept hitting her three or four more times while she lay face-down on the concrete.
She was out for five minutes.
The only people who tried to help were other customers standing on the sidewalk.
What a Beating Costs
Haueter needed more than a dozen stitches in her lip. She had a black eye, facial bruising, a severe concussion, and a traumatic brain injury. A doctor told Way that if the punches had landed harder, the damage to her wife’s brain could have been catastrophic.
A year later, she is still not the person she was. The GoFundMe raising money for her medical and therapy bills describes memory problems, PTSD, and severe anxiety. Haueter has trouble finding words when she speaks. She gets headaches bad enough to cancel her day.
Way says the two of them used to go out constantly — concerts, crowds, all of it. Now they stay home. Way cries every day.
“We just wanted a safe, fun night together,” Way said after the attack.
She is also the reason there was an arrest at all. Wilson and his companion took off; she followed them for three miles and called police with their location. The second man has never been identified.
The Law That Should Have Helped
When Wilson attacked these two couples, he was charged under a hate crime statute that was barely three months old. Michigan’s old law — the 1988 ethnic intimidation act — didn’t cover sexual orientation or gender identity at all.
Someone beaten for being gay in Michigan got charged as a plain assault, full stop.
That changed with Public Act 259 of 2024, sponsored by Rep. Noah Arbit and signed in January 2025. The new law added sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, disability, age, and ethnicity to the list of protected characteristics, and it created tiered felony penalties running up to ten years — including for attacks carried out with another person. It took effect April 2, 2025.
Wilson was charged with assault with intent to do great bodily harm, aggravated assault, two counts of assault and battery, and four hate crime counts.
In January, he pleaded guilty to one hate crime count and one count of attempted assault with a dangerous weapon. The other seven charges were dropped as part of the deal.
On March 17, Wayne County Judge Bradley L. Cobb sentenced him to two years of probation.
No prison. A woman has a permanent traumatic brain injury, and the man who caused it received no jail time.
Way says she thinks he was let off easy. She’s not wrong.
Suing the House: MGM Grand Detroit Lawsuit
The couples’ civil case, brought by Royal Oak attorney Jim Rasor, targets MGM directly. Rasor’s argument is straightforward premises liability: the casino knew violence was happening on its property, had been told about it, watched it, and did not call police or intervene.
“They did nothing,” he told The Detroit News, and he says this isn’t the first time.
The lawsuit also alleges MGM kept serving Wilson alcohol after he was already visibly drunk — which in Michigan opens up a separate line of liability entirely.
When reporters asked MGM about the attack in 2025, the company pointed them to the Detroit Police Department and said nothing else. It has not publicly answered the lawsuit’s allegations.
This is the Climate
The FBI counted 2,413 hate crime incidents motivated by sexual orientation or gender identity bias in 2024 — and federal officials acknowledge that reporting is voluntary and badly incomplete, meaning the real number is higher.
LGBTQ Nation has documented that 2025 was one of the most dangerous years on record for queer people in this country.
Laws on paper are not protection. Protection is somebody stepping between you and a fist.
Michigan wrote a better hate crime statute, and a man who fractured a woman’s life got probation anyway.
MGM Grand Detroit employed a security team, and instead of protecting people at the casino, that team reached for their phones.
Chelsi Way and Celia Haueter did everything right. They asked for help. They were standing under the lights of a major hotel, surrounded by staff.
Nobody came.
