U.S. District Judge Richard Kopf this week told alleged rape victim Tory Bowen and her attorney they could face sanctions for a federal complaint the attorney filed against Bowen’s state court trial judge.

Kopf, in an order Monday, gave Bowen and the attorney, Wendy Murphy of Boston, until Sept. 18 to show why the complaint was not filed for an improper purpose or was legally frivolous.

“I warn the plaintiff and her counsel that sanctions may be imposed for failure to show cause,” Kopf wrote.

“There is something profoundly disturbing,” the judge said earlier in the order, “about the notion that a federal judge has the power to tell a state judge how to do his job, particularly when that state judge is presumably trying to do nothing more than protect the rights of a citizen who may have been wrongly accused of rape.”

In the complaint filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Lincoln, Murphy said Lancaster County District Judge Jeffre Cheuvront violated Bowen’s First Amendment right to free speech when he issued orders barring the words “rape,” “victim,” “assailant,” “sexual assault kit,” and “sexual assault nurse examiner” from the trial of Pamir Safi.

Safi, 34, is charged with first-degree sexual assault stemming from an encounter between Bowen and Safi at his Lincoln apartment the morning of Oct. 31, 2004. Safi has said he and Bowen had consensual sex, but she and the Lancaster County Attorney’s Office say Bowen was too intoxicated to give consent.

In the Thursday complaint, Murphy sought a bench trial and a federal judge’s declaration that Cheuvront’s word ban violated the U.S. Constitution.

In an interview Friday, Murphy said language orders such as the ones issued by Cheuvront have become increasingly common in state courts nationwide. She said she filed the complaint partly to get clarification from the federal judiciary on the issue — one that seems to set the First Amendment against the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial.

But Creighton University law professor Richard Collin Mangrum said in an interview last week that the complaint made sense only when seen as an attempt to generate publicity about issues of language in courtrooms.

Kopf suggested similar motives in  his order Monday.

“I have serious reservations about whether this action was commenced for the improper purpose of forcing Judge Cheuvront to recuse himself from presiding over the state criminal matter or for the improper purpose of generating pretrial publicity about the plaintiff and the criminal case,” he wrote.

Murphy, in an interview on Tuesday, denied both suggestions.

“Recusal? … That never once entered my mind,” she said.

“If I thought Judge Cheuvront’s order was correct, I would not have filed this,” she said. “It’s really important the federal courts have a say about this.”

Murphy said she has done “a lot of research” on the issues raised by the language ban and has “yet to find any constitutional scholar to say the judge’s order is lawful.”

She indicated that she had anticipated the tenor of Kopf’s order.

“It’s really appropriate for the federal court to be saying to me, ‘What gives?’” she said. “I did a lot of legal research, so I’m more than happy to answer the court’s questions.”

Safi stood trial last year, but Cheuvront declared a mistrial Nov. 6 after the jurors deadlocked during deliberations.

Cheuvront declared a second mistrial in July during jury selection, citing intense news coverage and public protests on behalf of Bowen.

Prosecutors have indicated they plan to try Safi again.

Cheuvront issued the so-called language order in both trials. He explained at a hearing in July he was concerned Safi’s right to a fair trial might be jeopardized if witnesses were permitted to use the banned words in their testimony.

In the order Monday, Kopf indicated he was troubled by the language orders.

“There is … something profoundly disturbing about a judge telling a citizen that she cannot say she was raped when testifying as a victim in a criminal case, particularly when the victim is trying to do nothing more than describe what happened to her,” Kopf wrote in a footnote.

On Tuesday, Judge Cheuvront, through a spokeswoman, said professional ethics bar him from commenting on the case.

Reach Clarence Mabin at cmabin@journalstar.com or 473-7234.