FILE--In this Sept. 29, 2016, file photo, attorney Anthony Douglas Rappaport, left, speaks at a news conference with his clients, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn, right, in San Francisco.... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE--In this Sept. 29, 2016, file photo, attorney Anthony Douglas Rappaport, left, speaks at a news conference with his clients, Denise Huskins and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn, right, in San Francisco. The couple that police detectives wrongly accused of fabricating the woman's kidnapping from their... (Associated Press) 
 
 VALLEJO, Calif. (AP) — A couple reached a $2.5 million settlement with a Northern California city and its police department after investigators dismissed the woman's elaborate and bizarre kidnapping as a hoax. 
 
 Police in the city of Vallejo initially discounted a report by Denise Huskins and her boyfriend, Aaron Quinn, that a masked intruder drugged them in their home and then kidnapped her in 2015. 
 
 The assailant sexually assaulted Huskins and released her two days later outside her family's home in Southern California. The Associated Press doesn't normally name victims of sexual assault, but Huskins has frequently spoken publicly about the case in the past. 
 
 Police realized the couple were telling the truth after a disbarred Harvard University-trained attorney, Matthew Muller, was implicated in another crime and tied to the abduction. He pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and is serving a 40-year prison term. 
 
 Quinn's mother, Marianne Quinn, told the San Francisco Chronicle that the settlement in the lawsuit was reached Thursday. 
 
 Vallejo police had apologized after discounting the outlandish kidnapping. 
 
 Muller used a drone to spy on the couple before he broke into their home with a fake gun, tied them up and made them drink a sleep-inducing liquid, prosecutors said. They were blindfolded while Muller played a recorded message that made it seem as if there was more than one kidnapper. 
 
 He put Huskins in the trunk of his car, drove her to his home in South Lake Tahoe and held her there for two days. Investigators said they found videos of Muller arranging cameras in a bedroom and then recording himself twice sexually assaulting his blindfolded victim. 
 
 During and after the kidnapping, Muller used an anonymous email address to send messages to a San Francisco reporter claiming that Huskins was abducted by a team of elite criminals practicing their tactics. 
 
 After she was released in the city of Huntington Beach, Vallejo police called the kidnapping a hoax and erroneously likened it to the book and movie "Gone Girl," in which a woman goes missing and then lies about being kidnapped when she reappears. 
 
 Muller was arrested in an attempted robbery at another San Francisco Bay Area home. Authorities said they found a cellphone that they traced to Muller and a subsequent search of a car and home turned up evidence, including a computer Muller stole from Quinn, linking him to the abduction. 
 
 Huskins sued police, and a judge ruled last year that the lawsuit could proceed. 
 
 "The conduct plaintiffs allege goes beyond defendants being skeptical, investigating alternate theories, and expressing skepticism," U.S. District Judge Troy Nunley wrote in his 22-page decision, adding that, "A reasonable jury could find that defendants engaged in conduct that was extreme and outrageous." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Information from: San Francisco Chronicle, http://www.sfgate.com ||||| - The city of Vallejo has agreed to pay a $2.5 million settlement for a federal lawsuit filed by a couple in a bizarre kidnapping case from 2015. 
 
 An attorney for Denise Huskins and her fiance Aaron Quinn said his clients are "grateful." 
 
 James M. Wagstaffe, the couples attorney, issued a statement Thursday that said, "One can only hope that the message of this settlement will be that victims are to be believed and that the police will accept a woman’s highly credible report that she was kidnaped and raped.” He added that the "nightmare" experience has concluded. 
 
 The lawsuit accused the city and two police officers of defamation and inflicting emotional distress. 
 
 The ordeal began in March, 2015 when Huskins, 30 at the time, was forcibly taken from her Mare Island home by an unknown abductor and a ransom demand was made. 
 
 Police did not believe the story, initially saying the case was a hoax and many compared it to the film 'Gone Girl', in which a woman goes missing and then lies about being kidnaped when she reappears. 
 
 Police eventually apologized for their mistake. 
 
 In March of 2017, two days after Huskins' kidnaper, ex-lawyer Matthew Muller was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison, the couple got engaged and posted photos publicly on Facebook. 
 
 During the trial, the couple gave gut-wrenching testimony against their tormentor. They said he drugged them and bound them in their home in an elaborate kidnapping that involved spying on them with a remote-controlled drone. 
 
 Muller, the kidnaper, even came to Huskins’ defense, blasting police for not believing her story. He went as far as writing a series of bizarre emails and a manifesto, including writings to KTVU's Henry Lee, outlining what he had done. 
 
 The City of Vallejo admits no wrongdoing in the settlement. 
 
 The @CityofVallejo has agreed to pay $2.5M to settle federal lawsuit filed by Denise Huskins & bf, who said cops faked her kidnapping, when in fact she was abducted by Matthew Muller. Couple’s attorney sends statement to @KTVU: pic.twitter.com/eoZCqONAjZ — Henry K. Lee (@henrykleeKTVU) March 16, 2018 ||||| Claim: Vallejo cops told kidnapped woman’s lawyer to watch ‘Gone Girl’ 
 
 FILE - In this July 13, 2015, file photo, Denise Huskins, left, and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn listen as their attorneys speak at a news conference in Vallejo, Calif. Attorneys for Huskins plan to file a claim against the city whose police initially dismissed her kidnapping as a hoax. Law firm Kerr and Wagstaffe has announced that its attorneys intend to file the claim, a precursor to a lawsuit, against Vallejo on Thursday, Sept. 17, 2015. (Mike Jory/Vallejo Times-Herald via AP, File) less FILE - In this July 13, 2015, file photo, Denise Huskins, left, and her boyfriend Aaron Quinn listen as their attorneys speak at a news conference in Vallejo, Calif. Attorneys for Huskins plan to file a claim ... more Photo: Mike Jory, Associated Press Photo: Mike Jory, Associated Press Image 1 of / 57 Caption Close Claim: Vallejo cops told kidnapped woman’s lawyer to watch ‘Gone Girl’ 1 / 57 Back to Gallery 
 
 At a time when they should have been tracking down a violent kidnapper and rapist, Vallejo police “destroyed the lives and reputations” of two innocent victims of an abduction on Mare Island by calling the episode a hoax, according to a legal claim filed Thursday by lawyers for the couple. 
 
 The attorneys for Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn, both 30, said in the claim — which signals an intent to sue — that the city of Vallejo and three officers tarred the couple “through an outrageous, completely unprofessional and wholly unfounded campaign of disparagement.” 
 
 Vallejo Police Chief Andrew Bidou has since admitted the department was wrong when it dismissed the report that a masked intruder forcibly took Huskins from her boyfriend’s home in March and then asked for a ransom, an incident that made national headlines. 
 
 In a July 20 letter to the couple, the chief wrote that the incident was “not a hoax or orchestrated event” and that his department’s “conclusions were incorrect.” 
 
 “We apologize for and regret comments made by representatives of the Vallejo Police Department during the initial kidnapping investigation,” Bidou wrote. “We understand that these contributed to the difficulty and personal ordeal that you have experienced.” 
 
 Those letters were too little, too late, according to three attorneys for the couple, who held a Thursday news conference announcing the claim that seeks unspecified damages. They said Vallejo police “rubbed salt in the wounds” of Huskins and Quinn. 
 
 The department admitted its error after federal authorities tracked down 38-year-old Matthew Muller — a Harvard graduate and disbarred immigration attorney — and named him as the intruder who held Huskins. 
 
 Labeled a hoax 
 
 Vallejo police had publicly called the kidnap-for-ransom a hoax during a March news conference after Huskins turned up in Southern California and hired an attorney. “There is no evidence to support the claims that this was a stranger abduction or any abduction at all,” police Lt. Kenny Park said at the time. 
 
 From the beginning, Vallejo police didn’t believe Quinn’s story, said his attorney, Kevin Clune. 
 
 “Rather than recognizing that Aaron was telling the truth and that Denise — and the public — were at extreme danger from a violent predator, the Vallejo police immediately and recklessly assumed, based on nothing but speculation, that Denise was already dead and that Aaron had killed her,” Clune wrote in the claim. 
 
 Upon Huskins’ safe return, police shifted to a theory that the couple devised an elaborate scheme of deception, the lawyers said. 
 
 Request ‘demeaned’ 
 
 Huskins’ attorney at the time requested that she be examined for evidence of a sexual assault, but police “demeaned the exam request, responded that the sexual assault exam could wait, and told her attorney that Denise should ‘keep her clothes on,’” Clune wrote. “A law enforcement official on the case told Denise’s attorney to watch ‘Gone Girl,’” in which a woman fakes her own kidnapping. 
 
 Before she was freed, Huskins’ mother confided to police that her daughter had been molested when he was 12, her attorney said. 
 
 That’s when an officer told the mother that, “in his experience, women who have already been sexually assaulted often pretend that it is happening again in order to gain attention and relive the excitement of that experience,” Clune wrote. 
 
 What’s more, in the months after the hoax accusations, but before Muller was arrested, robbers looted Quinn’s Vallejo home, where he no longer was staying, according to the claim. 
 
 Robbers stole $5,000 in tools, appliances and other hardware and electronics but Vallejo police “refused to pursue the robbery,” his attorney said. 
 
 Proof of life 
 
 Huskins was taken March 23 after Muller broke into the couple’s home, drugged Quinn and stuffed Huskins into the trunk of a car, according to an FBI affidavit. The kidnapper later demanded two payments of $8,500 from Quinn, while twice sexually assaulting Huskins over two days. She was released two days later near her parents’ home in Huntington Beach (Orange County). 
 
 Amid the abduction, Huskins’ captor sent The Chronicle a “proof of life” recording of Huskins, showing she was alive, which was forwarded to Vallejo police. 
 
 Muller was identified as the suspect in June, when a cell phone left at the scene of a bungled home robbery in Dublin was allegedly traced back to him. He has been accused of burglary, attempted robbery and assault in the Dublin case, and named in a federal complaint in Huskins’ kidnapping. 
 
 E-mails to Chronicle 
 
 Included in the evidence against Muller are two e-mails sent to The Chronicle on March 26 and 28. In them, an anonymous author claimed to be the leader of an “Ocean’s Eleven” group of gentlemen criminals who had started out by stealing cars and graduated to something much more sinister — a kidnapping “training mission.” 
 
 The e-mails are alternately boastful of the group’s exploits, apologetic for the crime and dismissive of Vallejo police. The FBI says Muller wrote the e-mails. 
 
 Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @EvanSeronffsky
– A California woman whose kidnapping and rape were dismissed by police as a hoax akin to Gone Girl has settled with the City of Vallejo and its police department for $2.5 million, her family tells KGO. In 2015, Denise Huskins and boyfriend Aaron Quinn were drugged inside their home by a masked intruder, who kidnapped the then-30-year-old woman. Huskins was released outside her family's home two days later after being sexually assaulted. At the time, their claims were dismissed by police, who accused Huskins of making up the kidnapping. They only came around after the kidnapper, Matthew Muller, a Harvard-trained attorney and former Marine, was implicated in a different crime. He claimed to be part of a gang of "gentlemen criminals." While police eventually apologized to Huskins and Quinn, a federal judge rejected the city's effort to toss the couple's lawsuit. The settlement was reached Thursday, the AP reports. An attorney for Huskins and Quinn says the couple is "grateful." "One can only hope that the message of this settlement will be that victims are to be believed and that the police will accept a woman’s highly credible report that she was kidnapped and raped," KTVU quotes James Wagstaffe as saying. As part of the settlement, the City of Vallejo admits no wrongdoing. Muller, who pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and even criticized police for not believing Huskins, is serving a 40-year prison sentence.