Lawyers tell vastly different stories in Derrick Rose rape trial

BY NANCY DILLON

Jurors heard two vastly different play-by-play descriptions Wednesday of the events at issue in the Los Angeles rape trial of Knicks guard Derrick Rose.

The jury of six women and two men sat through two hours of opening statements in which Rose was alternately described as a cold-hearted sexual deviant by his accuser’s lawyer and a “shy, awkward” target of a shakedown by his defense lawyer.

When it came to the topic of the condom Rose used in the sexual encounter at the heart of the accuser’s claim she was gang raped by the NBA star and two of his friends, jurors heard dueling motives for why he put it back in its wrapper and took it with him.

His accuser’s lawyer said Rose took it with him to cover his tracks, “like he wasn’t even there.”

Rose’s lawyer Mark Baute scoffed at that explanation.

“You’re doggone right he takes it with him,” Baute said. “If you’re an NBA player, you don’t leave your sperm around for someone to get pregnant with it. The stories around this are legion.”

The openings marked the formal start of the blockbuster trial expected to last two weeks. The accuser who filed the $21.5 million dollar action last year bowed her head and let her long dark hair shield her face through graphic descriptions of sexual relations.

“This is a simple case,” her lawyer Waukeen McCoy said. “This is about a classic gang rape.”

He said Rose led his two friends in a “train rape” of Doe on Aug. 27, 2013 at her apartment when she was too intoxicated to consent — and that Rose didn’t care about the ramifications.

“He told Knicks President Phil Jackson that he has not lost any sleep,” McCoy said, claiming that Rose would rather be “dribbling basketballs” at his pre-season game Tuesday in Houston than show up for the civil proceeding in federal court in Los Angeles.

After U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald reminded jurors that Rose missed the first two days of trial with his permission, McCoy said the central issue would be “consent,” and that Rose doesn’t even understand the concept.

McCoy played clip of Rose’s June 17, 2016 deposition, in which the former NBA MVP was asked, “Do you have an understanding of what consent means.”

“No, but can you tell me?” Rose responded in the video shown to jurors.

McCoy said his client got overly intoxicated at a gathering at Rose’s Beverly Hills mansion the night of Aug. 26, 2013 and went home in a taxi and passed out on her bed still in herdress. He said Rose and his friends Randall Hampton and Ryan Allen later arrived at the apartment, let themselves in and “took turns raping her.”

“They don’t even know who went first. Mr. Allen will tell you he went first,” McCoy said.

“Plaintiff will tell you she’s never had any interest in sleeping with three men in one day,” McCoy said, adding that she waited about two years to go to the police because she was “embarrassed” and didn’t want her parents to find out.

Baute spoke to jurors second and said his client was the real victim.

“This lawsuit is fake. The evidence will show it’s a sad effort to get a lottery hit,” he said.

He described Rose as “shy, awkward, reserved. …He talks plain talk. He does not use a lot of multi-syllabic, pedantic words.”

Baute painted Doe as a calculating schemer who reached out to Rose the morning before the alleged sexual battery and asked him to pay for a “sex belt” that she planned to buy at a store called “Girl on Girl” before she arrived at his house that night with a friend.

He said Doe texted Rose at 9:11 p.m. that night saying her friend wanted some Ecstasy, a party drug often used as a sexual stimulant.

“You got e babe she wants some we just left the sex store,” the text from Doe that was shown to jurors said.

“There is no evidence at all of any date rape drug,” Baute said in a booming voice. “Zip, zero, nada.”

Rose’s lawyer claimed that not only did Doe engage in sexual relations with Rose and his friends separately at his Beverly Hills house, she invited them back to her apartment later that night because she had to work in the morning and didn’t want a long commute.

“I left my belt and my sh—n yo bathroom and u need to come to me right now,” Doe texted Rose at 1:40 a.m., according to messages shown by Baute on an overhead screen.

Doe then “nails” her address “perfectly” in a follow-up text to Rose because “she is completely coherent” by that hour, Baute said.

He said she let the men in, walked them to her apartment and invited them into her room one by one.

“Y’all ain’t coming in her at the same time. One at a time,” Doe allegedly told the three men, according to Baute.

“She does not say stop, no or anything like that. It’s pleasant,” he claimed to the jurors.

Michael Monico, a lawyer for Rose’s two co-defendants, gave his opening statement last, saying the case “is about money. It is about manipulation.”

Shortly before the jury was seated, Monico renewed his objection to the racial makeup of the jury pool, noting that it only had one African American man whose number was too high to have a shot of making it.

“It’s the result of a random process,” the judge said. “I don’t believe there is a mechanism for me to interfere with that, and even if I could, I question the constitutionality” of using race to seat jurors, he said.

Source: MSN Sports