A jury Wednesday found that NBA star Derrick Rose and his two friends did NOT sexually assault the woman who accused them of doing so.
BREAKING: Los Angeles jury clears NBA's Derrick Rose, 2 friends in lawsuit claiming gang rape of unconscious ex-girlfriend.
— The Associated Press (@AP) October 19, 2016
via L.A. Times:
Rose, 28, Randall Hampton, and Ryan Allen had been accused of breaking into the woman’s Los Angeles apartment and having sex with her when she was incapacitated from a night of drinking and, she claimed, being drugged by the men.
After roughly three hours of deliberations, the panel of six women and two men rejected those claims. They found instead that the evidence showed the woman, who had been in a relationship with Rose, consented to the late night encounter in 2013.
The eight-person jury alerted U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald at about 12:45 p.m. Wednesday that it had reached unanimous decisions on an array of allegations that a former girlfriend of the New York Knicks player had leveled against the men.
No criminal charges have been filed in the case. The woman reported the incident to Los Angeles police two years after the alleged rape and LAPD officials have said they are continuing to investigate it.
The two-week trial in a downtown courtroom was marked by often lurid and sharply conflicting testimony from the woman and the defendants about what occurred in the early morning hours of Aug. 27, 2013.
Rose and the woman had been in an open relationship for two years, but broke it off a few months before the alleged rape. Both sides agreed that on the evening of the incident, Rose invited the woman and a friend over to the Beverly Hills house he was renting, where they drank with the three men.
What is at issue is whether the woman was intoxicated and whether she had invited the men to come to the apartment for sex.
At trial the woman testified she had been drinking before arriving at the house and quickly became intoxicated. She told the jury of six women and two men of drifting in and out of consciousness and suspecting the men had slipped a drug into one of the shots of tequila she drank at the house.
The woman testified she returned home in a taxi and awoke hours later to find the three men in her apartment. Saying she could remember only “flashes” of the night, she described being raped by the men.
The men adamantly disputed that account, saying the woman had aggressively sought out sex with the men at Rose’s house and orchestrated the plan to come to her apartment. Once there, they testified, the woman opened the front door to her apartment building to let the men in and gave no sign of being intoxicated when she took each of them into her bedroom in turn.
Thoughts?
