It just goes on for a while. Describes the 21 minute video of the incident shown to the jury. Yeah, they filmed it. Smart.At the May 3 start of the Orange County trial of three teenage boys accused of gang-raping an unconscious minor, a defense attorney made a startling assertion: the alleged victim enticed the "sweet," "caring," "kind" defendants into a sexual frenzy and then, while faking unconsciousness, sexually assaulted them. At one point, the attorney, an incredulous Joseph G. Cavallo, blurted out to the jury, "Why isn’t she being charged with this crime?"
"She knew how to use her body. She knew how to use sex," said Cavallo, one of at least nine defense lawyers (not including the publicist, a jury consultant and an army of private investigators) representing Gregory Scott Haidl, 18; Kyle Joseph Nachreiner, 19; and Keith James Spann, 19. They’ve pleaded not guilty to 24 felony counts for the July 2002 Newport Beach incident. Referring to a video they made of the incident, Cavallo said, "The boys had every reason to believe she consented: she orchestrated it."
It was just one of the defense’s many remarkable claims after apparently horrified jurors inspected prosecution-supplied photographs of the late night gang bang. The images (which I’ll describe momentarily) are so disturbing that the defense team wasted no time calling the filmed episode repugnant, but blamed it solely on the 16-year-old girl known in court only as Jane Doe.
"The things she wanted done were done," said John Barnett, counsel for Nachreiner. "It’s disgusting and it’s awful. Who would consent to this? Jane Doe. Nobody is going to argue this isn’t morally outrageous. It is, but it was a choice. . . . This is exactly what she wanted. They believed her when she says she wanted to be a porn star."
SNIP
In just his opening statement, a pacing, finger-pointing Cavallo told the jury that the girl—next to the tape itself, the prosecution’s star witness--is "a nut," "a pathological liar," "a cheater," an "out-of-control girl," "the aggressor," a wanna-be "porn star," "a troubled young lady," "a tease--that’s what she is!" "a mess," a "master manipulator," a "little opportunist," "a compulsive liar," "a cheat--that’s what she is" and a "callous" drug addict and alcoholic who trimmed her pubic hair, bragged about liking group sex and once drank a beer in a car.
"Why was her vagina and anus completely shaved?" Cavallo asked jurors. "How many teenagers have a shaved vagina and anus? I don’t know, but I can think of a reason. Sex! She’s a sexual person!"
During preliminary hearings, Cavallo called Doe a "slut"; on this day, he stayed away from the word. However, he told the jury several times that everyone, including the girl’s parents, "knows what she is." Talk outside the courtroom was less coy. In the hallway just outside, a defense consultant openly and repeatedly called Jane Doe "a fucking whore."
On the second day of the trial, two boys connected to Nachreiner were reprimanded for mad-dogging Lindsay Picou, a key prosecution witness, before she could testify.
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