| The gloves are off in the Kobe Bryant rape case.
The preliminary hearing on Thursday had been expected to last no more than five hours and many legal experts had predicted the Los Angeles Lakers basketball player would waive it altogether.
Instead, the defense launched an all-out effort to cast the 19-year-old accuser in the worst light possible.
The young woman who said Bryant raped her on June 30 at a posh Colorado resort where she worked as a concierge did not have to testify at Thursday's hearing.
But Bryant's attorney Pamela Mackey cross-examined prosecution witness detective Doug Winters aggressively, suggesting that injuries to the accuser may have been the result of her having "sex with three men in three days."
"It's serious mud. But the question is will it stick?" asked former chief deputy district attorney for Denver, Craig Silverman.
Eagle County Judge Frederick Gannett ordered all the attorneys to come to his chambers after the "sex with three men" comment.
After 45 minutes the parties re-entered the courtroom and the judge said the preliminary hearing -- held to determine if the defendant should be put on trial -- would continue on Wednesday next week.
The 25-year-old basketball star has maintained his innocence, saying he had sex with the woman in a consensual encounter.
Winters told the preliminary hearing that the woman gave Bryant a tour of the resort, flirted with him and entered his hotel room.
After several minutes of kissing, he started groping her breast and she became uncomfortable, Winters said.
But when she tried to leave the room he blocked her way, grabbed her neck with both hands, pushed her over the back of a chair and raped her, the detective said, quoting the woman's account. Winters also said blood was found on the woman's underwear.
Norm Early, a former Denver district attorney, said outside the courtroom that the woman's account would cast doubt on Bryant's consensual sex defense.
"You have two people flirting with each other. You'd expect their first sexual contact wouldn't be over the back of a chair. That doesn't ring true to me," Early said.
He said he was shocked by Mackey's "sex with three men" question. "It's throwing it out just to smear the woman," Early said.
Mackey had already appeared to have broken the judge's decorum order by using the accuser's name six times in the courtroom while questioning Winters.
She apologized each time and once said: "I'll write myself a note," prompting the judge to respond: "Or I can go get the muzzle."
Source: Reuters | |
