Knicks’ Derrick Rose shows up to rape trial while accuser testifies she felt drugged at his Los Angeles mansion
Nancy Dillon and Rich Schapiro, 10/7/2016
Knicks point guard Derrick Rose walked into a full-court press Thursday — arriving at his rape trial just as his accuser was testifying against him.
The Los Angeles courtroom stirred when the NBA star showed up roughly 45 minutes after the 30-year-old woman took the stand.
The woman dropped her chin and stared at her lap.
Rose, 28, took a seat beside his lawyers and picked up a pen and pad.
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“Did you feel like you’d been drugged?” her lawyer Waukeen McCoy asked moments later as she was recounting the lead-up to the encounter.
“Yes,” she said. “I never felt like that before.”
It was Rose’s first appearance at the blockbuster trial that kicked off Wednesday.
The woman filed a $21.5 million federal lawsuit in August 2015 claiming Rose and two pals had gang-raped her two years earlier.
The woman filed a $21.5 million federal lawsuit in August 2015 claiming Rose and two pals had gang-raped her two years earlier.
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In between sobs, she offered a hazy account of the trio having their way with her on Aug. 27. 2013, as she lay on her bed too drunk to understand what was happening.
The night began at Rose’s Beverly Hills mansion where his accuser showed up with a friend — and a “sex belt” — and drank herself into a black hole.
But Rose’s lawyers later pressed her, getting the woman to admit that she’d lied in a text to Rose — fabricating the story about a trip to a sex store because she was bringing the sex belt and wanted him to think it was new.
“Yes, I wasn’t going to the store. I heard of the store, but there was no store I was going to,” she testified.
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The woman broke down in tears numerous times while on the stand, Rose’s lawyers grilling her for graphic details of the alleged sexual assault.
“At any point did you say leave?” Rose’s lawyer Mark Baute asked the woman.
“I don’t recall sir,” she said.
“At any point did you say, ‘Get out”?” he asked.
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“I don’t recall,” she said through tears, breaking down crying.
Once the session ended and the jury and judge left, Rose stood and cracked a smile.
His lawyer slapped him on the back, and he loosened up and laughed while chatting with his co-defendants before they all left the room in good spirits.
“If the belt doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” defense lawyer Michael Monico was overheard joking to the group.
As the woman’s lawyer, Brandon Anand, left the courtroom, he was asked what he thought of Rose and the defense team smiling and seemingly engaging in a congratulatory huddle.
“If that’s what it is, I think it’s miscalculated,” Anand said.
Rose and the woman had dated off and on for nearly two years, but hadn’t seen each other in months.
After catching a cab home the night of the alleged assault, she vomited in her bathroom, then passed out in her bed still wearing her black dress, she said.
“I tipped over into bed,” she said. “The room was spinning.”
The woman said she recalled only “flashes” of what happened after Rose and his pals — Randall Hampton and Ryan Allen — showed up in her bedroom.
“I remember (Rose) was undressed from the bottom and he was at the edge of my bed,” she said. “He was pulling me toward him.
“I was trying to get off the bed,” she added. “I just felt like I would throw up. I just felt dizzy.”
The woman said Hampton and Allen also preyed upon her as she drifted in and out of consciousness.
“I just felt weak,” she said. “I felt sick.”
The woman recalled being confused when she awoke at 7 a.m. and realized her dress was bunched up around her neck and lubricant covered her body.
“I just was trying to figure out how I ended up like that,” she said.
She said she confided in one of her roommates and her boss at the real estate firm where she worked. But she didn’t report the alleged sex assault to police for nearly two years because she feared the repercussions.
“I was scared and I was embarrassed,” said the woman, breaking down as she spoke.
She testified a day after Rose’s lawyer said she willingly had sex with the trio at the basketball star’s home — and then welcomed them into her Los Angeles apartment for another turn each.
“There was no gang rape,” lawyer Mike Monico said. “There was no rape at all.”