Woman Claims NYC Police Officers Raped Her
During a day of sometimes emotional and explicit testimony, the 29-year-old woman said she acutely remembers being raped and some other moments in her December 2008 encounter with Officers Franklin Mata and Kenneth Moreno.
On the recording, Moreno repeatedly denies violating her. But as she presses him about whether he used a condom, he twice says he did, though he later insists again that they didn't have sex.
"I was just trying to sincerely help you that day, OK? OK. Anything else that happened, anything that you remembered happened, it wasn't done intentionally. It wasn't done to hurt you," he says at another point.
His lawyer has said Moreno's seemingly incriminating statements were just attempts to pacify the woman, who suggests in the recorded conversation that she might "make a scene" in the police station.
But to her, "in that moment, when he finally admitted it to me, that was everything for me because I knew what he had done to me," she told jurors.
"I couldn't believe that two officers who had been called to help me had, instead, raped me and left me, facedown in a pool of vomit, on my bed to die."
Mata and Moreno have been suspended until a Police Department review after their trial. If convicted of rape, the officers could face up to 25 years in prison.
