Alleged NYC rape victim steady on stand

The woman who has accused two NYPD officers of raping her in 2008 appeared to hold up well on cross-examination Friday, deflecting defense efforts to suggest that she was too drunk to be sure of what happened.

"I never said I 'believed' I was raped," the 29-year-old Gap fabric designer shot back at defense lawyer Joseph Tacopina in one exchange at State Supreme Court in Manhattan. "I knew I was raped. I was in shock because it was the cops."

Suspended officers Kenneth Moreno, Tacopina's client, and Franklin Mata are charged with rape and falsifying reports for allegedly having sex with the semiconscious, intoxicated woman after helping her up to her East Village apartment. Surveillance videos show the two officers returning to the apartment three times in the early hours of Dec. 7, 2008, when they told dispatchers they were elsewhere. Defense lawyers say they kept returning to counsel the woman and check on her.

Tacopina tried to use prior statements from the woman and her friends to show that she was confused about what happened because of alcohol-induced blackouts. But he was reined in by objections from prosecutors and rulings by the judge.

The accuser, after breaking down several times during testimony Thursday, cried only once Friday -- when the defense lawyer tried to suggest that she had falsely claimed the forced sex was rough by reading an email telling a friend she was "OK."

"When something like this happens, the shock is so surreal that you tell people you're OK even though you're not, because you just want to get through it," she answered. "I didn't want her to worry about me."

She admitted under cross-examination that she had no memory of some events from the night in question, such as conversations with a cabdriver who drove her home from a Brooklyn bar, and had misremembered other facts -- such as giving investigators the wrong age and race of the cabdriver.

Those admissions could allow the defense to argue that she forgot about the alcohol counseling that Moreno said he gave her, and that she invented a memory of the sex. "Memory is without question at the heart of this case," Tacopina told reporters later. "Things remembered, things not remembered, and recollections that become fact that are not true."
The trial resumes Monday.