Cop repeats seduction story at rape trial

The NYPD cop charged with raping a drunk fashion executive in her apartment testified Wednesday that he was too gentlemanly to even tell his partner about what he now claims was her effort to seduce him.

"I don't kiss and tell," Officer Kenneth Moreno told prosecutor Coleen Balbert, who questioned the veracity of the seduction claim. "If I have anything with a young lady I don't say anything."

Moreno is accused of having sex with the passed-out woman, now 29, during the last of three post-midnight visits he made to her East Village apartment after helping her inside from a cab. His partner, Officer Franklin Mata, is charged with helping.

The woman, Mata and Moreno have all testified at the trial, now in its sixth week. Closing arguments are expected to begin Thursday.

Moreno says they never had sex, but in graphic testimony this week he said that while Mata was dozing on her couch the woman stripped, tried to arouse him, and pulled him into her bed to "snuggle."

Afterward, Moreno said he woke up his partner and resumed patrol, without ever mentioning the story. "I was embarrassed, and I didn't want to say anything," Moreno said.

The two cops say they kept returning to the woman's apartment to counsel her on alcohol. Moreno said he had sung a Bon Jovi song to cheer her up, and was stunned when she came on to him. Mata testified that he has no idea what happened in the bedroom a few feet away from where he was sleeping.

On cross-examination Wednesday, Moreno also acknowledged that 10 days later -- when the woman confronted him and accused him of raping her while she was unconscious -- he never mentioned her purported efforts to seduce him.

That meeting in front of his stationhouse, which she secretly recorded, lasted more than 20 minutes. Moreno, who both denied and admitted having sex at various points on the tape, said he was stunned and hesitant to bring up her behavior.

"I wasn't going to embarrass her," he said.

Balbert responded by asking whether he failed to bring it up because it was a phony story to smear the accuser that Moreno invented for trial. "It happened," Moreno responded.

But the prosecutor didn't buy it -- noting, in a series of angry exchanges, that the woman had just spent hours clutching her toilet before turning temptress.

"The same [accuser's name] who was standing in the bathroom vomiting . . . was the very same woman that was the seductress in the bedroom?" Balbert asked. "Is that what you're telling us?"