Actor Danny Masterson drugged and raped women, prosecutor says

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Actor Danny Masterson drugged and then raped three women in his Hollywood-area home between 2001 and 2003, a prosecutor told jurors Monday in his opening statement at the star’s retrial. “That ’70s Show”.

Assistant District Attorney Reinhold Mueller said Masterson put substances in drinks he gave to a longtime girlfriend and two women he knew through circles of friends around the Church of Scientology, that Masterson is all charged with rape.

“The evidence will show they were drugged,” Mueller told the jury. The defense denies the existence of such evidence.

A direct discussion about drugs was missing in the first trial – which ended in a mistrial when a jury deadlocked on all three counts – Mueller instead having to involve him through testimony from the women, who said they were dizzy, disoriented and sometimes unconscious on the nights they described the actor raping them.

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo allowed the direct assertion at the second trial.

Masterson’s attorney, Philip Cohen, said in the defense’s opening statement that those fuzzy stories and claims are all the prosecution has, and he told jurors, “there is no charge drugs in this case”.

Lawyers for both sides have acknowledged there is no forensic evidence of any substances Masterson may have given the women, as the police investigation that led to the two trials did not begin until some 15 years after the events.

But Mueller said he would call an analyst from the police toxicology unit, “who will tell you how some of the more common drug-facilitated sexual assaults, how some of the more common date rape drugs work, at what speed they are metabolized, what the side effects look like.

Cohen replied that “a toxicologist can give his opinion on whatever he wants, but there is no toxicology report, there is no urine, no blood test, no DNA”.

Cohen was not allowed to refer to testimony from the first trial — something Olmedo repeatedly chastised him — but he said he expected the testimony this time to show that the one of the women Masterson is accused of raping watched him make the alleged drug addict drink. he gave him.

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Cohen told jurors that another of the women, a young actress who spent an evening alone with Masterson at his home in 2003, made no mention of drugs at the time.

“She talked to her mom about how her date with Masterson went, she talked to her friends, she never said to a single person, ‘I was drugged.’ Never,” Cohen said.

She would only mention that she had been drugged years later after the investigation began, Cohen said.

This and many other similarities between the women’s stories stem from them talking to each other and “cross-checking” the details of their stories, which they did several times even after the detective in the case warned them. that such communication could taint the case against Masterson, Cohen said.

The drug allegations echoed the trial of Bill Cosby, where women testified to similar experiences. Cosby’s conviction after two trials was finally thrown out by Pennsylvania’s highest court.

The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have been sexually assaulted.

Masterson, 47, could face up to 45 years in prison if convicted.

Mueller also told jurors that the women did not immediately turn themselves in to authorities because Church of Scientology officials told them not to, and they were told what happened to them didn’t happen. was not rape.

Masterson is a prominent member of the church. All three women are former members.

The church said in a statement after the women’s testimony at the first trial that it “has no policy prohibiting or discouraging members from reporting the criminal conduct of Scientologists, or anyone else, to law enforcement.” “.

In another difference from the first trial, Olmedo allows expert witnesses to testify about these policies.

Cohen said prosecution expert Claire Headley, a former member of the church’s leadership group, is someone who works “to rid the world of Scientology, rid people of Scientology,” and told the jurors that they were going to “hear huge bias” in his testimony. . The expert on the defense witness list is her father-in-law, a current top Scientologist.

Actress Leah Remini, a former Scientologist who has become the church’s most prominent critic on social media and through a TV series she hosted featuring dissident former members, sat in the front row of the courtroom in support of Masterson’s accusers.

Masterson, who has been out on bail since his 2020 arrest, sat at the defense table, with a large coterie of supporters behind him, many if not all church members, who also attended his first trial. They included his wife, model and actor Bijou Phillips; his sister-in-law, “One Day at a Time” actor Mackenzie Phillips; and his brother, “Malcolm in the Middle” actor Christopher Masterson.

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Follow AP Entertainment writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton

Not all news on the site expresses the point of view of the site, but we transmit this news automatically and translate it through programmatic technology on the site and not from a human editor.

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