By Laura Italiano
The New York Post
NEW YORK — A fashion executive who accuses two officers of rape looks anything but falling-down drunk as she walks steadily and unassisted up to her East Village door in never-seen-before surveillance tape showed yesterday at the sensational “Rape Cops” trial.
The bulk of the video is hugely incriminating, showing accused rapist Officer Kenneth Moreno and accused lookout Officer Franklin Mata making three return trips to the drunken woman’s apartment over the course of five hours.
But defense lawyers are hanging their hopes for acquittal on a three- or four-second snippet at the start of the December 2008 tape - footage showing the 28-year-old woman animated, walking steadily and apparently talking with Mata as she extends her hand in a conversational gesture.
She is then seen pushing open her own front door.
The cops - who deny there was any intercourse that night - are charged with conspiring to rape the woman under a criminal statute that requires proof she was too drunk and helpless to consent.
But they hope to clinch the case on a crucial technicality: that there can be no conviction if there was no intoxication.
In the surveillance tape, Mata, a three-year rookie, gives no more aid to the woman than to place his hand on her back as she approaches her door. Moreno follows them inside at several feet’s distance.
Still, prosecutors Coleen Balbert and Randolph Clarke have promised jurors a mountain of evidence proving the woman was too drunk to consent, including test results indicating her blood-alcohol content hovered around .20 during those five hours - more than twice the legal driving limit.
So far in the three-day-old trial, her cabdriver that night and three of her friends have told jurors that she was a boozy wreck after a night of champagne chased with five big cups of Red Bull and Jack Daniels
The cabby’s call to 911 - in which he reported that the woman was unable to exit his cab unassisted - led to the two cops being dispatched to her door.
Andom Mangum, a visitor to the woman’s building that night, described how he happened to be standing on a narrow landing as the fateful trio brushed past him on their way to her apartment.
“She seemed intoxicated,” he said. “By her appearance,” he told Balbert when asked how he could tell she was intoxicated. “The way she’s walking. The way her heels sounded. Her heels were sliding on the floor, on the marble. Her hair was in her face.”
Mangum conceded under questioning by Moreno’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, that the woman had walked up the stairs on her own, unassisted by her two uniformed escorts.
Also yesterday, the woman’s fashion-biz boss, Joanna Elizabeth Kreling, bolstered the prosecution case by telling jurors that the woman was “devastated” and “just demoralized” after the incident.
“She seemed completely broken down and crying and emotional,” Kreling said of the woman, who awoke naked on her bed the next morning.
“She said that she had been raped and that it was a cop.”
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