He Said, They Said

LIKE THE REST of them — like the other attractive, successful, well-educated young women who authorities believe were drugged and raped by Jeffrey J. Marsalis — Rachael says her memory began fracturing at the bar, several hours into the night. Until then, on a weeknight in late March 2004, the conversation had flowed well as she and Marsalis hopped from one Center City Irish pub to another, drinking beer and wine, though Rachael, herself a natural talker, was surprised to find a date more voluble than she. He’d spoken so far of growing up outside Seattle, and of his mother, an educator whom he said President George H.W. Bush had given a position with the U.S. Department of Education. And though it wasn’t like her, Rachael had even found herself fighting back tears as he relived a particularly wrenching experience from the ER at Hahnemann Hospital, when he’d been forced to inform an elderly woman choppered in from a horrific car crash and fighting to live that, in fact, she would not. Perhaps, Rachael had told herself, all this would come with the territory: Trauma surgeons — let alone CIA agents and astronauts — are presupposed to be, and even forgiven for being, self-interested.

Earlier, around sunset, they’d hugged upon greeting each other for the first time in three-dimension, at Love Park, their predetermined meeting place. Six-foot-two, dark-haired and handsome, wearing a white button-down and khakis, he was as attractive as she’d found him in the dozen-plus photos on his Match.com profile, photos that would seem to corroborate the remarkable professional arc he’d claim to her and the others, from suit and tie to scrubs and white coat to orange astronaut jumpsuit and helmet; in reality, he was a nursing-school dropout. He’d contacted her on Match.com the previous weekend; their first phone conversation, which lasted a couple hours, quickly turned intensely sexual, something she did not protest.

Originally from upstate New York, Rachael, then 23, had recently moved here after graduating from Penn State with a degree in psychology, to earn her master’s in counseling from Villanova. Attractive and petite, with thick sandy hair and green eyes, she’d joined the popular dating website a few months earlier because she felt isolated. She was “flattered,” she says, when she first received the cyber “wink” from then-30-year-old DrJeff (his name on his profile). Now, three glasses of wine later, she sat slumped against the wall on the floor of a handicapped stall in the ladies’ room at the pub Fadó, on Locust Street.

“It was like I was there but I wasn’t,” as if she was “floating, my ears felt like they were full of cotton.” Like several other women I would speak with, she describes herself, at that moment, as devoid of thought: “It was just almost like I was dreaming but I was awake.” Then Marsalis appeared, peering over the stall’s door. He ordered her to stand up, to get herself together. “We have to leave,” she says he told her angrily. “Try to walk. And act like you’re sober.” She asked for her purse: “All I kept thinking about was my purse.” They headed out into the night. Her purse in hand, her head slumped, she fixated on the seams in the pavement, which blurred before disappearing completely.