He Said, They Said

Over the deliberations, as it became clear that the lone holdout wouldn’t bend, the jury began lending some credibility to Annie, but only to her second alleged assault, when she was ill and said Marsalis came to her apartment to tuck her in and then attacked her. It apparently took time for the jurors to reach unanimity on the sexual assault charge. “It was a half-and-half situation, because some people felt like she just got out the hospital, she was ill, she was weak, and then some of us just thought like, hey, we never know what the situation was — she probably was coming on to him, or both the same.” The juror remained dubious of her claim, but went along with the majority, because “they were arguing over the situation, and we would have been deadlocked and everything.”

As to the jurors’ second count of sexual assault, against Sarah — who’d claimed Marsalis raped her after she lost her memory while the two were sitting on his couch talking and kissing — the juror claimed, alarmingly, that not all of them had actually signed off on it. The court staff believed the jurors had reached their verdict, and brought them back into the courtroom prematurely. “We weren’t ready to give the verdict at all, so that was rushed on us,” he told me. The juror, in fact, says he had no intention of convicting Marsalis on that charge and regretted that it had been railroaded through: “To me, that one was snuck in.”


TO EACH OF the women I spoke with, I posed the question, the one that had undone them: Why? Why had so many of them reengaged Marsalis? Why, in the face of powerful evidence, even with their wounded memories, even with his elaborate set of props and costumes, why had they ignored their guts, and chosen to believe him over themselves?

Their answers all begin at the same place, at not knowing.

In this, apparently, they are not unique. There is voluminous psychoanalytic literature that corroborates the seemingly strange behavior of sexual assault victims, who often act in counterintuitive ways, blaming themselves, showing inappropriate emotions such as laughing about an assault, even reengaging their attackers, in hopes of legitimizing or ignoring what has happened. Pennsylvania law, however, forbids prosecutors from calling experts who could attest to this, leaving it to jurors to determine how victims ought to react. It is the only state in the nation to expressly preclude such testimony.

Still, if she could do it all over again, Katie tells me, she wouldn’t have contacted Marsalis after the fact, certainly wouldn’t have involved him in her pregnancy. “But,” she says, “there was a certain part of me that felt like I needed to regain my control, which I don’t think you could understand, because you have to have everything taken away first. It’s hard to say now, but back then I felt like I could have cared less if I lived or died. I can understand wondering why from a perspective of not being in the situation. When I heard about some of the stuff the other girls said or did, I realized, nobody will understand, they don’t understand this guy, they don’t know what it’s like to have this happen to you.”