He Said, They Said

An investigator from the case puts the number of women identified by authorities as viable victims at 30. If true, this would make Marsalis not only the most prolific serial rapist in Pennsylvania history, but among the worst in the annals of American crime. Still, it’s a figure hundreds lower than the number he met on Match.com while living in Philadelphia: Authorities say a doorman at the Metropolitan who worked the weekend overnight shift told them he’d seen Marsalis return home with around 100 different women over the few years he lived there; a former next-door neighbor told me Marsalis said he had sex with well over a hundred women annually; and the bartender at Tir Na Nog told investigators Marsalis often came in with several different women over the course of a weekend. The law enforcement source believes the actual number of victims is “way, way higher” than 30, potentially country-wide, as Marsalis, the son of wealthy, divorced parents from the West Coast, hopscotched from one college to another during a slacker migration eastward, ultimately landing at Drexel University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree for paramedics before immediately reenrolling, briefly, in the nursing school. “I’m sure this guy has done this wherever he’s been,” the source says.

Twice the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has put Marsalis on trial, alleging the rape of a total of 10 women, all of them college-educated, sophisticated, successful, good-looking and white. Twice a Philadelphia jury has heard the same scenario repeated — the women blacked out at some point during their dates, and either woke up incapacitated to Marsalis assaulting them or in the morning, naked — and decided that in every case, the women hadn’t been raped. For all but two of the women, the jurors believed that in fact no assault whatsoever took place: in effect, that the eight others fabricated their stories, and that Marsalis — who, his own defense team conceded, concocted fantastic lies and adopted fake personas — was more believable. If the authorities are correct, if Marsalis is so depraved, how could two juries — 24 people — in two separate trials have believed him over so many accusers?


EVEN AFTER HE’D officially dropped out of Drexel’s nursing program, Jeffrey Marsalis routinely left his apartment at all hours of the day and night dressed in scrubs and a white coat. At Drexel’s Hahnemann Hospital, he breezed past security and roamed the halls freely, going in and out of labs and supply closets (using the access codes he’d been granted as a nursing student), meeting dates in the hospital’s cafeteria, taking them on private tours of the fully staffed ER as well as the morgue, where he reportedly invited some to have sex among the cadavers.