He Said, They Said

During the same time period in which Marsalis is alleged to have assaulted the women he’d met on Match.com, he was dating many more he met online, plus maintaining a three-year relationship, with a brief engagement, with Jessika Rovell, a former Miss Laurel Valley who competed in the Miss New Jersey Pageant and later became a Philadelphia litigator and an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves.

It was the image of Marsalis the doctor that Maddie, a 23-year-old pharmacologist from suburban Philadelphia with Mediterranean features, saw on Match.com one day in 2005, an image that was central to his wild success in meeting women, and to some extent in explaining away his obvious eccentricities. Maddie found photos of Marsalis in full scrubs and mask in the midst of surgery (they weren’t of him) as well as another, grainier image of him in an astronaut group picture (once again not of him, though he regularly told his girlfriends he was away at astronaut training in Houston). Though many of the women described his personality, when they met him, as “intense,” all believed his initial claims about himself. Of his personality, one accuser told me: “You want — you expect — your trauma surgeon to be arrogant.”

Maddie, a virgin who’d emigrated to the U.S. from Greece with her parents several years earlier, and still lived with them outside the city, had gone on two dates with Marsalis; both were unremarkable and did not include sex, she says. Maddie claims, however, that on their third date, in 2005, after having champagne at his apartment and drinks at two downtown bars, she abruptly blacked out. She says she awoke to him raping her in his bed. Several weeks later, she went to police. Thus began an extraordinary turn of events.

Detectives investigating her claim presented a search warrant for Marsalis’s apartment to the property manager at the Left Bank lofts, along the Schuylkill River, where he’d recently moved. As the property manager — a young, attractive woman named Amy — read the warrant, her face suddenly changed.

Amy would become the second of three accusers in the Commonwealth’s first case against Marsalis. She claimed she’d also met him on Match.com, and that after their first date she, too, woke up groggy the next morning in his bed. The realization that she had been assaulted, she told police, did not come for some time, and she’d embarked on a relationship with Marsalis. She’d recently helped him secure his new apartment in the Left Bank building — on the same floor as the apartment where she lived with her young child.