He Said, They Said

Another accuser told the jury she spent a weekend with Marsalis, after he allegedly brought her back to his apartment incapacitated, then pulled out her tampon, threw it across the room, and anally and vaginally raped her; in the morning she awoke ashamed at the blood in the bed, and she later FedExed him a new pair of sheets. Another claimed that when she awoke to Marsalis raping her, she was on top of him. Still another went to lunch with him the next day and claimed her memory from their date was so sparse that she hadn’t realized she’d been raped until the authorities contacted her later.

And there was Katie, a petite 26-year-old pharmaceutical rep who’d joined Match.com reluctantly, at the insistence of her sister, who’d met her future husband on the site. Katie and Marsalis met at a wine bar in Bethlehem, where she lived; she says she had two glasses of wine over the course of the evening in February 2004. Though she says she realized early on she wasn’t interested in him, she agreed when he insisted that he come over to her house for one more glass of wine before his long drive back to the city. He followed her in his aqua Ford Escort to her condo, where she retreated to the bathroom while he opened the bottle. They sat together on the couch. She had a few sips of wine. The next thing she remembers is being in her bed, with him on top of her.

“I was just really out of it. Nothing like that had ever happened to me, ever,” she says. “I didn’t know what to think.” Over the next day, she became certain she’d been raped. She considered calling the police, but “I was scared. I was in Bethlehem, I didn’t have any family there. I was very naive. I was really vulnerable.” She confided in two friends, she said, who urged her to go to the police. But by then, she says, she just didn’t know what to do.

Twelve days after her date with Marsalis, Katie went to the hospital for a scheduled orthopedic surgery. The anesthesiologist informed her the surgery couldn’t go on: She was pregnant. She broke down. “I was so humiliated,” she says. “I just said, ‘I’m not pregnant, I’m not pregnant.’” The surgeon ultimately did operate.

Katie called Marsalis. “I’m pregnant,” she says she told him. “You raped me.” She says she told him she was going to the police, and that he told her he wouldn’t pay child support. He told her that as a physician, he knew she was clinically insane. She hung up on him.

“And I was lying there, with this cast on my foot, and I couldn’t go outside, it was icy out, and I was on crutches, lying there thinking about what’s going on inside of me, and how badly I didn’t want that. But I was raised Catholic, my dad was adopted, he was given up by a woman who did not want an abortion. I didn’t want my family or anyone to know.”