HEFNER PLEADS NOT GUILTY
Lawyer: Accusers ‘can’t remain anonymous’
The lawyer defending former Senate President Stanley C. Rosenberg’s estranged husband against a series of sexual abuse charges warned yesterday his four male accusers “can’t remain anonymous” if they push the case to trial next year.
“Mr. Hefner Rosenberg has pled not guilty to the charges and looks forward to defending himself in a court of law where accusers cannot remain anonymous and must face cross-examination,” attorney Tracy Miner said in a statement after she hustled Bryon Hefner, 30, past a throng of media covering his arraignment in Suffolk Superior Court.
“Unfortunately,” Miner’s statement continued, “he has already been pilloried in the press for political purposes, having never had a trial.”
Assistant Clerk-Magistrate Lisa Medeiros permitted Hefner to remain free on personal recognizance, but ordered him to stay away from the State House and any witnesses who may be called to testify against him, save for two that Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Snook did not identify in open court.
Rosenberg, 68, did not attend the hearing for the spouse he split from earlier this year when the scandal cost the Amherst Democrat his coveted leadership post. The legislator’s spokeswoman declined comment.
A grand jury indicted Hefner last month on five counts of indecent assault and battery, one count of open and gross lewdness and lascivious behavior and four counts of dissemination of images of a nude or partially nude person.
The latter charges involved photographs of a man’s genitals and buttocks that four witnesses allege Hefner showed them on his cellphone “in a casual and boastful manner,” and whose identity three of them told investigators Hefner revealed. The fourth recognized the man from the photos, Snook said.
The man in the photos said he and Hefner were attending a conference in 2013. After a night of drinking with Hefner, Snook said the man went to a hotel suite with Hefner, but “woke up the next morning in his own bed naked, with no memory of how he got there.”
In August 2016, two weeks before Hefner married Rosenberg, another accuser, while attending a birthday party with his wife, said Hefner told him he was “hot” and later “forcibly kissed him on the lips against his will,” Snook said.
She said Hefner’s alleged crimes span several years and “targeted both young men and older men ... in both public and private settings.”
Two other accusers claim to have been repeatedly groped by Hefner — one saying that on April 19, 2016, while he, Hefner and two others traveled “from one political event to another event in Boston,” Hefner grabbed his genitals in the back seat of a vehicle. Snook said the man warned Hefner to “screw off,” but that Hefner groped him again at a table that same night.
“All of these acts were done without this person’s consent,” Snook noted.
A fourth man told police he and Hefner became “close friends” in the summer of 2014, but that fall Hefner began molesting him. Still, he invited Hefner to his Boston apartment in June 2016. While trying to nap, he claimed Hefner attempted several times to climb into bed with him and eventually dropped his pants and exposed himself.
Snook said the accuser “did not invite this behavior and was shocked and alarmed by it.”