Woman charged with making false rape accusation
WOONSOCKET – An 18year-old Bellingham woman was charged with filing a false report of a crime after she allegedly made up a story about having been drugged and raped by two armed men in a city apartment.
Brittany Collins of 36 Depot Court was arrested Tuesday after she admitted fabricating the story because she thought her boyfriend would feel sorry for her if he thought she’d been attacked.
“She made it all up to make her boyfriend feel bad for her and forgive what they had been arguing about the day before,” Patrol Officer Normand G. Guilbert said in a report.
Since Guilbert was supposed to getting prisoners ready for transport to when he got bogged down checking out Collins’ phony story, the policeman booked her on an additional charge of obstructing an officer in
execution of duty.
Collins showed up at the police station a few minutes after 6 Tuesday morning to report the sex assault, which she claimed happened the night before. She told police she was fuzzy on the whereabouts of the crime because she was unfamiliar with the city, but she described going to an apartment “somewhere in Woonsocket” with two men she didn’t know in order to get a drink of water.
Later, two more men arrived and they gave her “something strange rolled in white paper” to smoke that made her drowsy. Then the last two men who arrived — “one with curly hair and one with tattoos all over his face” as she described them — tied her to a bed, ripped her clothes off and forced themselves on her sexually. She also claimed the perpetrators were carrying firearms.
Guilbert became skeptical of the story because every time he tried to get Collins to clarify some detail or other, it changed a little.
“All while Britanny was telling me the story, she avoided eye contact with me, and kept stalling in between parts of her story,” the officer explained. “When I told her to retell different parts, she made slight changes each time she told me.”
Eventually, he asked her if she was lying and, with tears welling up in her eyes, she admitted that she was — and why.
Both charges lodged against Collins are misdemeanors.
She pleaded not guilty during an arraignment in District Court Wednesday and was released on personal recognizance pending a pre-trial conference on July 17, according to the judiciary’s web site.