Former Wisconsin football player found not guilty of rape

MADISON, Wis. — A jury deliberated for just 30 minutes on Friday before it acquitted former University of Wisconsin wide receiver Quintez Cephus on charges alleging that he sexually assaulted two female students.

Cephus, 21, was suspended from the football team last August and was expelled from the university earlier this year for violating its non-academic misconduct code. It wasn’t immediately clear how the verdict would affect his status with the school and team.

He was charged with second- and third-degree sexual assault for the alleged attack on the women, who were 18 years old when they say Cephus sexually assaulted them at his apartment last year. They testified earlier this week that they were too drunk to consent to sex.

Shortly before the case went to the jury, Cephus testified in his own defense. He said that when the women arrived at his apartment, one immediately went into his bedroom, summoned him in and removed her clothes, the Wisconsin State Journal reported. He said the other followed behind.

Cephus said he summoned his roommate and teammate, Danny Davis, into his bedroom to take a look because having sex with two women “was something I’d never done before.”

He said he asked Davis to take a photo of the women, one of whom was on his bed and the other on his floor, but that angered the woman on the floor, who demanded that the photo be deleted.

“It was really dumb,” Cephus said of taking the photo, and he blamed the anger that the picture caused for his legal troubles.

Cephus testified that he met the women the day they came to his place. He met one while bowling with Davis and another teammate, A.J. Taylor, who was in an on-and-off relationship with that woman. He said that at a bar that night, that woman introduced him to her friend, “and for the rest of the 20 to 30 minutes (at the bar) she was attached to me.” He said he didn’t see the two women drink much.

When he declined a drink because he was driving, Cephus said, one of the women told him she wanted to go to his apartment for a “sleepover.”