Video plays large role in assault trial
MADISON - Surveillance video took center stage Tuesday during the first day of the sexual assault trial of former University of Wisconsin Badgers football player Quintez Cephus.
Prosecutors in their opening statements presented the incident as an unwanted sexual encounter that caused a woman “excruciating pain.” But lawyers for Cephus called the incident a “consensual threesome” orchestrated by one of the women.
Stephen Meyer, one of Cephus’ lawyers, called the case “a one-thousandpiece puzzle.”
Cephus’ lawyers indicated text messages planning the get-together — as well as security footage from bars, Cephus’ apartment building and the women’s dorms — show the women were willing and coherent enough to know what was going on.
“It’s not a crime to have sex with someone who has been drinking,” Meyer said. “It is, however, wrong to falsely accuse someone.”
Cephus, 21, of Macon, Georgia, is charged with one count of second-degree sexual assault of an intoxicated victim and one count of third-degree sexual assault. He was expelled from the university last semester and dismissed from the football team last summer.
One of the women testified she did not remember leaving the Double U bar with friends in April 2018 and was “very drunk.”
She said the next thing she remembered after taking her shoes off in Cephus’ apartment was waking up to Cephus assaulting her and her friend on his bed.
“I remember I was very confused as to how we became naked, how we got into the room,” the woman said. “Above anything, I was confused.”
Later in the night, the woman said she tried to get her friend out of Cephus’ room. She said Cephus told her to leave, asking for 20 more minutes. When the woman asked why he needed more time, her friend responded “sex,” according to a transcript of what she told detectives the next day.
In court Tuesday, the woman claimed her friend said “sex” not in response to her question but that “she was telling me he was having sex with her beneath the covers.”
The woman later returned to her dorm room in Ogg Hall. According to her testimony, a man on her floor saw her crying and asked what was wrong. After he repeatedly asked her what happened, she told him, and he called police.
“I wasn’t really planning on reporting it,” she said Tuesday. “I was definitely not planning on getting the police involved.”
University police escorted her to Meriter Hospital, where she had a rape kit done. There, she texted and called her friend, encouraging her to go to the hospital as well.
Text messages exhibited in court show the woman’s friend did not remember having sex. The woman in the messages told her friend she was raped.
“Did we have sex with him?” the friend wrote in a text message the next day.
University of Wisconsin Police Officer Jake Lepper, who responded to the 911 call about 3 a.m., testified that the woman was “crying and seemed distraught.”
Lepper noted she did not have any visible signs of medical issues and did not write anything in his report about intoxication.
William Needelman of the Madison Police Department, who met the woman at Meriter Hospital about two hours later, described a different scene. He testified she “appeared to be extremely intoxicated” and said her ability to function was “extremely diminished due to alcohol.”
Cephus’ lawyers pointed to inconsistencies in the two reports. They argued that the woman either drank more alcohol between the two meetings with police or she was reluctant to talk to police, suggesting she was just acting drunk.
Security footage presented at the trial showed the woman walking back to her room in Ogg Hall at 2:27 a.m., before she spoke to either officer. Cephus’ attorneys argued the footage — which shows the woman on her phone and walking straight — was evidence the woman was not too drunk to function.
Prosecutors said there were other factors besides walking that indicated intoxication. Needelman noted he smelled alcohol on the woman while talking to her at the hospital.
The woman cried once during her four hours of testimony. She lost her assertive composure when texts she sent to her friend apologizing for the alleged assault were displayed.
“I carry a lot of guilt for being the one that introduced them,” she testified.
The trial will continue Wednesday.