A jury finds
former Windermere Realtor Darryl Patterson guilty of sexual battery and attempted sexual battery with physical incapacitation in rape video case.
Thirteen times, a 40-year-old woman told her friend she didn’t want to have sex with him. “Not yet, Darryl.” “Darryl, wait until tomorrow.” “No. Don’t.” “No.” Darryl Patterson, a former Windermere Realtor, was found guilty by a jury Tuesday of sexual battery and attempted sexual battery with physical incapacitation. He faces up to 30 years in prison on the sexual battery charge and up to 15 years for the attempted sexual battery conviction. His sentencing is scheduled for May 4.
Earlier in the trial, the jury of three women and three men watched a five-minute video Patterson recorded in 2012 of himself with the woman. The Orlando Sentinel does not typically name victims of sexual assault. The woman testified against Patterson on Monday and said she did not remember having sex with him the night of her 40th birthday. She didn’t know it had happened until she recognized herself in a Windermere police bulletin online seeking the woman in the video.
She said her last memory of that night was a tingling feeling all over her body at a bar with Patterson. She told him she felt she’d been drugged. She woke the next morning in his bed.
Patterson’s lawyer, Richard Parker, argued there was too much unknown about the night for jurors to convict. The woman couldn’t say if she’d agreed to have sex with Patterson earlier in the night, Parker noted.
But prosecutor Deborah Barra said the key evidence is what the woman said in the video — “no.”
“She says ‘no’ four different ways. One hundred percent, this is not consensual,” Barra said.
About six years ago, Patterson’s ex-girlfriend moved out of his home and found a case of videos appearing to show him raping unconscious women, police said. She gave the video to authorities, but they were mishandled, Det. John Allen said, and languished in a storage shed until December 2014, when Patterson came in to report he’d been a victim of fraud.
Police found about 20 women on videos. They haven’t yet identified all the women. For some victims, Patterson cannot be tried because the legal statute of limitations ran out.
With his conviction, Patterson’s DNA will be entered into a law enforcement database. Police suspect he may have more victims than are shown in the videos and they are still trying to identify some of the recorded women. “We’re not done with the investigation,” Allen said.
The woman Patterson was convicted of attacking and another accuser testified they had no recollection of the incidents.
They learned of the incidents after seeing photos of themselves on Windermere police bulletins online. Both had considered Patterson a friend.
“I trusted him with my life,” said the woman in the case that ended in his conviction Tuesday.