Videos bring appeals fight in Kraft case

Lawyers clashed Tuesday over whether police went too far when they recorded activities at a Palm Beach

County massage parlor in a sting that ensnared

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft last year.

Arguing in front of a three-judge panel of the Fourth District Court of Appeal, prosecutors defended the legal process that left police and prosecutors with hours of video footage, some allegedly showing Kraft and two dozen other men paying for and receiving sexual favors at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter in January 2019.

The warrant for the video was obtained legally, Deputy Solicitor General Jeffrey DeSousa said during the hearing conducted on Zoom and broadcast on YouTube, but even if it were not properly executed, the defendants would still have found themselves in legal jeopardy, he said.

Lawyers for the defendants, including Kraft, countered that police were only able to record the alleged illegal activity because they violated the privacy rights of the day spa’s customers, recording not only men paying for sex but also women and men paying for and receiving perfectly legal massages.

“Mr. Kraft was entitled to the same reasonable expectation of privacy” as the innocent patrons, said his attorney, Derek Shaffer. “He should not have expected that the state would be spying on him over the course of these massages.”

Defense lawyers focused part of their criticism on the Jupiter police officer who obtained the warrant, arguing that he admitted in court that he did not even read the legal ruling that he should have relied on to decide what to record and when to turn the recorder off.

But the officer never claimed to have read it — he knew the substance of the ruling because he consulted a prosecutor, DeSousa said.

The relationship between the defense lawyers and prosecutors on the case has been testy ever since Kraft’s arrest on two misdemeanor charges last year.

Prosecutors say Kraft, now 78, was twice caught on secret police surveillance cameras allegedly paying for sex acts.

Last May, Palm Beach County Judge Leonard Hanser blocked the use of the video that allegedly implicated the customers, the owner, manager and two other women who worked there. DeSousa told the appeals judges that if detectives stopped recording female customers, men who received legal massages and customers who showed up after hours, every one of the defendants, including Kraft, would still have been snared in the sting.

The appeals court has no timeline for ruling on the case.

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