Winslow pleads guilty to rape, sexual battery

V I STA, CA L I F. » Former NFL player Kellen Winslow Jr. pleaded guilty Monday to raping an unconscious teen in 2003 and to sexual battery involving a 54-year-old hitchhiker in a deal that spared him the possibility of life in prison.

Winslow initially hesitated and seemed to agonize over his decision.

“I’m sorry. I’m just not thinking very clearly,” Winslow told the judge at one point.

He asked the judge for more time before he finally entered the guilty pleas moments before he was about to be retried on six felonies including kidnapping, sodomy, forced oral copulation and two charges of forcible rape in San Diego County Superior Court that could have sent him to prison for life if he was convicted.

In exchange for his plea, the court agreed to sentence him to between 12 and 18 years in prison for the two charges and dismiss the others.

In June, a jury found him guilty of raping a homeless woman in Encinitas, north of San Diego. Jurors also convicted him of two misdemeanors — indecent exposure and a lewd act in public — involving two other women.

But that jury failed to agree on other charges, including the alleged rape of the hitchhiker and the rape of the unconscious 17-year-old girl in 2003 when he was 19. Under the plea deal, the attack on the hitchhiker was reduced to sexual battery.

The 36-year-old former tight end — at one point one of the highest-paid in the NFL — had previously pleaded not guilty to the charges.

His attorney, Gretchen von Helms, had said the sex was consensual.

Five women took the witness stand this summer, and three of them were expected to testify again.

Prosecutor Dan Owens said outside of the courtroom that the women were brave to want to testify again but that he was glad they would not have to put themselves through that again.