Witness: ‘I was praying this would just stop’
Defense in Northampton County case argues sex was consensual.
One woman recalled fleeing a hotel room naked, banging on doors hoping that someone would protect her from her attacker.
Another recounted being bound with duct tape and blindfolded during a severalday ordeal in which she said Seth R. Mull raped her repeatedly. Mull spoke of a “sex slave contract,” she said, and sold her to other men who also came to the room to rape her.
“I was praying that this would just stop,” the 26-yearold Easton woman testified Tuesday in Northampton County Court, her voice faltering. “That this was a bad nightmare and I’d just wake up.”
On the first day of Mull’s trial on charges he serially raped women, a jury heard the often tearful accounts of accusers who described viscous attacks in which they said the 31-year-old Lower Saucon Township man claimed them as his property, assaulting them physically and sexually and threatening to harm them or their families if they didn’t comply.
“He told me that I was going to do whatever I was told and
that I could only address him as, ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘Yes, master,’” said the Easton woman, who had gone to Philadelphia with Mull in September 2017 for what she believed was a weekend away.
Authorities call Mull a serial predator who started creating victims when he was 13 years old. He is charged with raping four women last year at hotels in Northampton County and Philadelphia, and could face life in prison if convicted of human trafficking.
In opening statements to jurors, defense attorney Matthew Potts conceded his client had sex with each of the four women but insisted it was consensual, if “bizarre” and “immoral.” Potts argued the women’s stories are inconsistent, and said text messages suggest they were willing participants in the drug-fueled encounters.
“What the allegations are isn’t what happened in this case,” Potts said.
One accuser, a 20-year-old woman, testified Mull forced her to do drugs and raped her at several hotels he was staying at. But Potts pointed to texts the woman exchanged with Mull, in which she wrote explicitly of sex, talked of finding other women for him and repeatedly expressed interest in being with him.
“I keep crying because I’m going to miss you,” the woman wrote Mull in one message that Potts highlighted. “I like you. We have good times together.”
On the witness stand, the woman said she was merely trying to keep Mull happy, afraid of what he might do.
“If I didn’t, he was going to kill me and my family and my friends,” she said, later adding: “I was playing the game to keep him satisfied.”
Assistant District Attorney Laura Majewski said Mull held the women in such terror that they did whatever he wanted. Some were so scared that even after they had gotten away from him, they still tried to please him, she said.
“Thank you for the weekend. I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” the woman in the Philadelphia case texted Mull after he drove her home from the Marriott on Market Street. This was after she was trapped at the hotel for several days, she testified, assaulted by him and other men and forced to use drugs until she believed she was going to die.
Majewski asked the woman why she sent Mull the message.
“I was terrified,” the woman, a single mother, said. “I was so scared of what he was going to do. … He knew where I lived. He knew my mother. He knew of my son.”
Because the women are alleged rape victims, The Morning Call is not disclosing their names.
Mull was arrested on Oct. 28, 2017, after police in Bethlehem responded to a Holiday Inn Express, where a 25-year-old woman reported he had raped her, strangled her, burned her with a torch lighter and threatened to kill her. The three other cases occurred in an eightweek span before that.
Among them was the woman who fled the hotel room naked. She testified she had gone to the Best Western in Hanover Township, Northampton County, after a friend offered to let her hang out there. The friend was in the room, but so was Mull, the 20-year-old Bath woman testified.
He made her uncomfortable — even before he offered to pay her for sex, she said. Though she helped him get drugs, he became “very angry” afterward over the transaction, she said.
The woman spoke matter-offactly, even as she said Mull told her that, “I was his property for 24 hours,” and ripped off her clothes.
But as she continued her account, she burst into tears on the witness stand, a tissue pressed to her eyes.
The friend who was in the room testified on behalf of her and the other 20-year-old accuser, saying she witnessed Mull rape both of them. The friend said Mull also forced her to participate in the assaults, though he is not charged with crimes against her.
The friend remembered Mull choking the Bath woman, who kept telling him to stop.
“At one point,” the friend said, “she was literally screaming, ‘Stop.’”
The trial continues today.