SAVED BY A HOAX?
CAM COLE COLUMN:
Patrick Kane may soon be focusing solely on ice, not on his case.
And ... once more into the snake pit. Perhaps this will be the final time, for it seems now all but inevitable that the next actual news item to emerge from the Patrick Kane/ unnamed accuser file will be word the case isn’t even going to court.
Maybe that’s as it should be, and maybe not.
But the believability of the victim of the alleged sexual assault by the Chicago Blackhawks star has been so badly damaged by her mother’s apparent attempt to manufacture evidence, a jury would be hard-pressed to ignore the standard of reasonable doubt.
Patrick Kane has received the greatest gift possible, short of a video turning up showing he was in Siberia the night the alleged assault took place.
And all he had to do was keep his head down and continue to play hockey while the accuser’s case against him was kneecapped by her own mother.
The question of whether the 21- year- old complainant’s statements to the police are also discredited by the “elaborate hoax” — as Erie County district attorney Frank Sedita called the mother’s attempt to misdirect the investigation — is central to what happens next.
“Obviously, there has been an effort to create a hoax,” Sedita said. “I gotta figure out who was in on that, why they would do that and what it means vis-à-vis all the other evidence.”
Whether or not the accuser knew of or was involved in her mother’s actions, the 48-hour circus it triggered is practically certain to be fatal to the prosecution’s case.
The mother probably won’t be charged for lying about the socalled rape-kit bag she claimed to have found at her front door on Tuesday, the bag which her daughter’s attorney, Thomas Eoannou, displayed at a sensational Wednesday news conference, hinting at evidencetampering or misconduct or simple incompetence involving police or the DA’s office. As it turns out, the examining nurse gave the mother the bag in the early morning hours of Aug. 2, after being told the accuser changed her top before going to the hospital.
The mother was supposed to put the top in the bag and turn it into the police but never did.
Instead, Sedita said, police went to her house, put the top in their own evidence bag and left the hospital’s bag at the house — the same bag which, seven weeks later, the mother told Eoannou had been left by an unknown party at her front door the day before.
“She denies it, but I do not believe her story,” said Sedita, adding as far as he knows, it’s not a crime for a private citizen to lie to or “bamboozle” a lawyer with false information, but if she lied under oath or presented “dummied-up evidence” in court she would be committing perjury.
Let’s be honest: chances of proving what really happened that night were never very good.
They rarely are, in a he-said, she-said sexual assault allegation when the issue of consent is always the crucial point.
But now, as Sedita said, the question is not when, but if, he will even present the case to a grand jury.
Kane very likely will walk away, a serial misbehaver hardly innocent in the global sense, but not guilty of this crime in the eyes of the law.
Lawyers and legal experts have been quoted as saying they have never experienced such a weird series of events happening during what is usually a well-established followup routine of alleged sexual assault.
Eoannou dropped the complainant as a client Thursday after learning of the mother’s deception, and Kane’s lawyer, Paul Cambria leaped on that development to say: “They fabricated evidence. I told you yesterday that this whole thing was a hoax, and now it is obvious.
“Ethically, he had to withdraw and … I think logically it means that the integrity of the accusations has been completely undermined,” Cambria said.
It might be just as simple as that. No charges brought. Case closed.
And a big sigh of relief from the Blackhawks, the National Hockey League and Patrick Kane, who keeps learning lessons the hard way and — maybe, one of these days — will figure out the hazards of life in the fishbowl, and act accordingly.
His reputation, never exactly sterling, may have taken another hit, and it’s conceivable that he’s not quite endorsement material anymore for an image-conscious company.
But the allegations haven’t affected his fans, who still love him, or the eight-year contract extension at $10.5 million per that kicks in this fall.
So it looks like a happy ending all around, except for a couple of unidentified people, already vilified as gold-diggers, and soon to be forgotten.
Chances are, it was never going to end any other way.