DEFENSE TEAM GOES ON OFFENSE
Key witness challenged over memory, booze, sex
A woman who had a sexual relationship with accused rapist Gary Zerola and is one of the best friends of his alleged victim, and was sharing the same couch where the alleged crime took place seven years ago, took the stand on the second day of Zerola’s trial.
“I woke up to (the alleged victim) shaking me,” Colleen Daley, 29, said in an answer to one of prosecutor Ian Polumbaum’s questions yesterday at Suffolk Superior Court in downtown Boston. “She was very serious and said ‘Get up, we’re leaving.’”
Daley had been a former client of Zerola, 51, when he represented her as a defense attorney in 2015 into 2016, according to her testimony. Zerola, who has two past acquittals for similar charges, had served as a prosecutor in district attorneys’ offices in both Essex and Suffolk before becoming a criminal defense lawyer.
She said their relationship moved from attorneyclient into friendship and then that the pair “became more” when her case closed in early 2016.
But the focus of this trial is what happened on the night of Nov. 9, 2016, and the next morning, at around 7 a.m., when prosecutors say the alleged victim awoke to Zerola molesting her and then pulled down her black scrubs — which is the uniform where she and Daley both worked as estheticians — and proceeded to rape her.
Daley and the alleged victim left work sometime around 9 p.m. that night and headed to a bar near where they worked. Daley testified they each had two martinis and then split a bottle of wine as they watched SnapChat stories and realized that Zerola was already out and about and at a concert. That’s when one of them — “probably me,” Daley testified — decided to contact him to see if he wanted to meet up. He did.
Cue the Four Winds, the bar they all met up at, as previously described by the alleged victim in her testimony and by their bartender for the night, Jacqueline Hurley, who was the first witness to take the stand Tuesday. They would also try to go to a strip club, but that was closed so they returned to the Four Winds.
“We were all drinking a lot; it’s hard to have, like, a clear memory of what specifically happened, we were all close to each other,” Daley said, adding that the defendant “just kept ordering” vodka sodas for the group. “There was a lot of kissing on the cheek.”
Or maybe that’s not quite right, defense attorney Joseph Krowski Jr. said in his thunderous rebuttal to this and many other points.
Here, he said, was among her first misstatements and that a video existed — it was entered into evidence Tuesday and played again Wednesday for her memory’s benefit — showing the alleged victim herself not just receiving kisses from her accused rapist that night, but planting them on him, too, including on his lips.
Krowski hammered Daley about the four different occasions she spoke on this matter — an initial interview with police detectives on Nov. 19, 2016, her testimony to a grand jury 77 days later, a pre-trial interview with prosecutors and police detectives on May 15 of this year and, finally, her testimony that day. He started his cross-examination by depicting her memory of the time as both “very bad” and “very selective.”
“You seem to have a tendency to remember specific things that in your mind put Mr. Zerola in a negative light,” Krowski said, later asking “No disrespect, but do you have any cognitive difficulties?”
He continued the questioning of her credibility and, around the time she answered that she couldn’t remember what she had said because taking the stand was “a very stressful thing,” she began wiping tears from her eyes.
The inconsistencies Krowski brought up included who exactly went to sleep on the couch in the Back Bay apartment, to what exactly the alleged victim said when she woke Daley up, to why Daley wouldn’t ask any follow-up questions when her best friend indicated that Zerola may have done something inappropriate, to why she suddenly remembered Zerola was buying tons of drinks at the bar when she told the grand jury that she couldn’t remember anything about that night.
Daley had said she was feeling too sick to ask follow-up questions, but Krowski asked why she was too sick to be inquisitive about that but not too sick to spend the day with Zerola the morning of the alleged rape, including having sex with him in his gray Jeep outside a north-of-Boston courthouse before he had to appear for a hearing.
Wednesday also saw testimony from Sharon Italiane, the registered nurse who performed the rape kit on the alleged victim and testified to bruising and minor abrasions on the alleged victim’s vagina, and Boston Police Department Det. Michael Ross who was one of the detectives who first interviewed Daley during their investigation.