Battered by his accuser and a folksy prosecutor who apparently has made a nice impression with the jury, Mike Tyson Saturday finally got a break at his rape trial.
His defense team blocked the prosecution`s attempt to allow the jury to hear a 44-year-old limousine driver tell her story that Tyson allegedly exposed himself and accosted her in his hotel a day before the alleged rape.
The former heavyweight champion stands accused of raping a petite 18-year-old Miss Black America contestant in the Canterbury Hotel last July.
If the limousine driver, Virginia Foster, had been allowed to tell her full story to the jury, the account may have all but sealed the case.
Even so, Foster was allowed to corroborate much of the alleged victim`s earlier testimony. Later in the day, two doctors also told the jury injuries suffered by the Rhode Island teenager could have come only from forced sexual contact.
Tyson claims the young woman consented to have sex with him.
”When it happened I thought it was awful,” said prosecutor Greg Garrison of Judge Patricia Gifford`s decision to limit Foster`s testimony.
”But when we got done today, it didn`t mean as much,” said Garrison, grinning the way he does for the jury that has begun to laugh at his jokes.
The fighter, who had hoped to be training in earnest for a chance to regain his title from champion Evander Holyfield, sat poker-faced as usual at the defense table.
He looked slightly out of place in a suit, scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad with a hand seemingly as big as a rib-roast.
In telling part of her story to the jury Saturday, Foster`s account matched much of the alleged victim`s testimony.
(Tyson`s defense gets its chance once the prosecution rests sometime early this week. Then, chief defense counsel Vincent Fuller is expected to produce a string of witnesses in the hopes of portraying the alleged victim as a calculating and manipulative gold-digger.)
The sixth day of the trial started Saturday with the jury absent from the courtroom.
Garrison said Foster would testify she was lured to a room in the Canterbury Hotel last July on the pretext of delivering a small package, and that the boxer exposed himself and tried to kiss her before she broke away. Garrison said Foster would tell the jury Tyson asked her to come into the bedroom with the words, ”Come on in, I just want to talk to you.”
That is the phrase the alleged victim used to tell the jury how Tyson got her to leave a sitting room in his suite and enter the bedroom.
”What is clear is that this man`s sexual conduct never changes and the actions demonstrate an intertwining of all the defendant`s aggressive behavior toward women,” Garrison said in arguing that Foster`s full story be told.
But Tyson`s defense team argued that because Tyson`s defense is the sex on the morning of July 19, 1991 was consentual, the use of Foster`s full testimony was irrelevant.
The inclusion of such testimony, they said, would be admissible only if Tyson claimed sex never occurred. It also could be grounds for a quick reversal by the appellate courts because it would prejudice the jury.
”Do we have to have a rape completed to determine the sexual aggressiveness of this man?,” he cried.
In siding with the defense on this issue, Gifford may have signaled she will not allow other alleged acts by Tyson to be included in the testimony.
While Foster was unable to tell all of her story, she did testify for about three hours, corroborating key parts of the alleged victim`s accounts.
Foster, a 44-year-old school guidance counselor who treats victims of rape, incest and child abuse, recalled Tyson`s behavior during that time.
Foster also said her limousine business had failed since the alleged rape, because of all the negative publicity the incident had spawned.
She testified that when Tyson arrived to participate in Indianapolis Black Expo, she first took him to meet his friend, popular singer B. Angie B. At about 1:35 a.m. on July 19, Tyson used the car phone to speak with a woman and plead with her to come down to the limousine so they could talk, Foster testified.
The alleged victim, a college freshman and honor student, offered the same account earlier in explaining why she went out with Tyson at such an hour.
Foster said Tyson used the word ”please” several times in the phone conversation.
”Like when a man`s trying to get a woman to do something for him,”
Foster testified, ”So they beg and plead for it. . . . Please, I just want to talk to you,` ” she recalled the prizefighter as saying.
After taking the couple and the fighter`s bodyguard to the Canterbury Hotel, Foster told the jury she waited outside until the young woman came running to the car alone shortly before 3 a.m.
”I saw the lady rushing out of the hotel,” Foster said. ”When she came rushing out of the hotel she was frantic. Like she was in a state of shock. Like in a daze or disoriented.
”She seemed to be scared.”
Foster then appeared to corroborate the victim`s account further by recalling for the jury what the young woman told them she had said in testimony on Friday.
” `I don`t believe it. I don`t believe him. Who does he think he is?,`
” Foster recalled the woman as saying.
When Foster returned to the Canterbury Hotel, Tyson`s bodyguard, Dale Edwards, told her the former champion would be leaving the city by taking a 5:30 a.m. flight.
Foster said Tyson previously had planned to stay in town until July 21. The prosecution has suggested through other witnesses that Tyson decided to leave town immediately after the alleged rape.
In other testimony, physician Thomas Richardson of Methodist Hospital recalled examining the victim when she came to see him on July 20.
He said that based on his experience of dealing with rape victims as an emergency room specialist, in his opinion the young woman had been the victim of a sexual assault.
She suffered visible abrasions on her genital area that were made, the doctor testified, as a result of forced sexual intercourse.
Another physician, Thomas Akin, a gynecologist and fertility specialist at the University of Indianapolis, further testified the injuries were likely the result of nonconsentual sex.
Akin told the jury he regularly advises women under his care to have sex with their husbands in the mornings so that he can examine them later to help them conceive.
Those thousands of examinations of consentual sex, Akin testified, did not resemble the injuries the young woman received.
”I have personally never seen this type of abrasion with consentual sex,” he testified.
