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A former Brighton High and University of Southern California football player accused of rape has been ordered to stand trial.
Osa Chad Masina, 19, was bound over Monday on a first-degree felony charge of rape and two first-degree felony charges of forcible sodomy, stemming from allegations of a July sexual assault at a Cottonwood Heights house party.
During a 3rd District Court preliminary hearing, the alleged victim spent roughly 90 minutes testifying against Masina, accusing him of sexually assaulting her during an early July trip to Los Angeles and then again at a party early on the morning of July 25.
"The standard of proof is really low and the judge doesn't get to decide credibility," defense attorney Rebecca Skordas said afterward, adding that her client maintained that any sex between he and the 19-year-old woman had been consensual.
Masina himself declined to comment to reporters as he left the hearing.
Earlier in the courtroom, the alleged victim (the Tribune does not generally identify victims of sexual assault) told of how she visited Masina in California early in July after she had wished him happy birthday via the social media platform Twitter, and the USC football player had invited her to Los Angeles to visit.
At one point during a four-day stay, the woman said, she consumed alcohol, Xanax and marijuana. She said she awoke to Masina and another man having sex with her.
She says she spoke with Masina about the incident the next day.
"I asked him why that happened, how that even got to that point, because I didn't want any of that to happen," she testified. "He just denied it. He said, 'You said you wanted it. It was your idea. You said yes.' "
The woman said she returned to Utah, herself in denial about the assault.
"I tried to deny that it happened," she said. "I didn't want to say that something like that could happen to me, so I tried as hard as I could to push it down."
Back in Utah on July 24, the woman said she received a message from Masina via Snapchat, inviting her to a house party in Cottonwood Heights.
There, a night of partying — Bacardi rum, Mike's Hard Lemonade and half of a marijuana cookie — left her feeling so intoxicated she says could not get out of a car on her own that night when she went with Masina and a group of his friends to get fast food, and she said she cannot recall how she got back inside the house.
She said the next thing she remembered after passing out was waking up with Masina raping her.
"It hurt. It was very painful," she said, and though she said she felt "scared and helpless," she tried to move her legs to stop him.
"Did you consent in anyway to the sexual contact you've been describing?" the prosecutor asked.
"No," the woman said.
The woman testified she passed out and awoke several more times throughout the night, each time to a different horror: She awoke to Masina forcing her to engage in oral sex so rough she could not breathe; she awoke unable to move from a couch and unable to reach someone to come help her; she awoke, wearing only a bra and a blanket, on the lawn of a neighboring home where she saw Masina's car still parked outside and "that fear came over me again because I knew he was still in the house."
The woman next tried to call her ex-boyfriend and his father to ask for help. When neither responded immediately, she tried to call Uber for a ride but said her phone was about to die so she was forced to go back inside the house to charge it.
The woman said she slept in an upstairs bedroom for a while, then took a pair of leggings and a T-shirt from the room and left to call for a ride.
The woman said she was bleeding and noticed that a temporary crown in the back of her mouth had somehow gone missing.
She said she went to a dentist that night to replace it and went with a man from the party to get a Plan B birth control pill but did not tell anyone about the assault that day.
"Did you call the police?" the prosecutor asked.
"No," she said.
"Why not?" the prosecutor asked.
"I was just scared," she said.
Later, after her ex-boyfriend's father had told the woman's father that he believed something had happened at the party, the woman said she told her parents and decided to go to the police.
"After I verbally said it and said it out loud, then I knew what he had done was wrong and he had done it to me twice," she said.
Masina's defense attorney said his legal team could try to fight the bind over on the felony rape count because the state failed to present evidence of the charge before resting their case and had to ask the judge to reopen the hearing.
"I don't think they get two bites at the apple because they forgot," Skordas argued in court.
Masina, who was suspended from USC's football team in September, is scheduled to be arraigned Friday in 3rd District Court.