A woman testified in a Salt Lake City courtroom Monday that on the day she broke up with her fiancee, the night ended with him raping her.
“I was kind of frozen. … I was numb and scared,” the woman said during the first day of testimony in the trial of Nicholas Rossi, who has been charged with one count of first-degree felony rape.
Rossi, 38, made international tabloid headlines when he allegedly faked his death to avoid rape charges in Utah, then fled to Scotland and created a false identity as an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight. Rossi was arrested in a hospital in Glasgow in December 2021 and extradited to the U.S. in 2022.
The woman, now 41, testified in 3rd District Court that she was 25 when she met Rossi via a Craigslist ad in November 2008. She said she had renewed an interest in dating two months after suffering a traumatic brain injury in a scooter accident.
The Salt Lake Tribune does not generally identify alleged victims of sexual assault without their permission.
The relationship developed quickly, she said. After talking online, they met in person for the first time on Nov. 21, 2008. Six days later, she testified, she brought him home to meet her family at Thanksgiving dinner.
The next day, on Black Friday, the woman said she and Rossi were shopping at The Gateway in downtown Salt Lake City — and the couple went to a jeweler and bought a pair of engagement rings. The woman said they co-signed a credit application to buy the rings, for about $1,800, and that she was the one paying the bills.
Money issues were notable during their brief engagement, she testified. Early on, she said, Rossi visited her at work, saying he was about to be evicted from his Orem apartment. She said she withdrew $1,000.
“Basically,” she explained, “my whole life savings was wiped out.”
About a week later, she told the court, Rossi moved to a new apartment in South Salt Lake.
After they were engaged, the woman said, Rossi became verbally and emotionally abusive. For example, she said, he insisted on driving when they were together — even though they usually took her car.
‘I didn’t know what else he was capable of doing’
The relationship ended on a December night, she testified, starting with an argument at The Gateway. Rossi had said something rude, she said, and “I took my ring off and threw it in my purse, and I was going to leave.”
She said she went to her car in the parking garage and locked the doors. Rossi followed, she said, shouting and hitting the car with his hands.
“I couldn’t back out,” she said. “I didn’t want to run anybody over.”
Eventually, the woman said, she let him in the car and drove him to his apartment. “He was still just raging in the car,” she said. “He was just yelling at me the whole time on the way back to his house.”
By the time they reached his place, she said, he had calmed down. He invited her inside, she explained, with the idea that she “was maybe going to have a conversation with him about what happened.”
In his bedroom — the only space in the shared apartment that was solely his, she said — she told him that they should break off the engagement.
“He pushed me on the bed,” the woman testified, “and forced me to have sex with him.”
She added that she was frozen with fear at that moment, because “I didn’t know what else he was capable of doing. If he could do that, what else can [he] do?”
She told jurors she didn’t call the police after she found her parents were not supportive.
As the woman testified, Rossi, who has pleaded not guilty to the rape charge, sat in a wheelchair next to his attorneys, an oxygen feed under his nose. Rossi was hospitalized with COVID-19 when he was arrested in Glasgow in 2021.
The woman said she never saw Rossi in person again after the night she says he raped her, until seeing him in court Monday. They had some contact via text and phone, though she changed her phone number twice to avoid him.
After Rossi resurfaced in 2022, she said, she went to her phone company to document those changes. She also went back to the jeweler and got a copy of their credit application for the rings.
She said she directed a Utah County Attorney’s Office detective to an internet archive, the Wayback Machine, to find the subject line for the original Craigslist personal ad that caught her attention: “Cultured artistic scarf-wearing bibliophile seeks female counterpart, 21.”
Rossi also is charged with rape in a Utah County case. According to court documents, that case involved another ex-girlfriend, then 21, in September 2008. A preliminary hearing in that case is scheduled for Aug. 26.
Defense says case has ‘big gaps’
On Monday, prosecutor Brandon Simmons, with the Salt Lake County Attorney’s Office, spent just under 90 minutes questioning the woman. After a lunch break, one of Rossi’s attorneys, Samantha Dugan, cross-examined her for about an hour, seeking to point out discrepancies in the woman’s recollections of the brief engagement and its aftermath.
Both sides have stipulated that Rossi — who went by the name Nicholas Alahverdian before allegedly faking his death in Rhode Island in 2017, and by Arthur Knight while in Scotland — is indeed Nicholas Rossi.
In court hearings in Salt Lake City and Utah counties last August, Rossi acknowledged that was his name — after insisting in previous hearings that his name was Arthur Knight.
Third District Judge Barry Lawrence, who is presiding over this trial, ruled previously that the details that made Rossi’s case known on both sides of the Atlantic — the accusations that he faked his death and his extradition — would not be mentioned in this trial. That information, the judge ruled, could be prejudicial to the jury.
In his opening argument, Simmons said that Rossi had “moved away and moved on, but [the woman] never forgot about what he had done.”
Another of Rossi’s attorneys, MacKenzie Potter, in her opening argument, compared the prosecutors’ case to an old jigsaw puzzle bought at a thrift store.
“In the end, when you try and put this puzzle together, you’re going to have big gaps,” Potter said. “You’re going to have pieces from different puzzles. You’re not going to have a complete picture.”
The trial is scheduled to continue Tuesday.