On the witness stand, a Utah woman described to a jury how Nicholas Rossi raped her in his apartment on the night she broke off their engagement during a heated argument in 2008.
Rossi — who made international headlines for fleeing the United States for Scotland, allegedly faking his death in 2020 and living under another identity — said nothing during the trial. His attorney argued that his former fiancée may have consented to having sex with him after their argument.
In the end, the jury believed the woman who accused Rossi of rape.
After deliberating for several hours Wednesday afternoon, jurors found Rossi, 38, guilty of one charge of first-degree felony rape. Rossi now faces a possible sentence of five years to life in prison when he is sentenced on Oct. 20.
The victim testified earlier this week that she and Rossi met in November 2008 via Craigslist, and their relationship moved quickly. That Thanksgiving, she said, she introduced him to her parents and grandparents and on Black Friday, the two became engaged.
A few weeks later, she told the jury, the couple had a falling out one evening at The Gateway shopping center in Salt Lake City. After he refused to let her drive away, she said, she let him into her car to give him a ride to his home. Once there, she recalled going inside to talk about breaking off the engagement. In his bedroom, she said, he “forced [her] to have sex with him.”
The Salt Lake Tribune generally doesn’t identify sexual assault victims without their permission.
The woman did not immediately report the rape to law enforcement. She contacted police in 2022, when Rossi’s story of fleeing the United States for Scotland was in the news. Rossi was extradited to the United States in 2024, after he was charged with rape in Utah County.
The woman in that case similarly accused Rossi of raping her in 2008, and testified in front of the jurors in the Salt Lake County case, Fox13 reported.
In closing arguments, prosecutor Clint Heiner said there is no evidence that the woman in the Salt Lake City case knew Rossi’s Utah County accuser in 2022, when the Salt Lake County woman said she started gathering evidence of her relationship with Rossi to give to police.
Heiner asked jurors to consider the detail in which she had described the events, and the emotion they saw as she rehashed the painful memories in her testimony.
Samantha Dugan, Rossi’s attorney, argued in response that the prosecutors’ case had holes in it — the largest being that they didn’t prove that Rossi lived in the South Salt Lake home at the time the woman said she was raped there.
“The missing pieces are huge and troublesome,” Dugan said.
Dugan also argued that the woman might have consented to sex with Rossi — and years later, when she saw Rossi on the news, her bitter feelings about her ex-fiancée led her to fabricate a rape accusation.
In rebuttal, prosecutor Brandon Simmons asked jurors to consider that if the woman had lied, she likely would have embellished the story — to say she had been injured, or had to escape from Rossi’s home.
“She told you what happened,” Simmons said in closing.
Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill, in a statement released after the verdict was reached, said prosecutors were “grateful to the survivor in this case for her willingness to come forward, years after this attack took place. We appreciate her patience as we worked to bring the defendant back to Salt Lake County so that this trial could take place and she could get justice. It took courage and bravery to take the stand and confront her attacker to hold him accountable.”
Rossi is expected to be in court next for the Utah County case for a preliminary hearing on Aug. 26.
Tribune deputy enterprise editor Sean P. Means contributed to this article.