Provo • A Utah woman faced Nicholas Rossi, the man she accuses of raping her in 2008, in court and told a jury Wednesday about the assault she says happened in his Orem apartment while she attended Utah Valley University.
The woman told the jury he lured her there under the pretense of repaying a debt after their brief relationship had ended. Instead of getting the money owed, she said she left bruised and traumatized.
Her testimony came on the third day of Rossi’s rape trial in Utah 4th District Court in Provo — the second time he has been on trial in as many months. The Salt Lake Tribune generally doesn’t identify sexual assault victims without their permission.
Rossi — who made international headlines for fleeing to Scotland, allegedly faking his death in 2020 and living under a false identity — was convicted in August of raping his former fiancée in Salt Lake County in December 2008. He is scheduled to be sentenced in that case on Oct. 20.
During opening arguments in the Orem case, prosecutors said they plan to call the former fiancée to testify.
Utah County Public Defender Amanda Darcy told the jury the case boils down to “money, sex and lies.” After she read five statements the victim allegedly made to officers during the 2008 investigation, Darcy argued there are discrepancies in the recounting of events.
“Five very significant, different stories about one event,” Darcy said, “but there’s one constant in all of this: money.”
On Wednesday, the woman, who was 21 at the time, testified that she briefly dated Rossi after meeting him on MySpace in 2008. Their relationship began in August but ended by early September after Rossi used her credit card without permission to buy computer parts, sparking frequent fights, she said.
By the time they broke up, Rossi owed her between $300 and $400, she said.
On Sept. 13, 2008, she went to his apartment believing he intended to pay her back. After realizing he did not have her money, she tried to leave, but he “forced me down against his futon and pulled my pants down,” she testified.
“She said ‘no’ before and while it’s happening, she’s crying,” prosecutor McKay Lewis of the Utah County Attorney’s Office told the jury during opening arguments. “She didn’t want this to happen.”
The next day, she had a sexual assault kit completed at a Provo clinic and DNA was collected, she said. An officer took her statement and a case was opened.
On Sept. 15, 2008, Rossi told detectives his ex-girlfriend fabricated the sexual assault because she is upset about the money he owes her, Lewis said. A day later he came into the police station to file a report claiming that his ex-girlfriend had actually sexually assaulted him, Lewis said.
Darcy argued Rossi made the report because he got “scared.”
“These are really serious allegations,” Darcy told the jury, “and so he does something that a lot of us do, and he overreacts.”
Rossi wasn’t identified as a suspect until a decade later, according to a probable cause statement.
In opening arguments, Lewis told the jury the delay wasn’t due to lack of evidence but a yearslong backlog of untested sexual assault kits across Utah. The victim’s kit was eventually analyzed after the state launched a Sexual Assault Kit Initiative to clear that backlog — and Rossi’s DNA was found, Lewis said.
Lewis said that wasn’t the only reason the case stalled back in 2008. It was never referred to the district attorney’s office because the lead investigator at the time, former Sgt. Yolanda Stewart, closed it, he said.
In her report, Lewis said, Stewart wrote the victim told her she had dinner with Rossi after the alleged assault and that he had repaid the money he owed her.
“And Sergeant Stewart says, ‘Well, that’s not how a real rape victim will act,’” Lewis said, “and so she closes the case.”
Darcy argued that Rossi wasn’t notified of the charges until after he had moved to the United Kingdom, where he had already changed his name and gotten married.
When authorities went to extradite him, Darcy said, Rossi, who was living under the name Arthur Knight, resisted “tooth and nail” because he had “built a new life in the U.K.” and was acting out of “self-preservation.”
Rossi grew up in foster homes in Rhode Island and returned there before allegedly faking his death, according to the Associated Press. Months after charges were filed in Utah County, an online obituary claimed he had died on Feb. 29, 2020, from late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the AP reported.
Rossi was previously wanted in Rhode Island for failing to register as a sex offender and, according to a probable cause statement in the current case, also faces fraud charges in Ohio, where he was convicted of sex-related offenses in 2008.
Judge Derek Pullman said the trial will resume Thursday at noon at the Utah 4th Judicial Court in Provo.