For the second time in less than a month, Nicholas Rossi sat in a Utah courtroom and listened to a judge sentence him to five years-to-life in prison for rape.
Judge Derek P. Pullan, in Utah 4th District Court in Provo, told Rossi on Tuesday that his sentence would run consecutively with the prison term a Salt Lake City judge handed down on Oct. 20 — meaning he must serve the sentences one at a time, rather than simultaneously, as Rossi’s attorney requested.
A jury deliberating in Provo on Sept. 24 found Rossi, 38, guilty of one charge of rape, a first-degree felony. The victim testified at Rossi’s trial, telling of how he assaulted her in 2008, when she was 21 and a student at Utah Valley University. She described how she completed a sexual assault kit in a Provo clinic shortly after he raped her in her Orem apartment, but the kit was never tested and the case languished for more than a decade.
By the time Utah County prosecutors filed the charge in 2022, Rossi was in Scotland — after making worldwide headlines for allegedly faking his own death and assuming another identity. He was eventually extradited from Scotland to Utah in 2024.
Before the Utah County trial, Rossi was convicted in August in a Salt Lake City court of raping his former fiancée in December 2008. He received a similar five-years-to-life sentence for that charge.
The victims in both cases spoke at Tuesday’s sentencing hearing. (The Salt Lake Tribune generally does not identify alleged victims of sexual assault without their permission.)
Rossi’s former fiancée told Pullan that his raping her “has devastated my life.” She described herself as someone “whose mind, body, family and future were torn apart in a single catastrophic moment, and whose life has been defined by pain and survival ever since. From that night forward, I have carried a terror that has never left me.”
She said Rossi is “extremely dangerous. … If he was ever released, I believe he will retaliate against every survivor, every witness, every attorney, every judge, every law enforcement officer and every member of the media who has spoken out against him.”
The former UVU student said that since Rossi assaulted her, “I’ve struggled with severe anxiety, especially around men and relationships. Trust has been almost impossible to rebuild, and I have carried feelings of shame, fear, guilt and confusion.”
Donna Kelly, an attorney representing both women, urged the judge to make Rossi serve the two sentences consecutively so he can receive sex-offender counseling at the Utah State Correctional Facility.
“A consecutive sentence would give the Board of Pardons the maximum amount of time to have the maximum impact on Mr. Rossi,” Kelly said.
In a raspy voice, Rossi — as he did after his Salt Lake City trial — said the women in both cases were lying, and that he would appeal this latest conviction.
Rossi quoted the conservative pundit George F. Will. Rossi said Will once wrote that “victimhood is the new status symbol, like a small dog or a new purse. Everyone needs to be a victim, because that is their way of signifying their status.”
From the bench, Pullan looked at Rossi and said, “if victimhood is the new status symbol, then it was a status you falsely claimed for yourself in an effort to avoid conviction. And it is a status rightfully claimed by [the victim] and many others, not by choice, but because you forcefully raped her.”
Pullan did allow Rossi credit for the time he spent in custody since 2024, when he arrived in Utah from Scotland. He did not give Rossi credit, as defense attorney Daniel Diaz had asked, for the two years he was in custody in Scotland while fighting extradition.
“Every minute he spent in custody in Scotland was of his own making,” McKay Lewis, one of the Utah County prosecutors, told Pullan. “He denied who he was. He was actually out on bail. His own actions got him brought back into custody.”
Rossi has 30 days to file an appeal on his conviction and sentencing in the Utah County case, Pullan said.
Utah County prosecutor Stephen Jones said in a statement that the sentence “is a significant victory for the victim in this case, and for sexual assault victims across the state. While every case is unique, this case is proof that juries can and will convict based on a victim’s report. The strength this victim has demonstrated throughout this process is absolutely remarkable.”