Derrick Rose Flicks It Up With Jurors After Not Liable Verdict

New York Knicks point guard Derrick Rose and two friends were cleared in a $21 million civil case were the three were accused of drugging and gang rapping a woman in August 2013.

The deliberation took three hours and 45 minutes, from a jury that consisted of six women and two men. The jurors did not find the 30-year-old accuser credible.

Identified in court documents as “Jane Doe,”  the woman had a two year non-exclusive sexual relationship, that began during the NBA lockout of 2011 after meeting in a club in L.A.  Doe alleged that Rose and two his friends, Ryan Allen and Randall Hampton, drugged her drink during a party at Rose’s Beverly Hills rental home on August 27, 2013.

Doe claimed to have taken a cab home and that she needed the cab’s driver to walk her to her front door. After that, she says she remembered throwing up and passing out in her bedroom with her clothes on. From there she alleged that Rose, Hampton and Allen broke into her apartment at some point, and recalls Rose having sex with her, and then Hampton and Allen later having sex with her while Rose watched.
Attorneys for Rose, Allen and Hampton said the sex was consensual. That the accuser asked them to come to her apartment after the party and let them into her apartment herself. Rose said during the trial that he felt the accuser consented because she asked that they come in the room “one at a time.” Their attorneys claimed that the accuser was trying to “shake down a highly respected and successful athlete.”

Rose said the only time the woman said, “Stop” was after she let them in her apartment and they all headed for the bedroom together.

“She told us, ‘One at a time,’” he said. He and Hampton waited on the sofa while Allen was inside.

Rose said he never received any text from the woman telling him she wanted to have sex with him and the two others. But he had assumed from what had transpired and the fact she had never told him no.

“In my mind, she consented every time we had sex,” he said. “Why wouldn’t she do it that time?”

Two former friend’s of Doe’s came forward to state that she told them the suit was a money play. There were also several text messages that the defense claimed were omitted purposely by Doe’s lawyers.

According to Rose’s lawyer Mark Baute, the texts showed that the woman willingly went along with the request that she and a friend come over to his house for sex. In one of these messages which occurred after the woman and her friend left Rose’s home, the plaintiff disapproved of Rose refusing to have sex with her friend after she went to the trouble of arranging the threesome.

Below are the jury instructions on the legal definition of consent

After the trial, Rose even posed for photos with some of the jurors.

The judge in the case even dropped a basketball joke.

From Julia Marsh for the New York Post:

“Best wishes,” Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald told Rose. “Except when the Knicks play the Lakers,” he joked.

In a statement, Rose said he’s “thankful” for the verdict, and eager to put the trial behind him.

“It was important to prove I did not do what I was accused of, even if it meant publicly sharing very private details about my personal life,” he said. “I am thankful that the jury understood and agreed with me. This experience and my sensitivity to it was deep. I am ready to put this behind me and focus on my family and career.”