By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — A woman who was allegedly raped by police while drunk tearfully relived her painful memory of a man ripping off her clothes and violating her in emotional testimony Thursday.
The alleged 29-year-old victim, who lived on East 13th Street, avoided eye contact with the defendants at their trial as she wept while recounting the alleged early morning attack on Dec. 7, 2008.
She said the officers attacked her after the driver of a cab she was in called police because she was too drunk to walk to her apartment and had vomited in the backseat.
The woman, a fashion company product developer who now lives in San Francisco, admitted she blacked out for significant portions of the night but also described having her tights removed while she was too intoxicated to stop it or verbally protest.
She said she was too drunk to consent to anything or try to fight off Officer Kenneth Moreno, who is accused of raping her while his partner Franklin Mata allegedly stood guard at the woman's East Village apartment.
"What were you able to do or say when your tights were being removed?" Assistant District Attorney Coleen Balbert asked the woman on direct examination.
"Nothing," she said. "I was so intoxicated I couldn't say or do anything. My body was complete dead weight."
She also remembered the officer who had sex with her laying beside her afterwards and asking, "Do you want me to stay?" according to her memory of the incident.
She later became aware of the pair "shuffling" around in her dark bedroom and feeling around her mattress, apparently searching for something with a flashlight as she lay face down, undressed, and unable to move, she said.
The victim said upon "coming to" in the morning, she noticed her bedroom was a mess and the living room curtains she normally kept open had been closed.
She then detailed the steps she took the next morning. She said she was in a state of shock and she "just felt so dirty" that she showered before going to her friends' apartment upstairs for help.
"I started crying and I sat in the shower and just tried to basically take my skin off," the tearful woman said.
Her friends took her to Beth Israel Hospital, where she underwent a rape kit examination and was given the morning after pill and an HIV drug.
Because she was afraid to tell the police that a pair of their own had violated her, she went to the district attorneys' office, she testified.
The DA's office asked her to wear a wire to record a confrontation between her and Moreno in front of the 9th Precinct as he was reporting to work the following weekend.
In the wiretapped chat, which was also played for jurors Thursday, she demanded to know whether he wore a condom or not.
"Did you use a condom?" she demanded.
After denying that anything happened multiple times he finally conceded.
"Ok ma'am you're not going to get pregnant because nothing happ...yes Ma'am I used a condom," Moreno said, according to the recording that was played for jurors on direct examination.
The woman said she ended the conversation shortly afterward because she finally heard what she wanted to hear — an admission that she had been raped from the man who she believed had done it.
"I knew in my heart that he knew what he had done to me," she said.
Prosecutors asked her why — in the recording — she repeatedly asked Moreno why they had not taken her to the hospital considering on her condition.
"I couldn't believe that two police officers who had been called there to help me had instead raped me and left me face down in a pool of vomit on my bed to die," the choked-up woman said.
Moreno and Mata were suspended from duty after the allegations surfaced. They are each charged with rape, official misconduct, burglary and other charges.
The officers were caught on surveillance video returning to the woman's building four times. Once, they told a neighbor they were looking for a "prowler."
Defense lawyers argue the cops are not guilty because the woman could not rightly recall what happened to her because of the amount she drank.
On cross-examination, which began late Thursday afternoon, Moreno's attorney, Joe Tacopina, began to grill the woman about the many details that went "blank" because she blacked out.
After the trial on Thursday, Tacopina said the recorded conversation was not an admission of impropriety on Moreno's part. He said there were "more than two dozen" denials that anything had happened before he said he used a condom, just to calm her down and avoid her causing a scene.
"We have a long way to go on this case," Tacopina told reporters.
Cross-examination of the woman is expected to resume Friday morning.
