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Police Officer Kenneth Moreno broke his more than two-year public silence in the scandalous “Rape Cops” case yesterday, portraying himself on the night of the alleged attack as part attentive officer, part “snuggling” pal, part alcohol therapist, part Bon Jovi pop-tune crooner — and all gentleman.
He was particularly gentlemanly when, as he startlingly claimed from the witness stand, the woman at the center of the case put the moves on him, and he “pushed her away.”
“It was getting crazy,” he told jurors, describing the evening’s supposed grotesque trajectory from chitchat to his singing her a verse of “Livin’ on a Prayer” in her tiny, vomit-splattered bathroom, to the fleeting rubbing together of their various bodily “areas” and a brief, puke-scented kiss.
“She asked me if I liked her,” Moreno, 43, told jurors of a conversation he described happening in the alleged victim’s East Village bedroom.
It was December 2008. She’d been so drunk, her cabby had called the cops from her curbside to get her out of his taxi.
Moreno wore his full uniform, with gun belt, and had just used the woman’s key to let himself and his partner inside her place for the fourth time that predawn morning. The woman, he said, had stripped down to a bright-pink bra.
“I said I liked her,” Moreno conceded. “Then she kissed me. I could smell the alcohol on her breath, but I could smell the vomit.” He turned away, he told jurors. “She said, ‘You don’t like me. You don’t like me,’ ” he testified.
Then, “she started rubbing her buttock area against my groin area,” Moreno announced clinically. That lasted “maybe two seconds.” But the night’s debauched antics were not to progress, he insisted.
“I had Frank in the next room,” he told jurors, meaning his partner and accused lookout, Officer Franklin Mata, 29, who had already testified on his own behalf that he was one wall away at the time, asleep on the woman’s living-room couch.
“I didn’t see this coming,” Moreno insisted of the kissing and rubbing. “I kinda pushed her away. I told her, ‘There’s another time for this. Not today. There’s another time for this . . . We’re not doing this.’ ”
The testimony stands in stark contrast to the account of the alleged victim, a 29-year-old fashion executive who has accused Moreno of raping her while she was face-down on her bed, alternating between passed-out drunk and semiconscious.
“Did you commit rape?” Moreno’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, had started off direct testimony by asking. Moreno answered with a quick, earnest look to the jury box, and a firmly stated “no.”
Four weeks ago, the woman herself had taken the stand to describe her only memories from the bathroom as “hugging the toilet,” hearing Moreno order, “Drink the water,” and feeling his arm around her rib cage as he hoisted her to her feet.
But to hear Moreno describe it — sitting in the witness box in a crisp suit, his testimony peppered by jarring, first-name references to the alleged victim — the encounter between the on-duty cop and the severely intoxicated woman had started out so chivalrously.
The pair had spent long stretches that night confiding in each other and laughing together amid the vomit stains.
He’d shared with her that he, too, had once struggled with alcohol, and was fighting for custody of his now-14-year-old daughter. He even held her hand as she sprawled by the toilet, and, bizarrely, sung to her, he said.
“I told her my favorite band was Bon Jovi,” he told jurors. “I sung to her a verse of ‘Livin’ on a Prayer.’ ”
“Please come back!” he testified she told him each time he left. “She was holding onto my hand, telling me to come back.
“I promised her I would come back,” he explained. “I saw no harm in it.”
Moreno conceded on the stand that he did commit patrol-guide violations — the return visits were not logged with his precinct or central dispatch.
He also admitted that it was he who made a bogus 911 call, claiming to be “John” from Canada and reporting a homeless man asleep in a vestibule three doors down from the woman’s apartment to give himself an excuse to return.
Moreno’s direct testimony is scheduled to continue today, followed by cross-examination by the prosecution.
His partner, Mata, had had a tough time of it during his own cross-examination earlier in the day. “I heard voices,” he said, when asked by Assistant District Attorney Coleen Balbert about what he could hear through the wall.
“I don’t remember,” Mata said when Balbert asked him what was being said.