Both cops were with her in her bedroom, the victim claims.
The woman in the “rape cops” trial stuck to her story yesterday, the last of her three days of testimony, insisting that both officers were present as she lay semi-conscious on her bed.
“I remember that there were two voices in my bedroom,” the woman told jurors.
“I woke up to being penetrated once, but there were two cops with me after,” she insisted, describing the moment after being allegedly raped in her East Village bedroom on a vodka-soaked morning in 2008.
The pretty and petite 29-year-old fashion executive would conclude her testimony just before lunch, giving jurors a cordial, “Thank you for listening,” as she stepped down.
She told jurors she was only conscious of an assault by a single officer. But afterward, she said, both cops searched the bed around her. She could feel their hands patting the mattress and see a flashlight beam near her in the moments before the two men exited her apartment in a flurry of conversation and police-radio crackle, she testified.
The testimony is important because accused attacker Officer Kenneth Moreno, 43, and his accused lookout, Officer Franklin Mata, 27, are both charged with rape under the theory that the younger cop — in serving as his partner’s accomplice — is equally guilty.
The cops had been called to the woman’s address at 1 a.m. on Sunday, Dec. 7, by a cabby who needed help getting the vomiting woman out of his cab. They were caught on sidewalk surveillance video using her key to re-enter her building three more times over the next four hours.
Mata’s lawyer, Edward Mandery, spent much of his morning cross-examining the woman, striving to portray his client as being as physically distant as possible to her bedroom.
Didn’t she tell one of her friends later that very day that just one of the cops was in her bedroom, the lawyer asked.
“I definitely remember hearing two men’s voices and the police walkie-talkies,” she maintained.
The woman had testified all day Thursday and Friday, giving a detail-rich account of the few moments she can recall from that predawn morning. Among the more persuasively vivid of her memories were the sound of Velcro being ripped apart just before the alleged rape and, afterward, seeing “multiple” hands and the flashlight beam examining the bed around her.
Prosecutors are expected to argue in closings that the Velcro-rip sound was Moreno taking off his bulletproof vest and that Moreno — and possibly Mata as well — had scoured her bed to be sure they left no evidence behind.
Testimony continues today.