(
)
The so-called “rape cops” have come out swinging.
Two police officers on the brink of going to trial for the alleged on-duty rape of a drunken female clubgoer are insisting that there was no sex whatsoever that night — and that 10 days later, one of the cops confessed to using a condom only after the woman threatened to “make a scene.”
“I don’t want to go and make a scene in there!” the 27-year-old fashion exec, who was wearing a hidden mike, told Officer Kenneth Moreno as she confronted him outside Moreno’s Ninth Precinct in the East Village on Dec. 17.
“I don’t want you to make a scene!” the worried-sounding Moreno responds, on a tape played yesterday in a Manhattan courtroom for the first time publicly.
“So then, just answer me honestly. Did you use a condom?” the woman pleads. “That’s all I want to know, OK?”
“Yes,” Moreno answers. “Yes, I did.”
Moreno, 43, goes on trial Monday for rape and burglary, as does his partner and alleged lookout, Franklin Mata, 28 — who faces the same charges for allegedly “acting in concert.”
The tape of Moreno’s 20-minute conversation with his accuser was played as part of a pre-trial hearing over whether it was admissible.
“That statement was not made voluntarily,” Moreno’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, argued yesterday, in hopes of keeping it away from next week’s jury.
But Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro ruled yesterday that the cops’ accuser did not use the kind of undue pressure on Moreno that would make his incriminating statement inadmissible.
Case law allows investigators to use ruses in secretly taped conversations, Carro said. And the woman’s threat of complaining to Moreno’s superiors is not such a big deal.
“Complaints are made against police officers all the time,” the judge said, in explaining his decision to deem Moreno’s statements “voluntary.”
Stuck with the taped statement, Tacopina appears poised to make the most of it.
He’ll argue that in the recording, Moreno denies there was sex between himself and the woman more than a dozen times and only changes his story after her threat.
Even Moreno’s apology is hedged.
“I was just trying sincerely to help you that night,” he says, according to the tape. “Anything else that you remembered happened, whatever it was, it wasn’t done intentionally.”