Accused lookout Officer Franklin Mata suffered a blistering cross-examination in the “rape cops” trial today, after claiming on the stand that all that happened on the night of the alleged attack was his partner and a drunken, vomiting East Village woman “getting to know each other” in her bathroom.
“Building up a rapport,” Mata called it.
“They were getting to know each other,” Mata said of his partner, Officer Kenneth Moreno, and the 29-year-old fashion executive they’d been dispatched to help out of a cab and up to her apartment on a December, 2008 evening.
Manhattan assistant district attorney Coleen Balbert perched her reading glasses up atop her head, leaned over her podium and went at the wilting cop like a petite, ponytailed dynamo.
“Getting to know each other?” she railed.
“Getting to know each other when this woman was puking every single time you were in there?” Sidewalk surveillance video had captured the two officers using the woman’s key to let themselves back into her building three more times that same evening.
“I didn’t say she was puking every time we were there,” Mata protested feebly.
“You were there so he could go back to have sex with her,” Balbert shouted, pointing to the partner, Moreno, at the defense table.
“Absolutely not,” Mata insisted.
“It’s because he wanted to have sex with her and you were helping him do it,” the prosecutor added, going for the figurative jugular.
Mata, helpfully, offered up his figurative neck.
“It seemed to me they were talking to each other,” he said, his voice weakening. “They were becoming friendly.”
“Friendly?” Balbert responded, her own voice an indignant shriek
“This sober officer and this drunk girl who was in the bathroom every time you came back? These two were getting friendly with each other? Is that what you’re telling us?”
“Correct,” Mata protested. “She was OK. She was conscious.”
“So your definition of being OK is conscious?” Balbert snarked. A defense objection to that question was sustained.
The dizzying grilling raised gasps from the audience, and came on the heels of Mata’s 90-minute direct testimony, in which he’d also insisted to jurors that his partner shared nothing more than a “very personal,” and “a little flirty” heart-to-heart with the drunken alleged victim as they cozied up in her vomit-splattered bathroom.
“Ken was telling her about his past drinking problem,” Mata, 29, testified, his voice still nervous an hour into his testimony.
“Ken” — Officer Kenneth Moreno, accused of the actual sexual contact — merely confided to the drunken, vomiting woman that he, too, used to drink, until he realized he needed to stop to get custody of his young daughter.
“It was very personal, yes,” the younger officer told jurors of the exchange. “Their conversation seemed very friendly — a little flirty at times.”
The tete-a-tete was a far cry from the encounter described by the woman herself, in her testimony three weeks ago.
The petite, 29-year-old fashion executive had told jurors that her only memories from her bathroom that night were of “hugging the toilet –” and of Moreno ordering her “Drink the water. Drink the water,” before he hoisted her off the tile floor with his arm around her rib cage.
Jurors have seen crime scene photos of the woman’s hoop earring lying on that floor in a smear of vomit, along with other photos of her vomit-stained clothes and bed pillow.
“Ken was more concerned with her emotional state than with her physical state,” Mata explained of his partner’s decision not to call the woman an ambulance.
“So now he was being a psychotherapist?” Balbert snarked again. A defense objection was sustained.
Mata maintained both his and his partner’s innocence throughout his ninety-minutes of direct testimony.
“I committed no crimes,” Mata insisted. The cop told jurors he sat on the living room couch, waiting, during his partner’s “conversations.”
“And did you see Kenneth Moreno commit any crimes that night?” Mata’s lawyer, Edward Mandery, asked him.
“No, I did not,” the cop told jurors.
But Mata did implicate his partner in one misdeed. He told jurors that it was Moreno’s voice on the bogus 911 call prosecutors say Moreno called in about a fictional homeless man sleeping in an apartment building lobby three doors down from the alleged victim’s.
Moreno called in the phony “job” — pretending in his classic New York accent to be “John” from Canada — to give them an excuse to stay in the woman’s neighborhood and time to re-enter her apartment, prosecutors charge.