Karl Vanderwoude is a gentleman but not a groper, his friends insist.
Pals of the alleged “Gentleman Groper,” a 26-year-old churchgoing Brooklynite accused of manhandling women in Greenwich Village, lower Manhattan and the Upper East Side, claim police got the wrong guy.
“This is totally a mistake,” said Natasha Cerda. “We would hang out late at night, go to bars. He never crossed that line. He was super respectful.”
Cerda, who once worked with Vanderwoude at a hotel, said that she saw him just last week and that “the cops totally have the wrong person.”
“I’m almost 100 percent sure,” she said. “I know the type of person he is, and I know if he was this sick person . . . he would have done something to me because he had many chances to.”
Another supporter said the man in a video surveillance of the dapper fiend is simply not Vanderwoude.
“The guy has a shorter haircut. The eyebrows and face . . . It’s just not him,” this friend said.
Vanderwoude, who works for MVision, a Madison Avenue private-equity firm, was busted in his Park Slope apartment and charged with forcible touching, unlawful surveillance and sexual abuse. He was released Friday night on his own recognizance.
The former student at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a Christian school in Florida, allegedly groped strangers in four separate incidents.