The fate of former prosecutor Gary Zerola, charged with raping a 23-year-old woman in 2016, is about to be in the hands of the Suffolk Superior Court jury pool composed of eight women and six men — two of whom are alternates.
Zerola, 51, is charged with two counts of rape, which the prosecution has said occurred at around 7 a.m. on Nov. 10, 2016, on a couch in an apartment on Myrtle Street in Beacon Hill, which is owned by a friend of Zerola’s who did not testify in the trial.
Defense attorney Joseph Krowski Jr. made his thunderous closing argument first on Friday, the last day of the trial which began on Tuesday, in which he repeatedly said that his client’s accuser is a “liar” and called the allegations of rape “effing absurd.”
“You know she’s lying when you see her lips moving,” Krowski said of the alleged victim in the case. “If you’re telling the truth it’s easy to get your story straight. But when you lie it’s so much harder because you’re trying to remember the lies you told in the past.”
The Herald does not name victims of sexual assault, alleged or otherwise.
He said that the alleged victim purposely misled police and prosecutors about her prior interactions with Zerola in order to concoct these “false allegations” of rape against his client.
Those include that her repeated assertion that the pair had never been alone socially, despite the fact that the pair took a 2:30 a.m. ride on Zerola’s motorcycle from his Salem apartment during her birthday months before the alleged rape.
Another is that she and the prosecutors made out Zerola to be creepily touchy and kissy toward the alleged victim at bars ahead of going to the apartment where the alleged crime occurred, but that the defense had found another SnapChat video where the alleged victim had also kissed Zerola, and on the lips no less.
“Did she have a come to Jesus moment” to finally admit these things “… No!” Krowski said, saying that she only disclosed these things when the defense, “the party with no burden of proof,” found evidence that exposed them.
Krowski’s ire was not just directed at the alleged victim but also at her best friend, and the woman in a “sexual relationship,” as multiple testimonies have established, with Zerola, who he said has had a “selective” memory of all events involving the parties — including the night in question — designed specifically to make his client look bad.
Prosecutor Tom Brant said in his closing argument that the “The defense wants you to focus everywhere else than what happened on Nov. 10, 2016” and that as jurors, they should focus only on what occurred surrounding the crimes and that everything else is a distraction.
“The Commonwealth has a burden to prove lack of consent … we welcome that burden. Consent isn’t implied or assumed,” Brant said. “Asking for a motorcycle ride three months before is not consent … following a SnapChat story is not consent … kissing someone at a bar is not consent.”
Brant said that her lack of action immediately following the alleged rape, including taking a car ride from Zerola to go back to her car at Wellington Station instead of calling a taxi or an Uber, was due to fear and confusion over what to do: “The defendant, her rapist, is right there … she’s 23 years old, he’s a 45 year old defense attorney … nobody’s going to believe her.”
Brant said that when the defendant saw the alleged victim asleep on the couch, he thought “I can do this, I’m Gary ‘Big Time Lawyer’ Zerola,” a powerful line that defense immediately objected to and Judge Michael Ricciuti ordered struck from the record both then and just before his jury instructions following the arguments.
“Gary Zerola committed two rapes. One while she was asleep and one while she was waking u,” Brant said. “There was no consent when she was sleeping and there was no consent when she said ‘Get the (expletive) off me.’ … That’s rape.”
This is a developing story.