A woman who said that Manhattan corporate attorney and accused serial rapist Matthew Nilo raped her in Charlestown 15 years ago has spoken out about the traumatizing experience.
“I kept thinking, ‘Is this a nightmare? I’m going to wake up,’” Lori Pinkham, who was working as a promoter for nightclubs in the Boston area at the time of the 2007 incident, told “Good Morning America” this morning.
“I had been out at one of the clubs I was doing promotions for and I was walking to my car. He pulled up in his car next to me and kind of cut me off and started yelling something to me like, ‘Hey, oh hey I saw you, do you need a ride?’ I was like, ‘No, I’m ok,’ and that’s when I saw he had a gun in his hand. And he just said, ‘Get in the car,’” she said. “I just got really scared and I got in the car.”
“I started getting scared and he kept driving. As soon as we got to Charlestown and he stopped the car, I tried to run as fast as I could and he caught up to me and that’s when he raped me,” she continued. “It took away my freedom, honestly.”
Nilo, 35, who now lives in New Jersey, has been linked to a series of sexual assaults that occurred over a decade ago on Terminal Street in Charlestown, Suffolk County prosecutors allege. He was arraigned last week in Boston on three counts of aggravated rape, two counts of kidnapping, one count of assault with intent to rape, and one count of indecent assault and battery. Bail had been set at $500,000.
His attorney Joseph Cataldo said Monday that his client would post bail but the Good Morning American clip said that he was still in custody at the time the story aired.
Pinkham told Good Morning America that she would testify if prosecutors asked.
“It’s been horrible. A big part of my life stopped that day,” Pinkham said in her GMA interview.. “I couldn’t work. I didn’t want to spend time with anybody. Every day, I’ve lived in fear.”
Nilo’s arrest was announced by Boston Police Commissioner Michael Cox, Boston FBI Special Agent in Charge Joseph Bonavolonta and Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden in an evening news conference at BPD headquarters on May 30.
He was arrested at his home in Weehawken, N.J., earlier that day. On June 2 he waived an extradition hearing in Hudson County, N.J. He appeared for his arraignment on the charges in Boston on June 5.
At that arraignment, more details emerged, including that investigators obtained a sample of his DNA from a glass and utensils at a corporate event.
That sample, prosecutors said, linked him to four rapes in the Terminal Street area of Charlestown on Aug. 18, 2007; Nov. 22, 2007; Aug. 5, 2008; and Dec. 23, 2008.
The first two alleged victims were each 23 years old at the time, each reported being out at a bar for a high school reunion on State Street when they accepted a ride from a man under false pretenses, who prosecutors say is Nilo.
Both reported being driven to a location around Terminal Street, threatened with weapons, ordered out of the car and forcibly raped, prosecutors detailed.
The third alleged victim, a 36-year-old woman, said she was panhandling in the Boston Common when a young man bribed her to get into his car. He then drove her to Terminal Street and raped her at gunpoint.
In the December 2008 alleged rape, prosecutors said Nilo targeted a 44-year-old woman jogging near Terminal Street.
Pinkham’s mother Janine McGovern, sitting beside her daughter for the GMA interview, said that her daughter’s experience is “heartbreaking.”
“I feel like there’s a part of her that didn’t get to continue her life. So she didn’t finish growing up to become a woman with a career and a family,” she said. “And I know that breaks her heart.”
