A decide declared a mistrial on Wednesday within the rape trial of That ‘70s Show actor Danny Masterson after the jury said it had deadlocked on the charges, the Associated Press reported.
Masterson, 46, had faced three counts of rape by force or fear for allegedly sexually assaulting three women at his Hollywood Hills home in 2001 and 2003. Each of the women said that Masterson supplied them with alcohol and that when they became disoriented, he took them upstairs to his bedroom and violently raped them.
Masterson, who is best known for playing Steven Hyde on That ’70s Show, had pleaded not guilty to the charges and claimed that he only had consensual sex with the women. He could have faced a maximum sentence of 45 years to life in prison if found guilty.
Jurors said they had voted seven times over the last two days and were unable to reach a consensus on any of the three counts, according to the AP. Only two jurors voted to convict on the first count, four voted for conviction on the second count, and five voted to convict on the third count.
The judge has set a March date for a retrial.
The mistrial comes after two jurors tested positive for COVID-19 earlier this week and were replaced by two alternates, prompting deliberations to restart from scratch. The original jury had announced that they were deadlocked on Nov. 18 after three days of deliberations, but at that point, the judge ordered them to keep working to reach a unanimous decision.
The weekslong trial featured graphic testimony from the three women Masterson was charged with raping and a fourth woman who also accused him of sexual assault, as well as extensive discussion about the Church of Scientology.
Despite attempts by Masterson, a prominent Scientologist, to keep the church out of the trial, the institution and its practices took center stage as the three women, who are all former Scientologists, testified about how church officials allegedly tried to shield the actor from accountability.
One woman, identified during her testimony as J.B., told jurors that she thought Masterson was going to kill her as she described how the actor allegedly smothered her with a pillow and strangled her as he was sexually assaulting her in April 2003. It wasn’t till over a yr later that she first reported the incident to the police.
She testified that she did not go to the police sooner as a result of within the church group “you cannot report another Scientologist in good standing,” as she understood Masterson was, to the authorities.
She stated she “immediately would be guilty of a high crime” and expelled from the church, which means that no members might communicate or have any contact along with her. For J.B., that meant being lower off from her mother and father, who had been additionally Scientologists and whom she lived with and labored for, and all of her buddies.
“My life would be over,” she testified.
During closing arguments, Masterson’s legal professional Philip Cohen picked aside the ladies’s statements, highlighting inconsistencies in what they informed regulation enforcement, their household and buddies, and their testimony at trial. Cohen recommended that discrepancies raised sufficient cheap doubt that what they had been telling jurors was not true.
“[Prosecutors] want to win this case so badly that they have ignored right up until that closing argument,” Cohen stated. “They have ignored the blatant, obvious, overwhelming contradictions and fabrications that each Jane Doe has given you.”
Meanwhile, Los Angeles County Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller argued that such variations within the girls’s statements had been solely pure given the time that has handed, the immense trauma they skilled, and the truth that they needed to speak about it on separate events with completely different investigators asking completely different questions. He additionally famous that the foremost particulars within the girls’s tales remained constant through the years.
“Each time, they got to unearth what’s inside of them to bring that trauma out,” Mueller stated. “They did the best they can to answer the questions we asked them here in court.”
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