*Jury selection began this week for NBA star Derrick Rose’s $21 million rape lawsuit. Rose and two friends are accused of gang raping an incapacitated woman he dated on and off in the two years prior to the August 2013 incident at her apartment.
Rose and his alleged accomplices deny the allegations and maintain that the sex was consensual.
“I feel like I’m innocent and I feel like I didn’t do anything wrong,” Rose told reporters two weeks ago. He is expected to attend portions of the trial, though he may miss jury selection because it conflicts with the Knicks preseason opener in Houston, according to his lawyer.
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Lawyers for the accuser believe Rose violated a gag order by speaking about the case at a press conference tied to his Tuesday game in Houston, Jet magazine reports.
“That’s one of the reasons I wanted to take it to court,” the NBA star said Tuesday, “because I didn’t want to settle.”
The accuser claims she consumed a lot of alcohol before leaving a house that Rose rented in Beverly Hills and passing out in her apartment. She said Rose and his friends, Randall Hampton and Ryan Allen, let themselves into her apartment in the early morning and raped her.
She said when she woke up the next morning, her dress was over her head and a used condom was on the floor.
“I felt just dirty,” she told the AP. “I didn’t want to believe it was true.”
The woman claimed she was drugged, though Rose’s lawyers said there’s no evidence of that. The lawyer also notes how the accuser was alert when she let Rose and his friends in through two locked doors, and she cleaned up after sex.
She didn’t report the incident to police until last year – two years after the alleged rape, which is when she filed suit. The Los Angeles Police Department still has an open investigation.
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