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Even afterward, the woman said nothing about the alleged incident for eight years, choosing to go on with her life as before “to maintain a relationship with her family,” Calviello told jurors, adding that her mother had a heart condition.
“What would you do?” the assistant prosecutor asked them, nothing that New Jersey doesn’t have a statute of limitations for rape. “When you’re a victim of a sexual assault, a good fairy doesn’t come down with a handbook and tell you how to react.
“Everybody is different,” he said. “Let us not lose sight: There is no handbook.”
The time gap could become a central point of the trial. As Calviello admitted, he has no crime scene, DNA or stained garment – “only the victim and her story.”
Defense attorney Dennis Calo called the woman a “manipulative person” who had been surreptitiously taping phone conversations with associates “for years” because “she hates them.”
“She’s dishonest and manipulative within the context of those who know her best,” he told jurors.
Calo pointed to the woman’s statement to investigators that she took a muscle relaxer and pain killers earlier that evening – which he said he was able to disprove when he subpoenaed records and found that no prescriptions were written at Hackensack University Medical Center or filled by her pharmacy.
He also produced a stipulation by prosecutors that “the alleged victim was only advised to take Tylenol and was prescribed no other medications.”
Calviello, the prosecutor, produced what he said was a recorded phone call between Wedra and the woman. The quality of the recording is so poor that jurors were given headphones to listen to it. Calviello’s first witness was an investigator who testified about the process of enhancing the file.
On it, the prosecutor said, Wedra admits that he raped her.
“I broke my word. I know what I did, I was wrong. I shouldn’t have done it,” Calviello said Wedra told her. “I have gone through my mind a million times, and I can’t come up with an answer.”
Calo, however, said that the prosecutor won’t be able to prove his case.
“That man, Mr. Wedra, is not entitled to your bias, your sympathy, or your prejudice,” the defense attorney told jurors.
“I want you to get a good look at him,” Calo said. “He is protected by the United States Constitution. He is presumed to be innocent.
“You must assume at this point he did not do this, and at every stage of this proceeding, until the state proves beyond a reasonable doubt [that he did],” he said.
PHOTO / STORY: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
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