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A defense lawyer for William “Pierre” Sanders, in turn, questioned whether the victim’s story wasn’t “a bunch of hooey.”
Sanders, 34, assaulted the boy in the family’s studio apartment, then tried to drive him to the event, Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Demetra Maurice said during yesterday’s openings in the sex trial.
Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Demetra Maurice (STORY / PHOTOS: CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter Mary K. Miraglia)
The youngster was confused and frightened, however, and called his father to say that he wasn’t going in, she told jurors.
The father testified yesterday that his son was “incredibly upset” on the phone the night of the event.
“It was a huge deal over something that I just couldn’t understand,” the father said. “I told him, ‘You can still salvage this.’ But his voice was broken, he was crying, and he said ‘I just want to go home.’ I couldn’t understand it.”
This began a downward spiral of changes in the boy’s behavior and attitude toward school work, athletics and life, he said.
After several weeks, the boy told his father that Sanders had molested him years earlier.
The father said he sought to rebuild his son’s confidence while trying to remove Sanders from the family sphere by getting him a job in Atlanta. Sanders is from Ellenwood, GA.
“In my mind, I wanted to make sure [his son] knew it didn’t have to be something that marked him, that he was just a little boy,” he told jurors. “The important thing was to get beyond it, and we would help him. It didn’t have to mark him.”
He didn’t take action against Pierre, he said, because, “despicable as it was, the key thing was to get my son past it.”
The youngster continued to withdraw and underperform, however. Then came the admission of the June 2010 rape, the father testified.
“I asked, ‘Why didn’t you push him off?’ And he said the way he was being held, he couldn’t. He felt like he was paralyzed.”
When the father went to school to discuss helping his son, a counselor said she was required to notify the police. He said he then made a statement “as soon as they asked me for one.”
Defense attorney Robert N. Kalisch told jurors the claims don’t add up.
“Is it just a boatload of hooey?” he asked.
The family had a problem, Kalisch said: Sanders wasn’t succeeding as a music headliner, but his brother was.
The victim’s mother met the Sanders brothers in Atlanta. She joined them with two cousins to create a pop gospel group called Generation J (for Jesus) in 1998.
The brothers were originally scheduled to appear on “American Idol.” Aaron Sanders made it, but William didn’t, Kalisch explained.
The family is “very wealthy,” he told jurors. “They live on Central Park South, if that means anything to you. It is show business. That is what they were grooming [William Sanders] for.
“When his career was no longer going so well, they had a problem.”
The trial is scheduled to continue Tuesday, when the victim is expected to testify.
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