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The encounters occurred in Curtis Franklin’s tow truck, the bedroom of his house after his wife left early for work, her bedroom, in parking lots, on secluded roads, and in Oregon when she saved money from her summer job working for Franklin’s father-in-law at Speedway 17 in Mahwah and went to visit him and his family for six weeks — when she was 14 — she said.
It continued even when she was hobbled with an injury: “I had knee surgery and was wearing a cast and he came in my bedroom and we had sex,” the woman, now 29, testified yesterday in Superior Court in Hackensack.
She returned to the witness stand this morning in the underage sex trial of Franklin, who already is doing time for having sex with the woman’s sister when she, too, was a minor.
- CVP EXCLUSIVE: A defense attorney for Mahwah youth pastor Curtis Franklin today called his trial on charges of having sex with an underage congregant “a garden-variety ‘he-said / she-said’ case.” However, an assistant Bergen County prosecutor outlined a long-term relationship “conducted in secret” in several places over four years, beginning when the girl was 12. READ MORE….
“I felt nasty, like trash,” the woman testified yesterday, saying she had sex with Franklin two to three times a month, beginning with him masturbating on her when she was 12.
The encounters eventually became intercourse in his tow truck by the time she was 15, she said.
“Why did you do it?” Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Kenneth Ralph asked.
“I felt like I should,” she said. “I thought this was normal. I thought was it was love … special … something special between us.”
All along, she told jurors, Franklin insisted that “when I was 16, we’d run away.”
So on or shortly after her 16th birthday, “I approached him and said, ‘So are we going to run away?’ And he asked me, ‘Don’t you want to go to heaven?’
“This isn’t the way it was supposed to be,” she recalled. “I was heartbroken. I thought what he said was true.”
The sexual relationship ended when she went away to Bible college, the woman said.
The night before she left, she said, they had sex in his tow truck.
“In the morning I was leaving with a caravan of people, and driving down the road I just started crying,” she testified. “I felt this release come over me, like I had been trapped in something and I wasn’t any more. I wasn’t sad to be leaving him.
“It was a release cry.”
“Up to then, did you ever tell anyone?” Ralph asked.
“No,” the woman answered, her voice catching with emotion.
“There was no one I could approach,” she said. “I felt like I was a sinner, and he was a sinner, and this is what sinners do.”
It would remain with her, she said, until Dec. 2, 2009, when a phone chat with her mother and younger sister convinced her to drive to Bergen County and swear out a formal complaint against Franklin for illegally having under-aged sex with her.
STORY / PHOTOS: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
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