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Superior Court Judge James J. Guida has ordered both sides to return next Friday, when, he said, he will decide whether to accept Adel Baladi’s request or sentence him, anyway.
Baladi originally protested his innocence and was prepared to go to trial. Then Assistant Bergen County Prosecutor Dion Findley announced that two women he was accused of doing the same thing to were prepared to travel from Pennsylvania and California to testify against him.
Guida in June said he would allow their testimony in a trial, even though the charges in both cases were downgraded, sent to Municipal Court in Garfield and eventually dismissed.
Baladi, a native of Syria who has a wife and teenage son, said both women were mistaken: They were rubbed by a cellphone in his pocket.
He initially said the same thing in the more recent case. However, he changed the story during a June hearing, when he agreed to accept probation for a year in return for a guilty plea to a single count of criminal sexual contact.
Baladi told Guida that he deliberately lured the woman into bending into her car to turn on her air conditioner at his auto repair shop. He said then began grinding his groin area into her rear for sexual gratification.
She pushed him away, Baladi said, after which he said he told her: “I’m sorry. You really turn me on.”
Following his arrest last year, Baladi applied for Pre-trial Intervention, a special program that allows participants to clear their records if they stay out of trouble for a specified length of time. He was denied, however.
“Based on the facts of this case, the offense can hardly be considered a victimless crime,” wrote senior probation officer Michael Killeen.
The victim also requested that Baladi be denied PTI “not only for my protection but for other women that he encounters in the future,” Killeen added.
STORY / PHOTO: Mary K. Miraglia, CLIFFVIEW PILOT Courthouse Reporter
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