New York Knicks guard Derrick Rose could not define “consent” when asked to do so during a deposition, according to attorneys for a woman who has accused the NBA player and two of his friends of raping her.
“When asked at his deposition, Mr. Rose did not have any answer for what consent meant to him,” Waukeen McCoy, one of the accuser’s attorneys, said Thursday during a conference call.
Later, when asked to expand on Rose’s inability to explain consent, McCoy read from what he said was a transcript of Rose’s deposition.
“I have it right here,” McCoy said. “The question was, ‘Do you have an understanding as to the word consent?’ The answer: ‘No, but can you tell me?’ The questioner: ‘I just wanted to know if you had an understanding.’ The answer: ‘No.’”
The civil case, brought by a 30-year-old Los Angeles woman who is known in the complaint as Jane Doe, is scheduled to go to trial Oct. 4. Doe and her attorneys spoke with multiple media outlets, including ThinkProgress, the Associated Press, and the New York Daily News, this week to deliver her side of the story. They say Rose’s attorneys have attempted to discredit her ahead of the trial. The conference call was meant to provide further details about the case.
The lawsuit, originally filed in August 2015, accuses Rose and two other men of breaking into the woman’s apartment and raping her. The woman had been at a party at Rose’s house in Beverly Hills earlier that night.
Rose said previously that he had sex with the woman on the night in question, but insisted it had been consensual and said her narrative about what happened was “completely false.” But Doe’s attorneys say Rose’s account is wrong, and highlight inconsistencies in his accounts of the night, his inability to define “consent,” and Doe’s unwillingness and inability to consent.
“He and his friends...essentially decided they would have sex with her no matter what,” McCoy said during the call. “They clearly knew she was extremely intoxicated, could not consent, and would never have consented.”
Doe, on the call, recounted in detail what she remembers from the night. She said she had previously told Rose she would not consent to group sex. She had also refused to send him nude pictures or sexually explicit videos when he requested them via text message, she said.
“He tried to get me to do stuff via video and I said no to that,” Doe said. “I wouldn’t send any videos or pictures of me, in any way. He just knew that’s how I was. When we had a falling out he knew I was over him asking me to engage...in a foursome. I told him he knew exactly how I was and if we were not going to be in a relationship because of that we would just remain friends. There was nothing leading to that night that would let his friends think that I would want to be with them at all.”
In an emailed statement, Rose’s attorneys accused the woman’s attorneys of pandering “to the media with headline grabbing theories.” Rose, they said, “looks forward to clearing his good name” at trial.
“Mr. Rose is confident that the evidence of plaintiff’s consent will be clear once all the facts are heard,” the statement said. “The plaintiff consented to sex each and every time they had sex during their twenty month relationship, including on the night that is the focus of this lawsuit.”
In a court filing in Los Angeles this week, Rose’s lawyers said Doe was on a “media tour” and requested that her name be made public.
Doe said on the call, though, that her primary aim is to show other women that they have the power to come forward if they are raped or assaulted, and that her anonymity is essential for doing that.
“I wanted to speak and come forward now so others can know that you can speak without the worry and added suffering that comes with knowing who you are and knowing your identity,” she said. “I know that I wanted to speak out to let people know out there that are in the same situation that I am that they can tell their story and...share what they’re dealing with without being a target.”
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.