Teen-Ager Tells Court She Had Sex With ROTC Leader : Trial: The former Redondo Union student testifies that she was 15 when former Marine Allen Roth first molested her.

In a voice that cracked with emotion several times, a former Redondo Union High School student testified Thursday that she had sex, beginning at age 15, with the then-director of the school’s ROTC program.

During the first day of testimony in the sexual molestation trial of retired Marine Master Gunnery Sgt. Allen Roth, 65, jurors in a Torrance courtroom also heard 30 minutes of tape-recorded conversations between the decorated war veteran and the teen-ager in which Roth does not acknowledge, but never denies, the teen-ager’s repeated references to sex between the two.

“Did you love me?” the teen-ager asks Roth near the end of one conversation, recorded by Redondo Beach police detectives.

“Did I love you?” Roth responds.

“Yes,” the teen-ager says.

“I don’t think there was love even involved,” Roth replies.

The tape was made Dec. 4, only hours after the teen-ager told the school principal and Redondo Beach police that she had been molested by Roth beginning in her freshman year, when she joined the school’s award-winning ROTC program the first day of school.

Roth was arrested Dec. 5 and is charged with four counts of oral copulation with a minor and one count of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

Through his attorney, Tony Capozzola, Roth has denied the charges. If convicted, he faces more than five years in prison.

Roth has been on unpaid leave of absence from the school since his arrest.

Appearing as the opening witness in the case, the woman, who turned 18 last month, testified for nearly three hours about her alleged sexual encounters with Roth. The teen-ager, answering questions by Deputy Dist. Atty. Ron Geltz, offered explicit details of the alleged encounters while Roth, dressed in his Marine Corps uniform, sat ramrod straight in the courtroom.

Throughout most of her testimony, the teen-ager was composed. But several times, her eyes welled with tears and her voice broke as she testified that over a period of about two years, she and Roth had sex three times at the ROTC offices at school and once at his home.

On the first of those alleged incidents, in June, 1988, the young woman testified that she and Roth were alone in the ROTC offices when he approached her. “He came up to me and, um, hugged me and kissed me,” she said.

Moments later, she testified, Roth began molesting her.

“Was he touching you?” Geltz asked.

“Yes,” she said, her voice cracking. “He had his hands on my chest, on my breasts.”

After having sexual intercourse, the teen-ager testified, she told Roth, “Do you know you could get in trouble for this?” She testified that Roth responded, “You know, you can too.”

After that incident, the woman testified, she and Roth engaged in oral sex three times during her years in the ROTC program. During that time, she said, she received several gifts from Roth, including a dozen red roses and a ring with 17 tiny diamonds to mark her 17th birthday on July 4 last year.

But it was not until the next month, the teen-ager testified, that she told anyone of the sexual encounters. Confiding first in the manager of a video store where she worked and some months later in a friend at school, the woman said, she was finally persuaded to talk to the school’s principal.

The day she went to the principal in December, the teen-ager was interviewed by Redondo Beach police, who persuaded her to call Roth, first at home and then at the ROTC offices. Those conversations were recorded.

Minutes into the first conversation, the teen-ager asks Roth to pay for her to see a therapist, claiming that she had become increasingly distraught over their sexual encounters. Roth never directly answers the request, suggesting instead that the two talk over her concerns at school, rather than over the telephone.

Later, when Roth says he is uncomfortable talking to her from his home, the first conversation ends. At that point, the conversation picks up about an hour later after Roth travels to his office at school and is called again by the teen-ager just before 8 p.m.

In the second conversation, the teen-ager makes further references to sexual relations, asking Roth at one point if it was sex or her abilities as a cadet that led him to promote her several times in the ROTC program.

“No, I told you that there was no way. I told you a long time ago that you earned everything you got straight across the board. . . . I don’t think anybody got anything for nothing anyway; they worked for it,” Roth says.

“Right, but what was the sex for then? I mean, gee, I was only like what, 15? I was only 15,” the teen-ager says. “I mean, now that I look back at it, were you taking advantage of me or something?”

“I don’t think anybody took advantage of anybody, for anything,” Roth replies, unsuccessfully urging the teen-ager to visit him during school so they could talk.

When the teen-ager voices reluctance to talk alone with Roth in his office, he responds that they could meet on the school grounds. “I think you and I should talk outside. . . . Just the two of us outside . . . in front of God and everybody outside and that’s not a problem,” he says.

After the end of the first day’s proceedings, with further testimony expected from the teen-ager, Geltz described the tape as only one piece of evidence in the case that corroborates the young woman’s story.

But Capozzola said the tapes prove only that the teen-ager is “a great actress” bent on destroying Roth’s career and winning a $10-million claim filed by her family against the school district.

“This case is all about a Marine Corps hero from Iwo Jima” and other military campaigns, Capozzola said. “And in my opinion, this young lady is doing her level best to degrade the uniform and degrade the man, with $10 million at the end of the rainbow if she succeeds.”

Testimony in the case is scheduled to resume Monday.