Apartment Landlord, Managers Financially Culpable in Rape Lawsuit : Courts: The victim’s lawyer argued that the basement was too dark and lacked a security system. The rapists were assigned only 5% culpability.

A jury has held the owner and managers of a Hollywood apartment building liable for $1.2 million in damages for the rape of a woman in a dark basement garage.

“My client really feels vindicated,” said attorney Aileen N. Goldstein. She said her client, Pamela Bauman, and Bauman’s boyfriend, Ian Berger, were evicted when he lost his job after the 1988 incident. Berger had stayed home to care for the traumatized rape victim.

“They treated them shabbily,” Goldstein said. “The jury was in tears when they heard about it, and so was I, and I’ve heard the story a lot.”

After a weeklong trial, the jury assigned 76% of the blame to the Charles C. Dunn management company and 19% to property owner David Hayden, leaving only 5% of culpability for the two rapists, both of whom are now in prison. (In civil cases tried in California, culpability is assigned in terms of percentages.)

”. . . (This) would seem to indicate that the jury, instead of considering the facts and law, instead considered sympathy for plaintiff and the desire to award the plaintiff a monetary award from the clients,” said attorney John Rea, who represented the landlord and managers.

He said Thursday that he is preparing motions asking for a new trial or a reduction in the monetary judgment, which was announced last week.

“We did not deny the rape occurred,” Rea said. “It was our position that the rapists were responsible for the rape, and that an incident of this nature was not reasonably foreseeable, and there was nothing my clients could have done to prevent criminals from engaging in this activity.”

Goldstein argued that the owner and managers were responsible because they failed to replace the bulbs in the basement lighting fixtures, more than half of which were not operating on the night of the attack.

She also said they should have installed a security system. The building, located near a freeway underpass that harbors vagrants, was often used as a refuge for crack cocaine smokers and other outsiders, some of who routinely did their laundry in the basement washing machines, she said.

Although the building is in a district reporting a relatively low crime rate, it is only a block from the high-crime area south of Franklin Avenue, she said.

But, Rea said, there was no evidence of previous serious crime at the property. “As far as anyone knows, it was the two rapists themselves who disabled the lighting as part of their M O,” he said.

The victim had gone to the basement about 10:30 p.m. to go out, Goldstein said. She was attacked by two men and put into her car, where she was sexually assaulted. She was then locked in the trunk of another car but managed to escape.

The rapists were captured shortly afterward on the basis of fingerprint identification. One was sentenced to 27 years in jail. The other, a juvenile at the time, got a five-year term.