Sex With Teen Was Against Her Will, Dumm Testifies

School fund-raiser Salle Dumm, who faced sometimes intense cross-examination Wednesday, insisted that the sex she and a Burbank High School football player engaged in last summer was against her will.

“I did not have sex with him,” Dumm, 51, testified in Superior Court. “He had sex with me and there’s a big difference in the verbiage.”

Dumm, on trial for unlawful sex with a minor and contributing to his delinquency, testified that she awoke in her bed to find that the then-17-year-old youth had climbed on top of her after the two and another adult had socialized at her home last year.

But Dumm was pressed by Deputy Dist. Atty. David Vaughn on why she never reported the encounter the night of July 14, 1995, as a sexual assault.

Dumm acknowledged that she never notified police, a rape crisis center, a hospital or any other authority about the youth forcing himself upon her.

“Did you call the police and tell them you’d been raped?” Vaughn asked.

“No, I did not,” she answered.

Vaughn asked whether Dumm was now accusing the youth, who is 18, of raping her.

“I don’t believe I used the word rape,” said Dumm, who also testified that he pressed her shoulders down on her bed.

The testimony came shortly before Dumm’s lawyer, Jacque Boyle, rested his case.

Jurors are expected to begin deliberating today following closing arguments by Boyle and Vaughn. If convicted, Dumm faces up to three years in prison.

The case shook the Burbank Unified School District and led to criminal charges against two football coaches and the resignation of the school board president.

In earlier testimony, the youth told Judge Thomas W. Stoever’s court that Dumm, president of the volunteer, nonprofit Burbank Educational Foundation, served him vodka and seduced him, saying “Do this for your team.”

The teenager testified that during a night of socializing at Dumm’s home in Burbank he had massaged Dumm’s neck and touched her breasts. Later that evening, he testified, he found a note instructing him to go to the bedroom, where he said he found Dumm nude and leaning against a bed.

Dumm testified that she did not seduce the youth and never intended to have sex with him or anyone else that night. She testified that she drank too much alcohol, vomited twice and was suffering from an intense headache, so she went to bed, leaving the youth and another guest to leave when they were ready.

Dumm testified there was little she could do to get free when she awoke. “He was on top of me,” she said Wednesday. “He was big.”