Defense Goes on the Offensive in Albert Trial

Marv Albert’s attorneys portrayed his accuser Tuesday as a lying opportunist, playing a tape they said caught her agreeing to give $50,000 and a new car to a witness to corroborate part of her story of a sexual assault by the NBC sportscaster.

But the 42-year-old woman testified she was joking when she laughingly agreed to the payment during the taped telephone conversation with a cabdriver.

“I really thought he was joking because he knows I don’t have that kind of money,” she said.

Defense attorney Roy Black did not explain how he obtained the tape, which was played during a dramatic day of testimony by the Vienna, Va., woman, who alleges that Albert, 56, demanded three-way sex, bit her 10 to 12 times and forced her to perform oral sex Feb. 12 at a Pentagon City hotel.

Prosecutors elicited graphic testimony about the alleged assault and played their own tape, a recording of the woman sobbing to a 911 operator, “He wanted me to be in a threesome, and I told him I didn’t do that. . . . My back’s all full of bites.”

The woman works at a Washington-area hotel and has a 16-year-old daughter and a 20-year-old son. She described the night in question and her relationship with Albert, who she said used the alias “Jim Davis” whenever he called her and gave her $750 over a span of more than 10 years. She said she and Albert had no history of rough sex.

Black tried to chip away at the woman’s credibility, pointing out inconsistencies in her testimony, asking why she hadn’t called police from the suite right after the alleged biting. He also implied she had been collecting evidence against Albert for years, was deeply in debt and made the allegations to cash in on the relationship.

The surprise of the day was the tape of her conversation with cabdriver Walter Brody, a longtime friend of the woman who had driven Albert on at least one occasion. On the recording, Brody asks the woman what he is supposed to tell prosecutors, and she says, “When you were taking him back to the hotel [one night], he asked you to get a boy. . . . We’ve got to get that tight.”

The woman testified she was simply repeating what Brody previously had told her and that she used the word “tight” to mean that the prosecution needed time to investigate his story.

The woman testified that as she and Albert watched a pornographic film showing multiple-partner sex on the night of the alleged attack, Albert modeled black underwear and complained she should have brought along another man so they could be doing what was being done in the film.

When they adjourned to the bedroom of the 10th-floor suite, she said, he shoved her onto the bed. “He started biting me . . . full-mouth biting. I told him to stop. It was hurting a lot. . . . He said: ‘Oh, you’re enjoying this. You enjoy rough sex.’ ”

Then, she continued, after she told Albert she was not taking birth-control pills, he forced her to perform oral sex. A doctor who examined the woman testified he had found an abrasion inside her cheek.

When Black tried to ask the woman whether she had had rough sex with others, Arlington Circuit Judge Benjamin N.A. Kendrick would not let him finish the question. Kendrick also ruled that the jury could not hear other information about the woman’s past, including that she had spent a night in a mental hospital and had threatened a former boyfriend.