Luster on Tape Denies Raping Student

While rape suspect Andrew Luster remained a fugitive for a fifth day, his voice resonated through a Ventura County courtroom Friday in a videotaped interview he gave police after his arrest two years ago.

On the three-hour tape presented by prosecutors, Luster repeatedly denied raping a university student after they met at a Santa Barbara bar and drove to his beach home near Ventura in July 2000.

“We did have consensual sex, completely consensual,” Luster told Sheriff’s Det. Melissa Smith during the interview shown to jurors in its entirety. “I don’t know where she gets assault. There was no struggling, no saying, ‘No, no, no,’ nothing like that.”

Luster, the 39-year-old great-grandson of cosmetics magnate Max Factor, also denied early in the interview that he drugged the then 21-year-old woman, identified as Carey Doe, before having sex with her.

Prosecutors contend that Luster used the date-rape drug gamma hydroxybutyrate, also known as GHB and liquid Ecstasy, to render women unconscious for sex.

“I’m a homeowner; I’ve lived in that neighborhood all of my life,” he told Smith.

“I can’t afford to screw up. I don’t screw up.”

Smith seized on Luster’s denial, telling him that before his arrest she listened in on a telephone call -- set up by detectives between Carey Doe and Luster -- in which he admitted giving her the drug.

Luster then acknowledged putting some liquid Ecstasy in both of their drinks but told Smith he did so with her consent.

He said Doe was conscious when they had sex and was a willing participant.

“She totally dug it,” said Luster, barefoot and dressed in shorts and white tank top. “There was no negativity at all; she was loving it.”

The college student reported the encounter to Ventura County sheriff’s deputies.

They arrested Luster after searching his home and recovering videotapes that allegedly depict the 1996 and 1997 rapes of two comatose women.

Luster is charged with 87 criminal counts, including the rapes of three women, drug possession and poisoning.

He faces a life prison sentence if convicted.

Defense attorneys maintain that all three women consented to taking the drug and having sex, and they have characterized the videotapes as homemade porn that Luster intended to sell on the Internet.

Last weekend, at the end of a two-week break in the proceedings, Luster allegedly jumped his $1-million bail and is thought to have fled the country.

Two years ago, after Luster’s arrest outside his Mussel Shoals home, investigators drove him to Sheriff’s Department headquarters and handcuffed him to an interview table.

He waived his rights to an attorney and told authorities he had done nothing wrong.

On the tape, Luster described driving from the bar to his home with Carey Doe and two other men.

He said Doe had sex with one of the men during the drive.

Once they arrived, Doe walked out on a pier, removed her dress and jumped into the ocean, he said.

“She liked me,” Luster told Smith. “We seemed to hit it off and we had some chemistry.”

In another point in the tape, when asked by Smith why Doe would say she had been raped, Luster said it could be that she grew embarrassed or felt guilty about having sex with a man she had just met.

“I love women, but I would never, ever force one to have sex with me,” he said.

Luster repeatedly told authorities that he was considered an upstanding citizen in his beachfront neighborhood, an avid surfer who never had any run-ins with police and was viewed as a friend to law enforcement.

“If the D.A. files charges, it’s going to go to a jury, and she’s going to look like a fool,” Luster said during the interview.

“I’m going to get a top-notch lawyer and she’ll get cross-examined and ripped to pieces.”Before Luster was booked into Ventura County Jail, another detective, Joe Evans, confronted him about drugs and photos of naked women found during a search of his house.

Evans said he was concerned because some of the women appeared to be unconscious.

Luster said all of the photos were taken with the women’s consent.