Luster’s Flight Defended

Fugitive rape suspect Andrew Luster is an innocent man who jumped bail and ran because he feared he would not receive a fair trial after a key prosecution witness lied, his attorney argued Thursday.

Defense lawyer Roger Diamond made no attempt during closing arguments in the Ventura County rape case to skirt the issue of his client’s flight.

Instead, Diamond hit it head-on by telling the jury that Luster, 39, a self-employed investor with no criminal record and great-grandson of cosmetics tycoon Max Factor, bolted in the middle of the trial because he was being persecuted, not prosecuted.

“This case has been totally distorted,” Diamond said. “It’s all baloney.”

Luster is charged with 87 criminal counts, including rape, poisoning and drug possession, for allegedly using an odorless, colorless anesthetic called GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate, to knock out three women before raping them at his Mussel Shoals beach house.

Luster faces multiple counts of rape by use of drugs and rape of unconscious victims. Jurors are expected to begin deliberations today.

On Wednesday, Deputy Dist. Atty. Tony Wold argued that Luster preyed on women “like a spider,” spiking cocktails with GHB to prevent them from resisting.

The alleged crimes came to light two years ago after a 21-year-old UC Santa Barbara student reported being raped by Luster after they met at a bar. Detectives investigating her report searched Luster’s home and found videotapes allegedly depicting rapes of two seemingly unconscious women, who can be heard snoring on the 30-minute recordings.

Wold told jurors the tapes are powerful evidence that show Luster raping, pinching, fondling, and in one case sodomizing and inserting objects into, unconscious women.

But Diamond played another tape for the jury Thursday, one in which Luster is seen engaging in consensual sex with one of the alleged rape victims.

Diamond told jurors his client liked to make homemade porn movies and he argued that the women seen on the prosecution tapes were only pretending to be asleep.

For nearly three hours, Diamond picked apart the prosecution case.

He called the evidence flimsy and the three purported rape victims liars whose testimony should be disregarded.

In contrast to the prosecutor’s slick high-tech presentation a day before, Diamond, whom the judge ordered to stay on the case after Luster fled, relied on hand-scrawled poster boards, which he explained to jurors by quipping: “We lost our funding.”

Diamond went on to describe the UCSB student, identified in the trial as Carey Doe, as an embarrassed party girl who made false claims of rape after drinking too much, skinny-dipping in the ocean and having sex with another man in the backseat of Luster’s car.

“There was no rape of Carey, none whatsoever,” he argued.

A second alleged victim, identified as Tonja Doe, is a scorned ex-lover who lied because she despises Luster after a vicious breakup during which he won a small-claims judgment against her, Diamond said.

Tonja Doe met Luster in a Santa Barbara bar on Oct. 17, 1996, while visiting her sister, also a UCSB student. She and Luster began dating and lived together for several months.

It was three years later, after Carey Doe reported being raped, that Tonja Doe learned from a detective that she was one of the women on the videotapes seized from Luster’s home. The tape bears a date stamp from the night they first met.

According to her testimony, Tonja Doe fell asleep after voluntarily taking GHB with Luster at his house, but she never agreed to have sex with him that night or to be videotaped. She said she has no memory of the sexual encounter seen on the tape.

When Diamond questioned her on the stand Dec. 20, the day before a two-week break in the trial, Tonja Doe denied ever having sex with Luster in front of a video camera -- a statement Diamond seized on as a lie.

Outside the presence of the jury that day, Diamond asked Judge Ken Riley for permission to play another videotape, also taken from Luster’s home, in which Luster and Tonja Doe are seen engaging in consensual sex before the camera. Riley would not allow the tape. He later reversed that ruling and allowed three short portions to be played for the jury.

On Thursday, Diamond told jurors that Tonja Doe’s “flat lie” went unanswered for two weeks and prompted his client to run.

“This is flight because of perjury uncorrected,” he said.

Prosecutors argued in rebuttal that Tonja Doe testified that she never agreed to sex with Luster on videotape and did not perjure herself.

Diamond played the consensual sex tape twice during his summation and argued that it is proof that Luster doesn’t have sex with unconscious women.

“She is not a rape victim, this is ridiculous,” Diamond said of Tonja Doe. “She lied to you ... you cannot convict anybody based on a witness who lied.”

On the subject of his client’s disappearance, Diamond told jurors they should not view Luster’s flight as consciousness of guilt. He likened Luster to the Harrison Ford character in the movie “The Fugitive,” an innocent man who fled after being wrongly convicted.

But in her rebuttal argument, Deputy Dist Atty. Maeve Fox told jurors the movie analogy doesn’t fit because the Ford character sat through his trial and defended his innocence. Luster didn’t wait for a verdict, she said, because he knew he was guilty.

As for Diamond’s argument that the victims are lying, Fox said it is not reasonable to believe that three separate accusations of rape by use of drugs against Luster are a fluke.

“Ultimately, that is what [the defense theory] comes down to in this case,” she said. “Lightning striking over and over and over again.”