Defendant in Rape Trial Insists Sex Was Consensual

Deshawn Carter Stringer testified Tuesday he did have sex with a UCLA freshman in her campus dormitory room two years ago but insisted it was with her consent.

“It wasn’t just me, it wasn’t just her,” he testified in Los Angeles County Superior Court. “It was you and I.”

Stringer, along with Jamar Dawson and Chuwan Anthony, is on trial on charges of raping the UCLA student while they visited the Westwood campus on a high school field trip. All three defendants were football players at Carson High School. All are free on bail.

Addressing the defense attorneys as “Sir” and the prosecutor as “Ma’am,” Stringer, now 19 and a sophomore at Compton College, spoke loudly and clearly.

His account of Dec. 5, 2002, differed starkly from the woman’s.

The alleged victim, who testified earlier in the trial, said she was raped by all three men. But the defendants, all of whom have testified, said the sex was consensual.

If convicted, Stringer faces a maximum of 34 years in prison and Dawson and Anthony, both 18, a maximum of 42 years.

Stringer testified that he entered three residence halls during the field trip because he wanted to get to know the school, meet a well-known UCLA football player and meet as many college students as possible.

He said he entered the room of the woman, identified in court only as Jane Doe, for those reasons.

During cross-examination, Deputy Dist. Atty. Alyson Messenger suggested Stringer’s actions were not consensual but criminal. She portrayed the three defendants as not concerned with experiencing college life but with meeting women.

Facing a handful of family members and occasionally glancing at the jury, Stringer said he knocked on the woman’s door and introduced himself as a Florida State student transferring to UCLA to play football.

He testified that the woman said he could enter the room, so he did.

Stringer said he and the woman discussed the UCLA football team and the school’s nightlife. He said the woman sat on his lap, started flirting and the conversation turned sexual.

Earlier in the trial, the woman testified that Stringer had noticed a photo of her boyfriend and in a sexually suggestive tone pleaded with her to “show me [some things] he’s shown you.”

She also said she told Stringer no several times but that he raped her. She said she did not protest during the sex.

But Stringer testified he never heard the woman verbally or physically resist. He said she even unbuttoned her pants.

“During the course of time you were in Jane Doe’s room, did she ever say no?” Frank Williams Jr., defense attorney for Jamar Dawson, asked Tuesday.

“No,” Stringer replied.

“Did she ever say stop?”

“No.”

“Did she ever say don’t?”

“No.”

Stringer said before he left her room she gave him her phone number and e-mail address so they could possibly meet again.

The woman testified earlier that she gave the defendants her phone number because she “just wanted them to leave.”

Defendant Chuwan Anthony testified earlier that he and Dawson also had consensual sex with the student.

Anthony also said the woman lifted her hips to help him remove her pants.

“I went for her pants button to unbutton her pants and she didn’t say anything,” he said on Friday.

In a soft-spoken voice, Anthony testified that at no time did the woman physically or verbally resist.

“Everybody was into it together,” Anthony said on Monday when asked about the atmosphere in the victim’s dorm room.

“Everybody seemed to be comfortable.”

Testimony in the trial is expected to conclude today.