Okay, I read the additional article in the Oregonian.
They say her phone call to Gore contradicts her claim she was terrified of him?
Actually, what she said was that she was terrified of him while they were in the hotel room alone.
Obviously, once she got out of the room she was no longer terrified that he would rape her. At that point, the question for her was whether to report the assault, or to pretend it never happened and get on with her massage business.
If she decided to pretend it never happened, and wanted to continue to get future business from the hotel, she wanted to make sure Gore was not going to complain to the hotel for her not releasing his “second chakra.”
Her problem is that it appears she decided to pretend it never happened, but then changed her mind. The strongest evidence on her side was that she contemporaneously told other people about it, and even called a rape hotline.
But I don’t blame the authorities for not going forward with the case. I mean what do you do with it? If I’m the local prosecuting attorney and I get handed this file, it’s a case that is almost impossible to win. If I charge him with a felony and need a unanimous verdict, that will be impossible if there are some democrats on the jury. Maybe I can get lucky with one honest democrat juror, but if there are at least a few democrat jurors, then no matter how strong my case is, I won’t be able to get a guilty verdict.
And even with an honest jury, it would be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt with ONLY the he-said she-said testimony and her contemporaneous statements. There is no physical evidence and there is nothing in her statement that would lead one to think there would be any physical evidence relevant to the matter. Whether there is anything to the other allegations by the other massage therapists, and whether the other evidence is solid enough that the judge would allow me to introduce it to show a pattern of behavior, is a major open question.
And there is a lot for the defense to work with. They could make much of the fact that she was inconsistent in whether to report it or to pretend it never happened and make nice with Gore and the hotel. Her exaggeration of the pants evidence is another weak point, and whether she would have motives to fabricate the charge. And facing money-is-no-limit defense counsel, who knows what dirt they would find about my star witness, the flakey New Age massage therapist.
So even if everything she said in her statement to police about what happened in that hotel room did in fact happen exactly as she said, this case is as a practical matter nearly impossible to win.