“He threatened me. He told me next time he’d bring friends,” she said. “He also said that he’d make sure that everyone knew I was a slut if I said a word to anyone. That the only way to keep my ‘good girl’ reputation was to shut up.”

By the time Judge Shaw called a late lunch recess, four hours had passed. Rachel had no appetite. She doubted that anyone else did, either. She saw a social worker taking Kelly Moore down a corridor into a private room. Kelly would have the lunch recess to compose herself for the cross-examination.

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Guilty or Not Guilty

Season 3, Episode 9: The Testimony

As soon as court was adjourned for the day, I rushed out of the courtroom to the ladies’ restroom where—well, I’ll spare you the gory details. Other than to say that I’ve never felt as sick as I did that afternoon after watching a sixteen-year-old girl get tortured on the stand. All in the name of justice.

Rape cases can be more traumatic to try than murder cases because the brutalized victim is there to describe what happened to her. More than that. She lives with the nightmare every … single … day … of … her life.

Today K took the stand. She was asked about every tiny detail of what happened. And I mean every single detail. Did he ejaculate. Sexual positions. Everything. Can you imagine at the age of sixteen—hell, at any age—having to go into that level of detail to a room full of strangers? It was awful.

Her parents clutched each other’s hands as they listened to their daughter recall the worst night of her life. Her mother went through a packet of tissues. Her father, well, he’s an ex–naval officer. He’s been pretty stoic in court so far. But tears streamed down his cheeks as he listened to his daughter recount what happened to her on that lonely beach last October.

There wasn’t a sound in court except the rustle of paper as Mitch Akins went through a thick legal pad full of questions written out on page after page after page.

K never strayed from her testimony. Over and over and over again, she consistently said that she told Scott Blair to stop. She pushed his hands away. She told him that she wanted to go home. She told him that she didn’t want to have sex with him. He didn’t listen. He raped her. And when he was done, he raped her again. And again.

K’s testimony left me feeling queasy. I’m sure that it sickened the jury as well. Every day since the trial started, it’s been a running joke between the jury and the judge about what meal they would get for their lunch. Today it was obvious that the jury wasn’t interested in food when we adjourned. Who could possibly have an appetite after hearing that horrific testimony?

The defendant had a tendency to stare into space during K’s testimony. Dale Quinn, and his team of lawyers, scribbled furiously on their notepads and traded notes as K testified. They were already preparing for their redirect even before K left the stand.

Judge Shaw, who throughout the trial has been quick-tempered and sharp-tongued, was unusually pensive. He’s probably presided over his fair share of rape trials, but by the end of the session he looked drained.

K’s answer each time was consistently “no.” K insisted that nobody could possibly have mistaken her responses—weeping, struggling to get away, begging to go home, the way she tried to wriggle out of his grasp, holding her legs together and covering her genitals—as suggesting that she was a willing participant.

So, yeah, I was nauseous after I heard her testimony. But not half as sick as when K took the stand after the lunch recess for cross-examination.

Dale Quinn is charming. He comes across as a regular guy. He loves to mention his wife and twin babies. We know their names. We know that he and his wife put bands on their daughters’ wrists to tell them apart. He acts scatterbrained. Drops stuff. Spills stuff. And then pretends to forget his train of thought before going for the jugular with a question that nobody sees coming.

He acts dopey. He seems kind, and considerate and very friendly. It’s hard not to like him. If a survey was done, then I’m betting that Dale Quinn’s congeniality rating would be through the roof.

But when it came to shredding K’s testimony through cross-examination, Quinn was brutal. Not in an aggressive way. He kept his voice soft; he maintained his “aw shucks” routine. But he hammered away at K with question after question. It felt as if he was very slowly and carefully destroying her.

He asked her whether she got into the car voluntarily. She said, “Yes.”

He asked whether Scott was nice to her. She said, “Yes.”

He asked if she screamed in fear.

“I tried to scream at first, but nothing came out. I was so scared that I was paralyzed,” K answered.

“How was Scott to know that you were paralyzed with fear if you didn’t say anything?” he asked.

“I cried and begged him to leave me alone. And I kept on saying, ‘Please, no, please.’”

“How could you be paralyzed with fear and, at the same time, scream and beg him to leave you alone? Which one was it? Were you paralyzed with fear? Or did you scream and beg him to leave you alone?” He badgered her. “It can’t be all three.

“Isn’t it true that you wanted to sleep with Scott Blair? He’s famous. Good-looking. You wanted to have sex with him. Didn’t you?” Quinn asked her.

K broke down about ten minutes into the cross-examination. Quinn asked a detailed question about the rape. I can’t remember his exact question, but I think it was something about whether she’d moaned in pleasure. K turned deathly white. Her hands trembled. She took in a series of loud, sharp breaths. She was hyperventilating on the stand. Then she made a primal sound that I’ve only heard once before at a slaughterhouse. It was a deep, retching howl of pain that sent chills up the spine.

We all thought K was about to collapse. She was having a full-on panic attack. She had her face in her hands. She sounded as if she was choking. Her father held her mother back while a social worker attended to her.

“Your Honor,” said Alkins. “The witness has been on the stand for over four hours. It’s becoming too much. She’s just a child. Can we adjourn for the day?”

Dale Quinn tried to score points with the jury by showing he was equally concerned about her well-being. He rushed to bring her a glass of water and then made a big show of acting magnanimously by agreeing that she could leave the stand until she was feeling well enough to continue testifying. At the same time, he made it clear that he wasn’t done with her. Not by a long shot.

Quietly, during a sidebar I overheard, he told the judge that he hadn’t come close to finishing his cross-examination. “Eleven minutes, Your Honor,” he said. “The complainant testified for hours. All I had was eleven minutes with her. I can’t defend my client in eleven minutes.”

K is not done yet. She’ll have to come back to court to complete her cross-examination. She barely lasted eleven minutes today. Next time, it could last hours. Perhaps even days.

Mitch Alkins looked extremely concerned as he left court today. This from a man renowned for his poker face. He doesn’t have much of a case without her testimony. He needs K back on the stand. But at what cost?

One of the questions I keep asking myself is whether it’s worth it. When a person goes through a terrible trauma, her mind is conditioned to forget what happened. Memory loss from trauma is a protective mechanism. It helps us stay sane.

In this case, a sixteen-year-old girl is being asked to recount, in front of a large group of strangers, in public, every single traumatic, horrific moment of that night on the beach so that maybe, just maybe, her alleged rapist will be punished for what he did to her.

Is she doing that for herself, or for the public good? Will it give her closure if he goes to prison? Will it vindicate her? Or will it destroy her? The pain and trauma that she has to endure to get him convicted took a terrible toll on K today. She was trembling uncontrollably. Her eyes were glassy. Her expression was agonized.

The trauma of testifying in open court is one of the main reasons why so many rape victims opt not to testify and why so many rapes are never prosecuted.

We saw K barely able to formulate a sentence at times. We saw her grief, and her despair. We saw the way a social worker had to support her so that her legs wouldn’t buckle under her when she took the stand. And how that same social worker almost had to carry her away because she could barely walk when she got off the stand after that brief cross-examination.

We heard her saying “Sorry,” as she passed the prosecutors’ table, because she couldn’t bring herself to answer the horribly detailed and accusatory questions of the defense.

The question now is whether K will return to the stand to finish her cross-examination. If she doesn’t, then Scott Blair may well walk free. This is Rachel Krall on Guilty or Not Guilty, the podcast that puts you in the jury box.

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Rachel