Danny Masterson was found guilty on two out of the three charges against him by the jury in his rape retrial today.
After the jury was dismissed and the judgments were announced, Judge Charlaine Olemdo determined that Masterson posed a flight risk. Despite the actor’s attorneys’ protests, he was handcuffed and hauled into custody with a confused expression on his face. August 4 has been set aside as the date for the following motions hearing in the case. A hearing for sentencing has not yet been scheduled.
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The actor is facing 30 years behind bars on the two counts he was found guilty of. Yet, similar to the first trial that ended late last year, the jurors were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on sexual assault charges against Masterson.
Prosecutors retried Masterson in December after a mistrial due to a hung jury. They claimed that between 2001 and 2003, he sexually assaulted three women in his Hollywood Hills home. They informed the jury that he had spiked the women’s drinks in order to rape them. All three women were members of the church at the time, and they claimed he utilized his status there to evade punishment for many years.
No witnesses were cited by Masterson’s attorneys, and he declined to testify. The defense asserted that the acts were consensual and worked to undermine the women’s accounts by calling attention to changes and contradictions that they claimed indicated collaboration between the parties.
“If you decide that a witness deliberately lied about something in this case,” defense attorney Philip Cohen told jurors, going through their instructions in his closing argument, “You should consider not believing anything that witness says.”
