She slowly drank one beer, then a second.
When the 28-year-old accountant returned to her barstool, her glass of wine was waiting.
Leigh took a sip.
The pain felt as if he were ripping her in two.
Her limbs were leaden, her mind sluggish.
“Stop, like stop,” Leigh mumbled.
Leigh slid back into unconsciousness but kept resurfacing that endless night to discover Marsalis violating her limp body.
Finally, she opened her eyes to an apartment filled with late-morning light.
“I had a wonderful time last night.
I hope you did, too,” she says he told her, staring into her eyes.
Leigh felt groggy and confused as she pulled on her jeans.
Am I reading the situation wrong?
Leigh wondered as she drove herself home.
Would a rapist act this nicely?
Because in far too many instances, juries don’t believe date rape exists.
“Juries are extremely resistant.”
When they know each other longer than 24 hours, the conviction rate falls to 35 percent.
Even fewer, 29 percent, of intimate partners and exes are punished.
“She has terrible injuries, and she leaps up and reports it immediately to the police.
Anything that falls short of that story is questionable.”
Incredibly, that analysis holds true even in a situation as extreme as that of Marsalis.
This is not a date, she reassured herself; rather, it was a fact-finding mission.
“I wanted to confront him about what happened.
I needed to figure out what was going on,” Leigh remembers.
She hadn’t told anyone she feared she’d been raped.
She needed more information first, some validation of her suspicions.
“And all that went wrong,” Leigh whispers, eyes glazing with tears.
Then, she says, she blacked out.
As Leigh would later tell the court, she woke up in Marsalis’s bed again.
He was on top of her, once again having sex with her inert body.
“It was just devastating,” Leigh says.
She spends a long moment composing herself, tucking wisps of hair behind her ears.
“I made the stupidest decision to go out with him that second time,” she says finally.
“I think to myself all the time, How could I have done something like that?
But I did.”
How could Leigh have done such a thing?
Yet the majority of the 10 women who ultimately testified against Marsalis had contact with him afterward.
Two of his accusers befriended him.
Two others went on to briefly date Marsalis.
By establishing a relationship on her own terms, a person feeling helpless can reclaim her lost dignity.
“We can’t believe someone would do something so terrible to us,” Valliere says.
“We work under the assumption that this must be something we can understand through talking it over.”
It’s the classic female response to tackling a problem: Let’s discuss it.
And prosecutors argue that Marsalis skillfully exploited that confusion.
Marsalis asked her out for a drink at a nearby bar.
“I was bleeding and hurting,” she remembers.
“But I just didn’t remember anything.
And I didn’t want to acknowledge that I’d been raped.”
But when she came face-to-face with him at the building’s Christmas party, she acted perfectly friendly.
“I was trying to be logical instead of emotional.”
Nevertheless, Marie’s subconscious couldn’t forget.
She began withdrawing socially and starving herself.
“I called him,” she says hollowly.
And Marsalis visited her, playing the role of doctor by wearing a stethoscope and flipping through her chart.
Marie made her way to the shower, curled up under the water and cried.
Yet she didn’t even consider calling the police.
Think most women would behave differentlythat in the same situation, they would jump up and call 911?
Many survivors assume they won’t be believed.
“I brought myself to this situation,” Leigh explains, voice surging with emotion.
“And I had done it not once, but twice.
Who in the world’s gonna believe that?”
Leigh never called the police.
Instead, she did her best to move on.
“And I knew, immediately.”
The agent told Leigh that Marsalis had recently been tried for the rapes of three other women.
The first accuser had called the police in March 2005roughly two weeks after Leigh’s attack.
Among them was a 27-year-old lawyer who told an uncannily similar tale.
But during the weeklong trial, the case had come undone.
But testing was not completed and the syringe was not introduced as evidence.
It was the behavior of the women, however, that the defense used to truly torpedo the case.
The apartment manager had become friends with Marsalis.
The attorney had gone on to have a short relationship with him.
Neither had immediately called police or gone to a hospital for a rape-kit exam.
As for the pharmacist, she had waited more than a month to make a report.
The jury had acquitted Marsalis on all counts.
Already in custody during his first trial, he was denied bail again and sent immediately back to jail.
Marie, too, was contacted by the D.A.
She was reluctant, but they told her that her story was compelling enough to bolster the other cases.
“I wouldn’t have done it if it was just me,” Marie says.
“But because I could help the others, I felt it was something I had to do.”
So the two women joined five others to face down Marsalis in court.
They had safety in numbers; no way could they lose this time.
The core of the defense’s theory was simple: All seven women were lying.
Each had gotten drunk, had consensual sex with Marsalis and regretted it.
“This is not the forum for that!”
Hexstall told the jury in his closing argument.
“Throw a brick through his car window, slash his tires.
The jury sat rapt.
“All of these women wanted to date Jeffrey Marsalis,” he said.
“They all went out drinking.
They all went out with Dr. Jeff, and they all went out drinking alcohol.”
The women’s composure may not have helped their standing with the jury.
But experts say many jurors expect women to weep when they are talking about a rape.
“Of course, if you cry too much, you’re too hysterical to be believed.”
So the Marsalis jury had little context in which to understand the lurid, difficult-to-digest details they were hearing.
Instead, the jury opted to find Marsalis guilty of two counts of the lesser charge of sexual assault.
One assault conviction was for Marie’s second attack.
Both had welled up while testifying and described lasting emotional damage.
“I put myself out there.
I told them every terrible detail.
And they said no.”
As she watched footage of jurors sprinting from the courtroom, some shielding their face, Marie became enraged.
“Don’t go running out of there, hiding your face like you’re ashamed!”
So that made it worth it,” Marie says.
“What you were was a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” Geroff told Marsalis from the bench.
“Your lifestyle was a fantasy.
What’s happened to your victims is reality.”
The sentencing softened the blow of the disappointing verdict; finally, their combined efforts had yielded something.
“At least he’s locked away, and I know he won’t do this to anyone else.
Without all of us there, that might not have happened,” Leigh says.
“And of course, all this isn’t even over yet,” she adds.
Because in January, Marsalis heads to a courtroom to be tried for rape a third time.
Court documents filed by the D.A.
There he invited a 21-year-old coworker to join him for a drink at a local bar.
Over beers, she told him she wasn’t interested in him romanticallyshe was a lesbian.
Marsalis ordered another round and handed her a kamikaze.
Instead, this accuser did something unusual: She contacted the police.
Then she had a rape kit done.
And when police confronted Marsalis, he initially denied having sex with her.
“She is more of a manly punch in of a woman for one,” he told police.
In other words, her case bears no resemblance at all to a typical report of nonstranger rape.
Photo Credit: AP Images.
