A Suffolk Superior Court jury found Gary Zerola, the former prosecutor accused of raping a 23-year-old woman in 2016, not guilty on both counts of rape.
Zerola, 51, was charged with two counts of rape, which the prosecution alleged occurred at around 7 a.m. on Nov. 10, 2016, on a couch in an apartment on Myrtle Street in Beacon Hill, which is owned by a friend of Zerola’s who did not testify in the trial.
“I’m just thankful that the jury had an open mind, they listened to all the facts,” Zerola said, thanking his lawyers Joseph Krowski Jr. and Rosemary Scapicchio, who he called “the two best lawyers in the United States of America, because they believed in me from day one and never once doubted.”
The jury, composed of seven women and five men, delivered their verdict at around 3:15 p.m. Friday after deliberating for roughly two hours after being handed the case at around noon, subtracting an hour-long lunch break during which they did not deliberate.
“It’s been a long six and a half years for him,” Scapicchio said, eliciting cheers from Zerola’s supporters who had lined the benches each day of the trial. “At this point in time all he wants to do is get back to his family and his friends and live his life without this cloud hanging over his head.”
The trial was an intense one, starting with Scapicchio’s opening in which she called her client’s accuser a “liar,” which was the main position the defense took through the following days as the pair hammered away at the credibility of the witnesses before them.
“You know she’s lying when you see her lips moving,” Krowski said of his client’s accuser during his closing argument on Friday. “If you’re telling the truth it’s easy to get your story straight. But when you lie it’s so much harder because you’re trying to remember the lies you told in the past.”
The Herald does not name victims of sexual assault, alleged or otherwise.
He said that the alleged victim purposely misled police and prosecutors about her prior interactions with Zerola in order to concoct these “false allegations” of rape against his client.
Those include her repeated assertion that the pair had never been alone socially, despite the fact that the pair took a 2:30 a.m. ride on Zerola’s motorcycle from his Salem apartment during her birthday months before the alleged rape.
Another is that she and the prosecutors made out Zerola to be creepily touchy and kissy toward the alleged victim at bars ahead of going to the apartment where the alleged crime occurred, but that the defense had found another SnapChat video where the alleged victim had also kissed Zerola, and on the lips no less.
“Did she have a come to Jesus moment” to finally admit these things “… No!” Krowski said, saying that she only disclosed these things when the defense, “the party with no burden of proof,” found evidence that exposed them.
Following the verdict, Krowski reiterated another point in his closing: “Mr. Zerola was not just legally innocent, he was factually innocent. He did not do it. I was forceful in my comments — both of us — the entirety of the trial because we truly believed in him, and thank God they got it right.”
Tom Brant, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case along with ADA Ian Poumbaum, said in his closing that the “The defense wants you to focus everywhere else than what happened on Nov. 10, 2016” and jurors should focus only on what occurred surrounding the crimes and that everything else is a distraction.
Brant said that when the defendant saw the alleged victim asleep on the couch, he thought “I can do this, I’m Gary ‘Big Time Lawyer’ Zerola,” a powerful line that defense immediately objected to and Judge Michael Ricciuti ordered struck from the record both then and just before his jury instructions following the arguments.
“Gary Zerola committed two rapes. One while she was asleep and one while she was waking up,” Brant said. “There was no consent when she was sleeping and there was no consent when she said ‘Get the (expletive) off me.’ … That’s rape.”
The prosecutors did not speak to the press following the trial, but the Suffolk DA’s office did release a statement. Their statement highlighted that Zerola, who had previously been acquitted on rape charges three separate times, still has a pending case.
“We are not afraid to prosecute the toughest cases and we always respect the jury’s verdict, no matter how disappointing,” the statement began.
“We are grateful to the special prosecutor and victim advocate from Middlesex who guided this case from the start, the Boston detectives who investigated it, and especially the survivor who had the courage to come forward and the patience to stick with it. There is still a pending 2021 case against this defendant with similar allegations, and we will once again do our best to prove those charges.”
