Multnomah County DA's office will not pursue charges in alleged rape

Memo: Woman couldn't identify the Utah Jazz players she said had assaulted her

By Jacob Quinn Sanders

The Portland Tribune, Jan 5, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (37 Reader comments)

The Multnomah County district attorney’s office will not pursue criminal charges against four Utah Jazz basketball players who were accused of rape in an October incident at a downtown Portland hotel.

In a memo declining prosecution dated Jan. 2, Senior Deputy District Attorney Donald Rees wrote that the accuser could not positively identify her two attackers, though she had gone up to a room in the RiverPlace Hotel with four Jazz players: Dee Brown, Deron Williams, Ronnie Brewer and Paul Milsap. Investigators found no physical evidence implicating any of the men.

The accuser has stopped cooperating with police and has not returned repeated phone calls from the victims’ advocate assigned to her case, according to the memo.

The memo said the Jazz players met the woman, whose name is redacted from the copy obtained by the Portland Tribune, at a strip club where she worked. They flirted in a taxi on the way to the hotel, stopping off in a convenience store along the way so Brewer could buy condoms.

Rees wrote that the accuser, according to the cabdriver’s statement, reportedly said she wanted to have sex with two of the men at the same time.

At about 2:30 a.m. Oct. 23, RiverPlace employees saw Brown, Williams, Brewer and Milsap enter the hotel lobby with the woman. The players appeared to have to convince the woman to go farther, Rees wrote, but after a little time they all got in an elevator and went up to the fourth floor together.

About 40 minutes later, according to Rees’ memo, the woman emerged – alone and naked – from an elevator. She collapsed to the floor.

“They raped me,” she said.

Hotel employees called Portland police, who found the woman screaming and crying in the lobby, according to the memo. Rees also wrote that the woman appeared extremely intoxicated to the officers and “seemed to have difficulty remaining conscious.”

Police took her to Oregon Health & Science University Hospital, where she was examined. She said she thought the players had drugged her. Three of them assaulted her, she said – two of them by forcing her to have sex with them.

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