On Thursday in open court, James Martin, a defense attorney for Gov. Eric Greitens, spoke to the issue of a video deposition that had somehow gone missing.
“Just hours after the House Committee is issuing its report,” Martin told Judge Rex Burlison, “and conveniently after [the prosecution] has obtained a gag order in this case, the video tape has magically appeared and been produced.”
The video reportedly contains some serious discrepancies between what the woman, K.S., told the House Committee and what she said in the deposition taken a month ago by St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner and her private investigator, William Tisaby.
Said Martin, “Knowing the House was going to put out such vile information in a report, to not turn over the information to us that would have disproved much of what K.S. is saying and completely disprove this claim of nonconsensual is so wrong, Judge.” A separate article will address why the prosecution failed to turn over the video in a timely manner, but the discrepancies deserve attention. The defense attorneys spoke to several of them, all exculpatory.
The House report makes K.S. look like a non-consenting victims of Greitens during their first sexual encounter in the basement of his house on March 21, 2015. In the newly found video, K.S. admits to having been “turned on” by Greitens’s advances during that first rendezvous.
In the House report much was made of an alleged slap to K.S.’s face by Greitens. From her testimony in the newly found deposition, K.S. seems to be saying that she reminded her girl friends after the story broke in January that she had told them about the slap at the time it happened. The girl friends, however, did not remember her telling them about the slap.
“Suddenly,” said Martin, “now we have evidence that the slap could all be made up. That, in fact, she may have made an effort to have her friends support a made-up story.”
One particular bit of evidence troubled Burlison, specifically the semi-nude picture K.S. sent of herself to Grietens via FaceTime several months after her initial encounter. The judge refused to accept the prosecution argument that this revelation was irrelevant.
“You don’t think that has anything to do with whether or not the [initial] March 21st incident was consensual,” Burlison said in one of his few interjections, “the fact that there was Facebooking three or four months later?”
Said Martin, “This woman is not a victim. She was a willing participant in everything they did, and this video goes a long way to establishing that.”
More to follow . . .
