The date-rape ‘doctor’ they could not convict

By Sabrina Rubin Erdely
updated 5:15 a.m. PT, Fri., Nov. 21, 2008
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Leigh thought her date was going quite well, right up until the point, she says, when she was drugged and raped. It was her first time meeting Jeffrey Marsalis, a gregarious trauma surgeon who had contacted her through the online dating site Match.com. Tall, blue-eyed and engaging, Marsalis had taken her out in downtown Philadelphia, entertaining her with stories of life in the ER.
“He seemed a little full of himself,” Leigh recalls; still, she was having a good time. She slowly drank one beer, then a second. Their date was in its fourth hour when Marsalis ordered a carafe of white wine, and Leigh excused herself.
“I would never think to be so cynical that I’d stand there and watch as he poured my drink,” remembers Leigh, a striking blonde (who, like all accusers in this article, is identified by her middle name). When the 28-year-old accountant returned to her barstool, her glass of wine was waiting. Leigh took a sip.
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As she would later testify, the next thing Leigh remembers she was in a dark room, facedown on a bed — and Marsalis was anally raping her. The pain felt as if he were ripping her in two. Her limbs were leaden, her mind sluggish.
“Stop, please stop,” Leigh mumbled. Marsalis simply chuckled. 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.
“Good morning,” Marsalis said, smiling and leaning in for a kiss; Leigh, stunned, kissed him back. “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.
So when Marsalis walked Leigh to her car and suggested they get together again, Leigh heard herself say, “Sure.” She was certain she hadn’t gone to bed with her date of her own volition — and that she couldn’t possibly have blacked out after barely three drinks — but her certainty was softening in the face of his chivalry. Am I reading the situation wrong? Leigh wondered as she drove herself home. Would a rapist act this nicely?
Baffling as her experience seemed on that day in February 2005, Leigh was only the latest woman to struggle with the same confusion. Because Jeffrey Marsalis wasn’t really an ER doctor looking for love. He was an unemployed paramedic and nursing-school dropout whose true profession, prosecutors assert, was full-time predator. Investigators would discover 21 women who claimed Marsalis drugged and raped them — many listed in a file on his computer called “The Yearly Calendar of Women.” Authorities suspect his true tally is far higher. “Any woman was potential prey,” says Philadelphia special prosecutor Joseph Khan. “Plenty of women were attracted to him, but this guy was aroused by the very idea of nonconsent.”
As Leigh drove home that morning, she had no idea what lay in her future: that she would join 9 of those 21 accusers to face Marsalis in Philadelphia courtrooms over the course of two trials, telling nearly identical stories of assault. They would be 10 educated, professional women versus a demonstrated liar — a man who had pretended to be a doctor, a CIA employee, even an astronaut — whom a court-appointed psychologist would decide met the legal definition of a “sexually violent predator.” And yet the most remarkable thing about both trials wasn’t the way they exposed the alleged tactics of a serial date rapist. It was that despite the outrageousness of the accusations against Marsalis, the testimony of 10 women wasn’t enough to get a single rape conviction against him. The verdicts in these cases would be far lighter than his accusers sought — and victims’ advocates say the outcome reveals a disturbing truth about the justice system. Nationwide, despite all the legal advances of the past three decades, little has changed for women who report a date rape. Because in far too many instances, juries don’t believe date rape exists.
Cases still hard to winWhen it comes to rape prosecutions as a whole, so much has changed for the better: Thirty years’ worth of advocacy, better investigation techniques and tighter laws have led more women than ever to come forward and report the crime to police. But in cases of nonstranger rape — which represent three quarters of all rape cases in the United States — all that progress often comes screeching to a halt in the deliberation room. “Cases where a victim knows her assailant are still extraordinarily hard to win,” says Jennifer Long, director of the National Center for the Prosecution of Violence Against Women in Alexandria, Virginia. “Juries are extremely resistant.”
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Until now, it’s been impossible to know exactly how many of these cases collapse in court, because no prosecution data was being collected. But the research and training group End Violence Against Women International in Addy, Washington, just completed a four-year study across eight states and has allowed SELF an exclusive early look at its conclusions. Of all the rape cases that come across prosecutors’ desks, stranger-rape cases have the best courtroom odds, with 68 percent ending with a conviction or guilty plea. But when a woman knows her assailant briefly (less than 24 hours), a mere 43 percent of cases end in a conviction. 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. “And keep in mind, the cases that come through the prosecutor’s door are the strongest ones — strong enough for the police to have referred them along in the first place,” notes EVAW International research director Kimberly Lonsway, Ph.D.
Back in the 1970s, most reported rapes were committed by strangers; those cases are now in the minority. Yet juries — and many judges as well — still think of rape as being only between strangers, says Lynn Hecht Schafran, director of the National Judicial Education Program of Legal Momentum, a woman’s advocacy group in New York City. “To a juror, a rapist is a guy who jumps out of the bushes and throws a woman to the ground,” Schafran explains. “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. What’s especially troubling is that the very things that some of his accusers speculate made the juries so skeptical are typical elements of nonstranger assaults. It doesn’t fit with most people’s misguided concept of rape, for example, that Marsalis’s accusers went out with him willingly — thinking him a worldly doctor, the embodiment of Mr. Right — and were initially enjoying their evening with him. As the defense hammered home, none of the women stormed to the nearest police station or went to a hospital for a rape exam and toxicology test. In fact, the opposite happened: In a near-masochistic twist, most of Marsalis’s dates had contact with him again — behavior that seems too bizarre to be believed, but that psychologists say is actually not uncommon among women raped by someone they know. Nonstranger rape is a distinct crime whose survivors exhibit equally distinct behaviors — the very actions the Marsalis defense used against his accusers. It makes you wonder: If these 10 women didn’t get a satisfying result, what chance does anyone have in a date rape case?
“You hate to tell people that we have such terrible success with these cases at trial, because it makes victims think, Well then, why press charges?” says retired police sergeant Joanne Archambault, president and training director of Sexual Assault Training and Investigations, also in Addy, Washington, a firm that educates law enforcement about rape. “But the truth is, until we change the public’s attitude about how they see women and sexual violence, we’re going to keep losing.”
‘I wanted to confront him’Two days after Leigh awoke in Marsalis’s bed, she found herself seated across the table from him at a Chinese restaurant. 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.
The last thing Leigh says she remembers about that dinner, she was picking at the noodles Marsalis was dishing from a serving plate, trying to muster up her courage to ask: Did you rape me? 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? The idea of reaching out to one’s rapist seems like nothing any woman in her right mind would do. Yet the majority of the 10 women who ultimately testified against Marsalis had contact with him afterward. One 33-year-old woman testified that, after regaining consciousness in Marsalis’s apartment, she discovered his bed was soaked with her menstrual blood, humiliating her; she later FedExed Marsalis a set of sheets. Two of his accusers befriended him. Two others went on to briefly date Marsalis. Yet another accuser, a 26-year-old pharmaceutical representative, told the court that the assault left her pregnant — and she allowed Marsalis, of all people, to accompany her to the abortion.
“There are so many reasons why victims reengage offenders,” says Veronique Valliere, a clinical psychologist in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania, who specializes in sexual abuse. By establishing a relationship on her own terms, a person feeling helpless can reclaim her lost dignity. “Someone yanks that sense of control from you, and you need to get it back,” Valliere explains. Denial also plays a powerful role, as many survivors have a hard time accepting the idea of themselves as a victim — and turn to their attackers to help explain away their fears. “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.
Marsalis’s accusers may have been especially prone to have further contact with him because in many cases their memories of those nights were foggy. And prosecutors argue that Marsalis skillfully exploited that confusion. In interviews with SELF, one accuser described how it unfolded: In October 2003, Marie was a 23-year-old grad student living in Marsalis’s building when one evening, she ran into her neighbor “Dr. Jeff.” Marsalis asked her out for a drink at a nearby bar. Two gin and tonics later, she would testify, it was suddenly sunrise, and Marie was naked from the waist down in Marsalis’s bed. “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.” The whole thing didn’t make sense to her — she’d never blacked out before in her life — so Marie got out of there as fast as she politely could and avoided Marsalis for several weeks. But when she came face-to-face with him at the building’s Christmas party, she acted perfectly friendly. “Talking to him, I guess it was a way of asserting myself, an attempt to restore some normalcy,” Marie says. “I was trying to be logical instead of emotional.”
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Nevertheless, Marie’s subconscious couldn’t forget. She began withdrawing socially and starving herself. A 5-foot, 100-pound pixie to begin with, Marie lost so much weight that within three months, she was hospitalized for a heart arrhythmia. As she lay in the ER, it occurred to Marie that Marsalis had said he worked at that very same hospital.
“I called him,” she says hollowly. And Marsalis visited her, playing the role of doctor by wearing a stethoscope and flipping through her chart. Two days later, after Marie had gone home, the “doctor” showed up at her apartment to check on her. Then, as Marie would tell the court, Marsalis steered her to her bed, pinned her down and raped her again. This time, there was no blackout to cloud her perception; Marsalis offered no smooth talk as he pulled up his scrubs and left. Marie made her way to the shower, curled up under the water and cried. Yet she didn’t even consider calling the police.