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July 27, 2001 Friday

BYLINE: By TERRI VERMEULEN KEITH, City News Service

LENGTH: 811 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

A millionaire businessman acquitted of charges that he sexually assaulted nine women, seven of whom allegedly were drugged, said today that the allega-tions have been “a devastating experience.”

“The nightmare is over, absolutely. I’m looking forward to just relaxing and going back to work, and salvaging a lot of the money that I’ve lost and just looking forward to a new life and getting married and having a family,” John Gordon Jones said at a downtown news conference.

Jones spent more than two years in county jail without bail until a Long Beach Superior Court jury acquitted him yesterday of 29 charges, including kid-napping, rape of an unconscious person, rape by use of drugs and sexual battery.

The 46-year-old owner of Worldtech Computer in Encino, which he had helped to run from jail, maintained that he had been “wrongfully accused.”

“They falsified documents, they hid documents. There was prosecutorial mis-conduct that was just to an unbelievable, devastating state,” the businessman said.

“Well, what happened is the District Attorney’s Office wanted to have a GHB date rape case, and they wanted to go ahead and prosecute me no matter what the truth was.

“They went ahead and they got these women to go ahead and say false allega-tions against me, with blackouts that never existed, by lying. When these women wanted to back out, I believe that they forced them to go ahead with their sto-ries,” Jones said.

One of Jones’ lawyers, Milton Grimes, said his client is “thinking very seri-ously of suing the county for false imprisonment because of the incompetent in-vestigation in this case.”

“Nine different women caused this man, this man here, to sit in jail wrong-fully for 793 days over two years with wrongful allegations,” Grimes said.

On behalf of the district attorney, Sandi Gibbons said her “office will not be commenting on such silly allegations that aren’t true anyway.”

The woman whose allegations launched the case against Jones claimed he had date-raped her and that she got home after spending the night with him and be-lieved she had been drugged, Grimes said.

“Well, when she was tested the next day, it turned out that she had snorted a considerable amount of cocaine, which would definitely inhibit or prohibit or keep anyone from being knocked out, so this is the young lady that started this avalanche going,” the defense lawyer said.

He noted that the jurors cleared his client after taking a field trip to Jones’ home.

“Once the jury went out to the residence of Mr. Jones and viewed it, they had no doubt of his innocence because the descriptions of some of the women were that they were locked in bedrooms that turned out to have no locks on the doors,” Grimes said.

Another of Jones’ lawyers, Richard Sherman, said his client became the “poster boy for date rape.”

“He was a rich man, he was a prominent man in the business community and they took him into custody. They never investigated the allegations of the first vic-tim, the alleged victim. Had they done that, they would have realized that he didn’t do that and that she was not telling … a true story,” Sherman said.

Jones said he learned that “county jail is very rough,” and that he was jumped and beaten up while on the county jail bus.
“It has been a devastating experience with tremendous loss of income. And it took a lot of praying and a man like Milton Grimes and (private investigator and former LAPD detective) Bill Pavelic and Mr. Sherman to prove my innocence,” he said.
Jones and his lawyers said they believed the case was motivated by his wealth and the prospect that the women might get hefty legal judgments in civil law-suits if he had been convicted.

The women “started coming forward” with the allegations after the District Attorney’s Office went to the media in December 1998 and “asked are there any victims out there who have been victimized by the alleged millionaire limousine rapist?” Grimes said.

“I don’t think there’d be any charges if I didn’t have any money, there would have been no charges, absolutely not,” Jones said.

Jones, who had faced the possibility of consecutive life prison sentences if convicted, said he spent his first night of freedom in more than two years at a gathering with his mom and some of his friends.

“It’s like starting all over again, really. Just driving the car was amaz-ing,” he said, adding that he plans to go back to work next Monday at his com-pany, which sells laser jet cartridges and office products nationwide. “Basi-cally, I’m just happy to be free.”

The case against two other people indicted along with Jones in April 1999 on a much smaller number of charges is under review given the jury’s verdict in Jones’ case, according to the District Attorney’s Office.

Pina Marie Colapinto and Lawrence Elliott are awaiting trial next month in downtown Los Angeles.

LOAD-DATE: July 28, 2001

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Tags: William Bill Pavelic

Tampa Tribune (Florida)

March 4, 1995, Saturday, FINAL EDITION

Judge fines 2 on Simpson team for “disregard of truth’

BYLINE: A Tribune Wire Service Report

SECTION: NATION/WORLD, Pg. 2

LENGTH: 1032 words

DATELINE: LOS ANGELES

Judge Lance Ito, asserting that defense lawyers had tried to deceive the court “in reckless disregard of the truth,” Friday imposed $ 950 fines on two of them and said he intends to tell the jury about their “violation of the law.”

The punishment against the two lawyers, Johnnie Cochran and Carl Douglas, was imposed because they failed to notify prosecutors of a taped interview with a potentially crucial witness, as required by California law.

The witness, Rosa Lopez, concluded her testimony Friday, a week after saying she wanted to leave the country for her native El Salvador.

“The false representations by Mr. Cochran and Mr. Douglas that no such tape recording existed lends credence to a finding that this was at the very least a representation made with reckless disregard for the truth if not a deliberate attempt to mislead both the prosecution and the court,” Ito said in his opinion, released late in the day.

He fined Douglas because he was directly responsible for exchanging evidence with the prosecution.

And he added in the three-page document that Cochran, who is O.J. Simpson’s lead attorney, was being fined because he is not only “responsible for the con-duct of the defense team, but he is also the trial counsel presenting the testi-mony of the witness in question and has made untrue representations to the court in reckless disregard of the truth.”

Ito left open the possibility that he will grant a request from prosecutors that they be allowed to raise the delay in the tape’s disclosure in their clos-ing statement, which is considered a vital part of any lawyer’s presentation.

In addition, the judge said that if Lopez is called to testify, he will first inform the jurors about the defense’s conduct and tell them that they may con-sider the delay in assessing the witness’ credibility.

Ito said he would instruct the jury that “this was a violation of the law.”

Lopez, a housekeeper who worked next door to Simpson, said she saw the defen-dant’s Bronco in front of his house at the time prosecutors contend he was mur-dering his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Her testimony has been taped because she had threatened to flee the country.

Cochran later denied lying to the court and maintained it was an honest mis-take. “We did not know about the tape,” he said. “I talked to the judge and he knows I didn’t lie to him. … We’re big boys. We’re big men. We accept it.”

During her testimony Friday, Lopez appeared to undercut one of Simpson’s ali-bis, saying she had not seen him hitting golf balls outside his home the night he allegedly committed two brutal murders.

Lopez also acknowledged she gave a defense investigator some key information after he first suggested it.

“If he says yes, then I say yes,” Lopez testified under cross-examination by prosecutor Chris Darden.

Asked if she had gone along with ideas offered by the investigator, Bill Pavelic, she replied: “I never agreed on anything, sir. He would say that and I would say, “Well, OK.’ ”

This exchange referred to when Lopez had told Bill Pavelic she saw Simpson’s Bronco outside his estate the day of the slayings.
On a tape of an interview with Lopez, played in court Friday, Bill Pavelic seems to be steering her toward specific answers; at one point, for example, he asks if she hadn’t seen the Bronco “the whole time” between 8:30 p.m. and 11 p.m.
Lopez replies “yes,” as she does to most of Bill Pavelic’s questions.

Darden had implied a day earlier that a friend of Lopez, another housekeeper named Sylvia Guerra, had said that Lopez had told her she was promised $ 5,000 for her testimony and that Guerra could get a like amount if she corroborated the story. Friday, the prosecutor elaborated.

He said Guerra had told a police detective on tape that Lopez identified Simpson’s lawyers as the source of the money.

When the witness denied that, Darden asked her whether that meant her friend was lying.

“One hundred percent, sir,” Lopez said in Spanish through an interpreter.

Lopez frequently contradicted statements she made days and sometimes just mo-ments earlier. She even denied having said some things after hearing herself saying them in Bill Pavelic’s interview, which was conducted in English.

In a potentially crucial portion of the tape, the investigator asks when she took her employers’ dog out for a walk, during which she purportedly saw Simp-son’s auto parked in front of his house.

During testimony this week, Lopez has adamantly stated she only knew the time was “after 10.”

When Bill Pavelic asks that question, some paper shuffles, then there is a pause and Lopez responds “10:20 … 10:15″ - precisely when prosecutors contend Simp-son killed two people.

Darden portrayed the paper shuffling as an effort by Bill Pavelic to provide Lopez with a script, an accusation she denied.

As he asked what else she saw while out that night, Darden threw the day’s only curve-ball: He asked Lopez if she saw Simpson playing golf in front of his home, as defense attorneys have said he did at the supposed time of the murders.

“I’ve never seen him play,” Lopez replied. At that point, Simpson looked agi-tated, put his head in his hands, and talked animatedly with attorney Robert Shapiro.

Darden led Lopez through many questions designed to show her memory is flawed, and she conceded she forgets many things.

As has been the case throughout her appearances, her testimony was riddled with contradictions.
During a round of gentle questioning in which he tried to rehabilitate his witness, Cochran served notice that he will play hardball with anyone the prose-cution puts on to contradict Lopez.

For instance, he asked Lopez whether a former employer - who told prosecutors Lopez had praised Simpson and said she would testify for him anytime - had paid her Social Security taxes. Lopez said she had not.

Cochran also sought to draw from his witness explanations for some of the perceived problems with her testimony, including her propensity to answer “I don’t remember” to dozens of probing inquiries this week.

She said that, in her dialect of Spanish in El Salvador, that phrase really means “no.”

LOAD-DATE: March 6, 1995

LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

GRAPHIC: SIGNATURE; PHOTO 2,
Carl Douglas

NOTES: THE SIMPSON TRIAL

Tags: Official Bill Pavelic