Nate Webster's attorney attacks accuser

NateWebster
As she sat in the audience holding her mother’s hand for support, the accuser of former Bengal Nathaniel “Nate” Webster listened to his attorney verbally rip her and her family apart.

“She had her own personal hell at home,” Gregory Samms, Webster’s Florida attorney, told a Hamilton County jury Tuesday.

“No one else in this world trusts that girl. Do you trust her?”

Webster was charged with sexual battery, sexual touching and five counts of unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, after the Symmes Township girl said she was 15 when a sexual relationship started with the former pro football player.

Samms focused his scorched-earth attack on the girl, now age 18, and her family, suggesting evidence showed she’d been abused.
He also noted evidence showed the accuser told others she dated NFL players Ray Lewis and Willis McGahee who, like Webster, attended the University of Miami.

“This is a fantasy story of someone who is infatuated with an older man and makes this up. This cannot be true,” Samms said of the accuser.
It continued with Samms’ attack on prosecutors who he said were unethically manipulating information during the trial to “build your careers off of his back,” he said pointing at Assistant Prosecutors Katie Burroughs and Seth Tieger.

“(Prosecutor) Joe Deters is going to run for election and say, ‘I convicted Nate Webster.’ Is that what justice is? To win at all costs?” Samms asked.
Samms could do nothing else, Tieger said, but attack others in the case because the evidence surely will convict his client.

“You cannot overcome a taped confession,” Tieger told jurors.

When questioned by police last year, Webster initially denied he had sex with the girl. But after police played tapes his accuser secretly recorded, Webster admitted he had sex with her.

The issue is if he had sex with her in the fall of 2009 when she was 15. In his taped statement to police, played for jurors during the trial, the-married Webster said he had. But after his arrest, he said he was mistaken and had sex with her after she turned 16, Ohio’s age on consent.
“Not only does he cheat (commit adultery) but he has an intense sexual relationship with an underage girl who is the daughter” of a friend, Tieger said. “The only thing he cared about was his own sexual satisfaction.”

Before the trial started, Webster rejected a proposed plea deal that would have resulted in him being sent to prison for four years. The charges against him can send him to prison for more than 30 years.

The eight-woman, four-man jury before Common Pleas Court Judge Ralph “Ted” Winkler began deliberating just after lunch Tuesday but was sent home without a verdict. Deliberations resume today.


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(cincinnati.com)
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