A defense attorney and the woman who has accused former Canterbury police chief John LaRoche of sexually attacking her faced off Thursday in court, as the attorney tried to undermine her account and she insisted he not “mince my words to make me sound like I was interested in him assaulting me.”
“You never said anything?” the attorney, Nicholas Brodich, asked the woman, referring to her actions during one of four alleged encounters 16 years ago.
“He never asked,” she replied.
“So in the end,” Brodich pressed, “you never gave John any sign that you were dissenting?”
“I froze,” the woman said. “If he had paid attention to my body language, I did nothing.”
The pointed exchange came on the fourth day of testimony in LaRoche’s criminal trial in Merrimack County Superior Court, where the 45-year-old faces multiple felony counts. He is accused of pressuring the woman into oral sex during a ride-along in 1999 or 2000, when he was just starting out at the Boscawen Police Department and she was a 16-year-old mentee in its Explorer Program. The woman, now 33, claims he touched her intimately twice more at Boscawen’s old police headquarters and once directed her to perform a sexual act on herself when they were inside his cruiser.
Over several hours on Thursday, the woman came under intense cross-examination from the defense, which hopes to portray her as having changed her story under the influence of prosecutors. LaRoche has acknowledged the encounters but says they were consensual.
Brodich, a soft-spoken defender, was calm but relentless in his attempts to pick apart the woman’s account. He asked her whether it was her or LaRoche who had removed her pants during one encounter. He scrutinized her description of LaRoche’s “matter-of-fact” tone, questioning whether that meant he was calm or angry, forceful or suggestive, polite or overpowering. Had LaRoche taken off his handcuffs or kept them on his utility belt? Exactly how many people had the woman told about the contact, and when?
Referencing the last alleged incident, in which LaRoche claims the woman became physically uninterested, Brodich asked, “Did he get violent with you when he says that you weren’t interested?”
“No,” the woman said.
“Did he raise his voice to you?”
“No.”
“Did he coerce you when he realized you weren’t interested?”
“No.”
But both the woman and prosecutors argue that LaRoche had clear authority over her as her supervisor. Though she had reached the state’s age of consent when the encounters allegedly began, LaRoche is still subject to statutory charges because of his professional position. To win a conviction, prosecutors will have to prove either that he used that authority coercively, or that the girl did not “freely consent” to the contact.
At one point, Brodich asked whether the woman had considered suing LaRoche, suggesting that she needed the money. She responded that it was just the opposite, that she has worried about a lawsuit from LaRoche.
“I was worried that we wouldn’t be able to prove it,” she said. “That he would get away with it, and that there would be some sort of blowback on me.”
“Isn’t the person who does something wrong the one who worries about the blowback?” Brodich replied.
“No, not always,” she said. “I worried about repercussions my entire life, about what admitting this would mean – whether it was repercussions on my career, whether it was repercussions on my family, repercussions the way my parents felt, because they entrusted me to him. That the person they trusted me with raped me.”
The trial is expected to extend into next week.
(Jeremy Blackman can be reached at 369-3319, jblackman@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @JBlackmanCM.)