- April 18, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
There’s no dispute about whether Victor Williams, 42, committed statutory rape of a 16-year-old boy he’d met on the gay hookup app Grindr. He’s admitted to that.
What is in dispute — and what a Flagler County jury is tasked this week with determining — is whether Williams drugged the teen and raped him while he was unconscious, and whether he neglected to inform the teen that he was HIV positive.
If he’s found guilty of the higher charge of rape of a minor, Williams faces life in prison.
Prosecutor Melissa Clark began her opening argument to the jury Oct. 22 by highlighting the teen’s condition when his parents found him the night after.
“[The mother] discovered her son, her 16-year-old son ... passed out unconscious on her front porch,” Clark said.
Later, after a “flood of memories from the night before” returned to him while he took a shower, the boy told his mother that he believed he’d been drugged and raped, Clark said.
The teen said he was on Grindr to meet men to get booze and drugs, not sex.
He’d met up with Williams previously, he said on the witness stand, to smoke weed and drink alcohol. But on those prior occasions, he said, nothing sexual had occurred. He also said he’d told Williams that he wasn’t 18.
But on this occasion, on Sept. 10, 2018, about 15 minutes after he took the Xanax, he said, “I started to feel kind of dizzy, and I came out of consciousness; I blacked out. ... I remember drinking and smoking and talking, and I just remember a black period of time.”
Twice, he awoke from his unconsciousness, and Williams was performing sex acts on him.
Williams’ defense argued to the jury that the teen had not been so intoxicated as to have lost consciousness and blacked out, as he’d claimed, that he had accused Williams in order to escape his own parents’ anger with his conduct, and that he was seeking older men on the app for sex.
She highlighted the fact that he’d falsely claimed on the app to have been 18, and had resisted reporting the crime.
The boys’ mother ultimately found Williams and his phone number, and called him multiple times: A law-enforcement-recorded phone call included Williams admitting to having had sex with the teen.
“This is not a case about nonconsensual sexual activity; this is a case about a scapegoat,” said Regina Nunnally, a public defender who is representing Williams. “Mr.Williams is the scapegoat.”
Nunnally said the defense would be calling a witness, a doctor, who would testify that it would not have been possible for the teen to have blacked out in the time frame he’d claimed based on the drugs he’d taken.
The trial is expected to conclude on Friday.
