Danny Masterson is placing blame on his trial attorney for his 2023 rape convictions, accusing his defense of implementing a botched trial strategy.
The 49-year-old That ’70s Show star is currently serving 30 years to life after he was found guilty in 2023 of raping two women over two decades ago.
On Monday, Masterson filed a petition for habeas corpus, seeking to have his convictions overturned, with his appellate lawyers accusing his trial lawyer, Philip Cohen, of failing to call on any witnesses and not arguing against the prosecution’s claims about Scientology.
The Independent has contacted Cohen for comment.
The filing obtained by The Independent says that Masterson “implored [Cohen] to present at least a minimal modicum of defense evidence, but counsel refused.”
“Cohen had a longstanding aversion to presenting affirmative defense evidence in the cases he tried,” it adds.
“He personally spoke to only two of the more than 20 potential witnesses who had been strongly recommended by co-counsel Karen Goldstein and investigator Lynda Larsen. He wrote off the great majority of them without any personal contact, notwithstanding their manifestly exculpatory prior statements to the police and to investigators,” the filing alleges.
“This failure of due diligence violated the well-settled principle of Sixth Amendment case law that an attorney must interview potential defense witnesses as a necessary foundation for making a reasoned decision about trial strategy.”
Masterson first stood trial in 2022, regarding accusations that he drugged and raped three women at his home between 2001 and 2003. The jury was hung on all three counts, resulting in a mistrial. He was soon retried and formally convicted of raping two of the women. The jury, however, remained deadlocked on the third rape allegation from November 2001, brought forward by a former girlfriend.
The Church of Scientology, of which Masterson is a member and all three women were former members, played an even larger role in the second trial than it did in the first.
During the retrial, prosecutors alleged Masterson used his prominence in the church to avoid consequences for decades after the attacks.
They called on ex-Scientologist Claire Headley, who testified that in order to go to the authorities, the church must grant special permission.
The habeas corpus states that the church’s lawyers had urged Cohen to call Hugh Whitt, a longtime Scientologist, to refute Headley’s claims.
Yet, even though Whitt was listed as a defense witness, Cohen decided not to call on him, instead choosing to downplay Masterson’s religion.
“Why have we heard so much about Scientology?” he asked in his closing argument. “Could it be there’s problems otherwise with the government’s case?”
After the verdict, the church said that the “testimony and descriptions of Scientology beliefs” during the trial were “uniformly false.”
“The Church has no policy prohibiting or discouraging members from reporting criminal conduct of anyone — Scientologists or not — to law enforcement,” the statement said.
