LOS ANGELES _ A federal judge in Los Angeles decided Wednesday against declaring a mistrial in a lawsuit accusing NBA star Derrick Rose and two friends of raping the basketball player's former girlfriend in 2013.
U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald faulted the woman's legal team for not having provided the defense sooner with three text messages the woman sent to Rose around the time of the alleged assault, but the judge said the failure was not serious enough to call an end to the civil court trial.
Fitzgerald ruled that the woman could be questioned again by Rose's attorneys and that jurors would be told of the plaintiff's error.
Fitzgerald said the texts "could be viewed as favorable to the defense" and that telling jurors they weren't initially available to Rose's team would "cure that prejudice."
One of the woman's lawyers, Brandon Anand, told the judge that it was a random mistake that the three texts weren't provided sooner to the defense.
"Any failure to give texts was inadvertent," Anand said. "There was no attempt to keep anything hidden."
Rose's lawyer, Mark Baute, had accused the woman's legal team of ignoring repeated requests to provide copies of the evidence it planned to present during trial. Baute said he found the previously unseen texts on Friday in documents the plaintiff's side belatedly shared.
Baute said the three texts show the woman willingly went along with a request from Rose that she and a friend come to his house for sex. In one of the messages, sent after the two women had left Rose's house, the plaintiff reproached Rose for refusing to have sex with her friend after she went to the trouble of arranging the rendezvous.
On Wednesday, Baute said the messages were "selectively omitted."
To believe it was an innocent mistake is "naivete at an extreme level," he said.
The plaintiff's lawyers had denied the charge. One of the woman's lawyers told the judge on Tuesday that he believed the text messages had been handed over along with a cache of other texts and phone records from the days before and after the incident in the early morning hours on Aug. 27, 2013.
But on Wednesday, the plaintiff's attorneys were unable to show documents to the judge showing that the messages had been turned over.
The woman alleges that Rose, a player for the New York Knicks, and his two friends drugged her while she was drunk at Rose's house and later sneaked into her apartment to assault her while she was incapacitated. The plaintiff has asked for an award of $21 million.
The Los Angeles Times in most cases does not name alleged victims of sexual assault.
The men have not been charged criminally in the case and deny the allegations. Los Angeles police officials have said they are continuing to investigate the incident, which the woman reported in 2015.
In unrelated news Wednesday, authorities said that the LAPD detective handling the inquiry was found dead with a gunshot wound in a Whittier home Tuesday afternoon. Nadine Hernandez, 44, was a detective in the department's Robbery-Homicide Division Special Assault Section and one of two investigators assigned to the Rose case, according to LAPD sources. Whittier police are investigating and said it's unclear if her death is a suicide.
Text messages have proved to be crucial evidence in Rose's civil trial. Each side has tried to use the exchanges selectively as proof of its own account.
The woman's lawyers have said they show she was unaware the men were coming over to her apartment and had no intent to have sex with them; Baute and Michael Monico, the attorney for the other two men sued in the case, have said the texts demonstrate that the woman was alert in the hours before the alleged assault and invited the men to her apartment for sex.
The 30-year-old woman testified in the trial that she believes the men slipped an unnamed drug into one of her drinks and that she has only "flashes" of memory of what occurred at Rose's house and later in her apartment. She told jurors that she passed out in her bed and awoke to find the men in her room assaulting her.
Rose, 28, who finished several hours of testimony Tuesday, denied the woman's allegations, portraying her as the aggressor throughout the night. He said the woman agreed to have the three men come to her apartment, let them in and willingly had sex with each of them in turn.
The other two defendants, Randall Hampton and Ryan Allen, childhood friends of Rose's whom he now employs, were expected to testify later.
