Prosecutor: 'most eligible bachelor' assaulted woman
(AP pool photo)
Gary Zerola at the trial Tuesday.
By John R. Ellement, Globe Staff
A Boston man once picked by People magazine as one of the city's most eligible bachelors was described today by a prosecutor as a relentless predator who would stop at nothing to get a 19-year-old woman to have sex with him.
But the attorney for Gary Zerola said that the alleged victim was a liar and that Zerola, 36, was a “sap’’ whom she had manipulated.
“She couldn’t tell the truth if her life depended on it, much less Gary Zerola’s life. … She lies when she needs to," Janice Bassil said in her opening statement in Zerola's Suffolk Superior Court trial.
Zerola, a lawyer and former Suffolk prosecutor, met the woman in July 2006 at a Boston nightclub. They spent an evening together and then parted ways, exchanging text messages and phone calls until Aug. 17, 2006, when they agreed to meet to go shopping.
What became a 12-hour date included Zerola buying a $450 leopard print Dolce & Gabbana dress for the woman and stops at several nightclubs and restaurants. It ended with a disputed series of events inside Zerola’s Commercial Street apartment in the early morning hours of Aug. 18.
Prosecutor Suzanne M. Kontz said Zerola and the woman struggled in the apartment, and she summoned help from Boston police on her cellphone. "He made the decision to use force and tried to take sex from her, and here we are," she told the jury.
Zerola faces charges that include assault with intent to rape, kidnapping, indecent assault and battery, intimidation of a witness, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, said the Middlesex district attorney's office, which is trying the case because of Zerola's former work as a Suffolk prosecutor.
Zerola also faces rape and other charges for a Feb. 28, 2004, episode involving a different 19-year-old acquaintance. And he was arrested in October on charges that he drugged and sexually assaulted a third woman while in Miami Beach.
