LOTA/GOTH Finale...maybe

The saga of lady of the afternoon (LOTA) and god of the hardwood (GOTH) has finally been closed…maybe, since strange things can happen, especially when sex is involved and criminal conduct is claimed by a lady to have been committed upon her by a gentleman, never mind the circumstances. Last April, LOTA, a married mother of three, accused GOTH, a University of Kentucky basketball player just finishing his senior year, of rape that she said occurred in his dormitory room, claiming she had been somehow drugged and violated, notwithstanding her voluntary presence in the room in the middle of the afternoon. It’s doubtful that there has ever been a happening with stranger twists and turns than this one, the event having been documented in newspapers and even in this space. Probably, some sports publications have picked up on it, as well, since GOTH was a player of some repute, though not an All-American and not taken in the NBA draft.

The District Court judge threw out the case some time ago, after it had been once closed and then re-opened, and the commonwealth’s attorney refused to prosecute GOTH when the woman’s complaint was later dumped in his lap. For some reason, LOTA engaged attorneys in the matter, never mind that she had to depend on prosecutors to make the case, since a crime had been alleged. GOTH was forced to engage legal counsel in order to protect himself, even though he apparently had committed no crime, though, through his attorney, he admitted that he and LOTA had engaged in consensual sex in the afternoon of an April day.

The alleged evidence a crime had been committed, as outlined in the Lexington Herald-Leader on numerous occasions (in fact, strangely, LOTA had even participated in an interview with the paper), was, to be magnanimous, totally non-existent. It seems that LOTA chased GOTH (143 phone calls to him in 3 months, for instance) and had even gone to lunch with him, at which time, according to his side of the story, she sort of “came on strong” to him. One of GOTH’s teammates even snapped a picture of LOTA and GOTH outside the dorm after the alleged rape had just happened, when one might have expected her to be yelling and screaming for the police, though she might have claimed to be incapacitated because of being drugged. Who knows? GOTH said he did not drug LOTA and did not see her ingest any drugs.

This whole sordid affair, besides being strange, points up the fact that an innocent person can be harmed simply upon a he said/she said matter, and egregiously so, since the media are more than willing to divulge the identity of the accused, who is presumed innocent until proven guilty, while concealing that of the accuser, who, as apparently in this case, had motives that were – to say the least – suspect. GOTH said he thought LOTA brought the charge in order for her husband not to find out she had cheated on the marriage. Who knows? One wonders, of course, if LOTA had visions of suing UK for damages accruing to its not protecting females in a men’s dorm on an April afternoon. A civil case would have been folly without an initial conviction of rape.

And so it goes.

Jim Clark