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The trial of a former Ohio University student charged with raping a female student in her dorm room will go longer than expected, with closing arguments possibly not coming until Friday.
Defense attorney K. Robert Toy, who represents 21-year-old Matthew Kulchar, said Wednesday that the lawyers in the case “seriously underestimated” how long the trial would take.
The Kulchar trial has reportedly run into a scheduling conflict with another proceeding set for the same courtroom, and may have to skip Thursday and return Friday. Kulchar faces counts of rape, kidnapping and evidence tampering.
On Tuesday, Kulchar took the stand to testify at length on his own behalf. Athens County assistant prosecutor Rob Driscoll was expected to begin cross-examining Kulchar sometime yesterday afternoon, and probably continue into Friday’s session.
Kulchar is accused of having come to the Boyd Hall dormitory room of a female student on Sept. 28, 2008 – his 20th birthday – and having constrained her and raped her repeatedly, causing her bruises and pain.
The woman testified that she told Kulchar more than once that she did not want to have sex with him and wanted him to stop.
He claimed Tuesday, however, that the sex was entirely consensual, and that in contradiction to the alleged victim’s claims, she made “absolutely no protest” while it was going on.
“I did nothing wrong,” he insisted.
Toy has implied that the woman – who has acknowledged having at least one previous sexual encounter with Kulchar – may have accused him of rape because she felt betrayed that after a night of sex, he did not invite her to a birthday get-together with his visiting parents.
Kulchar testified that he and the woman had a sporadic but “frisky and playful” friend/occasional lover relationship, beginning after they had sex in March 2008 after hooking up at the “Dance or Die” event at the Union Bar in Athens.
He said the woman told him in April during a dinner date that she did not wish to have a sexual relationship with him anymore. “I was not upset,” Kulchar said, and he ceased phone, instant-message, and text-message contact with her for a month or more.
Then in June, he said, the woman sent him an instant message containing pictures of herself. This re-started the relationship, he said, though based on his testimony he would only see the woman occasionally, sometimes watching movies or smoking marijuana together. At one point, he said, the woman “said that she was interested in another guy… She had made it clear that she was single.”
On the night of Sept. 27, 2008, Kulchar said, he was out at parties drinking, and while at a local apartment complex, called the woman. Though she didn’t pick up, she immediately called back, he said, and invited him to her dorm room to smoke some marijuana for his birthday.
After getting high, he said, the two sat on her bed in the dorm room and “began to touch and kiss, and we moved quickly to having sex.” He then described repeated sexual bouts, interrupted at one point by his leaving the room to go to the restroom, and at another by both of them going out, she to use the restroom and he to get a drink of water at a fountain.
Because in their first sexual encounter the woman had left deep, painful fingernail scratches in his back, Kulchar testified, in this case, since he had to see his parents that day, “I respectfully requested that she not leave any sucker bites, or scratch marks on my back.”
After sleeping together, the two woke up the following morning, and Kulchar indicated he planned to leave and see his parents. When the woman handed him his OU ID card he had misplaced, he said, “it was obvious to me that she was upset in some way,” telling him, “here it is,” in a “very angry, upset tone.”
He recounted a phone conversation he had with the woman that evening (which he later learned was arranged by, and taped with her permission, by the OU Police) Kulchar told the woman repeatedly he was sorry – a point the prosecution has suggested indicates his guilt.
However, he testified, he was apologizing because he thought he had been callous with her feelings.
“I never meant to hurt her emotionally,” he said. “I never meant to sleep with her and not be (emotionally) involved with her.”
Because he was studying for an important exam, he added, “my apologies became more and more exaggerated,” in an attempt to get her off the phone so he could keep studying.
When OU Police Lt. Chris Johnson later called Kulchar in to talk (and later arrested him), Kulchar admitted, while in the police station he texted his roommate to dispose of some boxer shorts he had worn during the encounter (the basis of the evidence-tampering charge).
However, Kulchar claimed, at that point he did not think he was being questioned about a sexual assault, but about marijuana use. When he described to the police officer the clothes he had been wearing, he said, he mistakenly described a different pair of boxer shorts.
When he realized his error, he said, he wanted to get rid of the shorts he had really been wearing, to keep his story consistent. He said he was very concerned about a marijuana bust, which could cost him his scholarship.
“I didn’t think that the issue at hand was what (Johnson) later arrested me for,” he said. “I really didn’t want to look like a liar.”
A nurse who examined the woman had earlier testified that the condition of her body was more consistent with non-consensual than willing sex.
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