Alleged victim testifies in OU dormitory rape case

The alleged victim in an Ohio University dormitory rape case testified Friday that though at one point during her 11-hour ordeal she left her dorm room with her assailant and walked down a long hallway past many other rooms, she never yelled for help or tried to flee into any of the rooms.

"œI did not know there was anyone in any of the rooms," the woman testified. "œI had no way of knowing that."

The woman alleges that Matthew Kulchar, 21, who was a fellow student at OU, raped her repeatedly in her Boyd Hall room on Sept. 28, 2008, after they got together for Kulchar's 20th birthday and smoked marijuana.

The woman has acknowledged having sex with Kulchar on one prior occasion before the alleged rape, but has said she made clear she was not interested in continuing a sexual relationship. She testified that she considered the sex in March 2008 "a mistake that I had made," while she was "very intoxicated."

Kulchar is on trial in Athens County Common Pleas Court on charges of rape, kidnapping and evidence tampering. The trial continues today.

The evidence-tampering charge relates to an allegation that while in OU Police custody, Kulchar sent a text message to a male student friend telling him to dispose of the boxer shorts Kulchar wore during the sexual encounter.

The woman testified that though Kulchar was coercing her into having sex against her will, when he left the room for about three or four minutes at one point, she did not call 911, but instead tried to compose a text message to a female friend.

"I didn't feel that 911 was necessary," the woman testified.

Under cross-examination by Kulchar's defense attorney, K. Robert Toy, the woman acknowledged that she never went to the room of the dorm's resident assistant to seek help; never tried to run out any of the exits in the building; never sought help at the rooms of any of the other students she knew who lived in nearby rooms; and never locked or blockaded the door of her room after Kulchar left temporarily.

At one point during the trial Friday, the woman was asked to stand up next to Kulchar, to compare their heights and weights for the jury. Athens County Assistant Prosecutor Rob Driscoll asked her how this made her feel.

"Surreal, I suppose would be the right word," she answered. "You can't really believe that it's happening. I can't really believe I was standing that close to him right now."

The woman acknowledged that after inviting Kulchar over to her dorm room, the two smoked two pipe "bowls" of marijuana.

Toy questioned why, after Kulchar allegedly accompanied the woman to the women's bathroom in the dorm and she went inside alone, she did not lock herself into the toilet stall.

Driscoll, however, brought out by questioning that the walls of the stall do not reach all the way to the floor and ceiling.

"So, is that a secure place for you?" he asked.

"No," the woman responded.

By way of explaining her apparent lack of effort to get away from Kulchar, the woman testified: "After I used the restroom, I wasn't really thinking about my escape plan... I was thinking of different ways that I could make him leave. Me leaving was never really considered, I guess... I just wanted to be in a secure place."

Had she stayed in the women's room, she said, "I thought that he would just come in to get me if I didn't come out... I just didn't think of staying in the bathroom."

Asked why she did not knock on any doors when she apparently had the chance, the woman testified, "It didn't cross my mind." She added, "I didn't think that Matt would allow me to knock... I assumed he would force me back to the room."

The woman testified that she was in "just an immense amount of pain" from the rape, because she was using a tampon at the time, which was shoved up into her body by the assault.

Pressured by Toy to explain why, when Kulchar left the room for a time, she did not flee, the woman testified that she felt "leaving was not an option. I just felt that leaving wouldn't accomplish anything."

She said that when Kulchar left the room, she frantically searched the room for her cell phone, and tried to compose a text message to the first friend whose number showed up on her phone, a woman. She said her hands were shaking and she couldn't complete the message before Kulchar returned.

"I could barely keep my phone in my hands," she said.

Asked why she didn't call 911 instead of trying to text-message a friend, the woman said that had she done so, the dispatcher would have asked her to describe the nature of her emergency.

"My emergency would have been, 'My drunken friend won't leave my room... and my drunken friend is making advances on me," she said, implying that this might not have prompted any response from emergency personnel.

Asked why she never yelled for help, the woman testified, "because I never thought to scream "“ I never thought to scream or to shout or anything."

The woman said that at one point she tried to escape from Kulchar by crawling under a desk, but Kulchar "pushed the chair out and pulled me from under the desk" to continue his assault.

Toy stressed messages sent by the woman to Kulchar more than a week after the alleged rape, in one of which she wrote, "Matt, please answer your phone. I swear I just want to talk to you. No police, I swear, I just really want to talk to you."

In another, she wrote, "I want you to know that I'm sorry for everything you're going through... I never ever wanted any of this to happen."

Asked to explain these messages, the woman testified that "I wanted him to know that I understood that he was going through a lot... I wanted him to know that I wasn't happy that any of it was happening."

Toy tried to get the woman to admit that the sex she had with Kulchar Sept. 28 "was consensual all the way, just as it was the first time," but she denied this. He also tried to imply that her filing a rape complaint against Kulchar stemmed from her feeling of rejection, after Kulchar had sex with her all night, but then did not invite her to a birthday celebration he was going to attend with his family the next morning.