The attorney for a 46-year-old Sherwood man accused of raping a woman with a 3-foot-long snow brush told a Pulaski County jury on Thursday that his client is the only one who has been violated.
Everything that occurred between David Ronald Kinder and the 47-year-old accuser was consensual, defense attorney Blake Hendrix told the seven women and five men of the jury before special Circuit Judge Hugh Finkelstein.
Proceedings resume at 9 a.m. today with the defense presenting evidence. Hendrix did not say whether Kinder will testify.
"There was no evidence of forcible compulsion, but you will find many many reasons to doubt [the accuser]," Hendrix told jurors.
The brush, which has an ice scraper on the handle's other end, is usually used to remove snow from cars. Hendrix said the woman used the brush on herself to prepare for the sexual encounter.
A rape exam that night showed she suffered only a surprisingly small scrape, not the kind of injuries people would expect to see on someone who claims to have been violated with a bristly tool, the defense attorney said.
Kinder thought the July 20 intercourse was about celebrating a milestone of increased trust between them in their 29-year relationship, until Sherwood police showed up later that night and arrested him, Hendrix said.
The woman never resisted Kinder, never asked him to stop and never complained to him about what had occurred between them, then had him drive her to work after the encounter, he said.
What really happened, the lawyer said, is that the woman realized Kinder was about to find out how much money she'd been stealing from his children.
Rather than face up to the way she had violated his trust, the woman lied to authorities to both avoid the humiliation of public exposure for stealing money from children and to pressure him into paying her a substantial financial settlement, Hendrix said.
"By making a false statement against David, not only can she avoid losing everything, she can take care of her future," Hendrix said.
Jurors heard a dramatically different version of events from prosecutors Michelle Quillen and Jayme Butts-Hall, who cited police testimony about seeing blood on the brush bristles and finding spots of blood on a bare mattress where the pair had sex.
The woman testified that she was surprised when a raging Kinder, caught up in some inexplicable anger with her, bullied her into submitting to him. She said she resigned herself to it.
"I thought, OK, we're going to have sex, no problem," the woman said.
But Kinder surprised her by getting the brush and raping her with it three times, among a series of other painful and humiliating sex acts he forced her to perform, the woman told jurors during her 90 minutes on the stand.
"The next thing I know, he is scrubbing me [with the brush] and calling me dirty and a whore," she testified. "I was afraid of something worse happening."
Her 11-year-old daughter was in a nearby room, the woman said, telling jurors she kept quiet to keep the girl from seeing what Kinder was doing to her.
"I did not want her to hear me scream," she testified.
After Kinder was done with her, the woman said, she made herself a peanut butter sandwich and had him drive her to work, where she called police.
Metro on 06/08/2018