The trial of a man accused of trying to rape a woman on a fold-down bed in his Midtown law office took a strange turn Tuesday when his defense lawyer tried to imply that the victim’s story about fighting him off couldn’t be right — because she weighs too much.
“At the time, you weighed approximately 215 pounds?” lawyer Tim Parlatore bluntly asked the 5-foot-6 36-year-old, who earlier told jurors that Manhattan lawyer Dan Nelson tried to rape her on the pop-out bed in his office conference room.
“Yes,” she replied.
Nelson, 39, also weighs 215 pounds, the lawyer noted.
“Did the bed fall or break in any way?” Parlatore asked about the less-than-3-foot-wide bed.
“No,” the victim answered, clearly offended.
Parlatore tried to continue, “Are you aware that the bed has a maximum . . . ” before prosecutor Maxine Rosenthal cut him off with an objection.
“Sustained!” Justice Patricia Nuñez said, looking aghast at the unorthodox line of questioning.
Parlatore said after court that according to the manufacturer’s website, the Murphy bed, which folds into the wall, can’t sustain more than 220 pounds of weight in total.
In earlier testimony, the victim told jurors she had met Nelson at the bar Bull McCabe’s in the East Village and agreed to go home with him the night of Aug. 21, 2014. The sloshed strangers had been drinking heavily.
After their clothes came off and they were making out in the conference room of his firm, Nelson & McCulloch, she asked him to wear a condom, but he refused and that’s when she changed her mind about the one-night stand, the woman testified.
But Nelson, who specializes in intellectual-property law, refused to take no for an answer, she said.
She said he pushed her down on the bed and molested her as she repeatedly told him to stop, she told jurors, pausing several times because she was crying.
“You think I’m going to f–king stop,” she said he replied.
“I kept saying, ‘Stop,’ then he just put his hands around my throat and he pressed down with his weight,” she said. “I was still fighting, but I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m a big girl. I can get this guy off of me,’ and I just pushed with all my weight and was able to get up.”
In a bid to escape, she said she told Nelson she had to go to the bathroom. As he escorted her, she tried to get into an elevator, but he grabbed her dress, ripping it off, she said.
“I just kept repeating to him, ‘I just want to go, please just let me go,’ ” she said. Then, she said, Nelson grabbed her by the hair.
“The wig came off,” she said. “He was stunned. He actually stepped back looking at the wig in his hand and said, ‘What the f–k,’ and it was just long enough for the elevator to close.”