Georgia investigators open files in Roethlisberger assault case
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Ben Roethlisberger is shown posing for a photograph with the young woman who later made the sex-assault allegations. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation provided the photo with her face obscured; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has digitally obscured it even further to protect her identity.
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In two interviews with authorities, a Georgia college student calmly told police that Ben Roethlisberger had sex with her over her objections inside a dark nightclub bathroom.
But there were two critical inconsistencies in the version of events she related to police in the interviews -- the first of which occurred mere hours after the woman went to police and the second of which occurred about 12 hours after the alleged incident.
Namely, the woman characterized the way she and the Steelers quarterback came to be in the bathroom of the Capital City nightclub in Milledgeville, Ga., very differently in the second interview than in the first. And she remembered details in the first interview about what transpired in the bathroom that she told police she could not recall in the second.
An audio recording of the first interview and the video tape of the second were among dozens of recordings from the Roethlisberger case file that were released Wednesday by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. But parts of the audio recording are difficult to hear in part because the recording is poor.
Neither the Pittsburgh Steelers nor the lawyer for the woman had any comment as media nationwide mined the 50-plus discs for new details about the case involving the superstar quarterback and posted clips on the Internet.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette does not identify accusers in sexual assault cases.
Of all the interviews, the accuser's are the most compelling, since for the first time the public is able to hear her speak and see her image, albeit with her face blurred by the authorities. It is also the most critical, since only two people know what, if anything, really went on inside the nightclub bathroom -- the woman and Mr. Roethlisberger.
At one point she calls herself "stupid" for going to a back room with him.
The 28-year-old quarterback spoke with authorities only briefly at the beginning of the investigation and never sat down for a formal interview. He has denied any criminal wrongdoing but has not publicly told his side of the story.
First Published June 10, 2010 12:00 am
