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RENDLEMAN TRIAL: Woman Says She Was Molested

Posted on: Wednesday, 22 February 2006, 12:00 CST

By Natalie Storey, The Santa Fe New Mexican

Feb. 22--Defense attorneys for Mark Rendleman on Tuesday sought to attack the credibility of a 20-year-old woman who says he molested her when she was 13 in his Santa Fe home.

The witness testified Rendleman woke her up while she was sleeping next to his daughter on a couch. "I want to make love to you," she said Rendleman told her that summer night seven years ago.

"I was pretty scared and I froze," she said.

The trial of Rendleman, an Embudo artist, on charges that say he took erotic photos of his young daughter and molested his daughter's now-20-yearold friend, began Tuesday.

The trial comes six years after he was charged with one count of sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of criminal sexual contact with a minor. Rendleman faces similar charges in Rio Arriba County, where a separate trial is scheduled later this year.

During opening statements, a defense attorney called into question the credibility of the prosecution's key witness -- the woman who said Rendleman molested her when she was 13.

Attorney Cammie Nichols told jurors the woman had given inconsistent accounts and was led to make the accusations by her mother, a woman with whom Rendleman also had a child. The witness' mother has a personality disorder and a history of alleging sexual abuse against ex-lovers, charges that have all turned out to be false, Nichols said.

"She's adopted her mother's fiction in this case," the defense attorney said. "She's taken it in; she's adopted it; she's made it her reality."

But Assistant District Attorney Andras Szantho said the woman and Rendleman are the only people who know what happened that night on the couch. "Who really knows what happened?" Szantho asked the jury. "How many people were there? Who is the best person to tell you what happened?"

The 20-year-old testified Tuesday that she and Rendleman's daughter were both naked and that the daughter did not wake up during the alleged incident involving Rendleman. The witness said she didn't immediately report the alleged incident, but told her mother about it after watching an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show concerning Little League coaches who molested players.

"I can remember it in my head to this day exactly what happened," the witness said.

The defense is scheduled to finish cross-examining the woman this morning.

Entered into evidence Tuesday was a series of photos of Rendleman's young daughter that he took when she was 6 years old. Prosecutors allege two of the 16 photos are pornographic. Rendleman's attorneys maintain all of the photos are simply family shots.

The photos, which are among hundreds of photos seized by investigators who searched Rendleman's house six years ago, depict a young blonde getting dressed for school. In the sequence of photos admitted into evidence, the girl is naked, then half clothed and then fully clothed with a pair of underwear over her head.

In two of those photos, from which the sexual exploitation charge stems, the girl's genitals are exposed. In one, she is crawling away and looking back at the camera. In the other, she is sitting on a bed and trying to put on her socks, but her legs are spread in such way that her pubic area is centrally exposed in the photo.

Both the Santa Fe and Rio Arriba cases were filed in 1999 after a boy and a girl told their mother Rendleman had videotaped and photographed them nude.

The state Court of Appeals ruled in September 2003 that only pictures that focused "on the genitals or pubic area" and were "for purpose of sexual stimulation" would violate the law.

Rendleman had been scheduled to go on trial last September, prosecuted by a member of the state Attorney General's Office who originally handled the case as member of the District Attorney's Office in Santa Fe.

The case was referred back to the District Attorney's Office two weeks before the trial began and then postponed because Rendleman's daughter married a good friend of Attorney General Patricia Madrid.

The trial is expected to last through Friday .

Contact Natalie Storey at 986-3026 or nstorey@sfnewmexican.com.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Santa Fe New Mexican

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Source: The Santa Fe New Mexican

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