“John, I realize this is one family’s turmoil in the midst of hundreds of other concerns you deal with on a daily basis; however, it could impact other innocent victims in the future. What has been done here is wrong and it must be addressed. I am tremendously grateful for any advice or direction you could give us in this regard.”
One part of this that became important to me as time went on, and would ultimately drive me to see this all to completion, was that through the filing of this lawsuit, I had listed police department policy and procedure changes I wanted executed as part of my settlement, so no other victim would have to endure the nightmare I had been through. I asked for improved sexual assault training to ensure that future victims were treated with respect and compassion, along with an apology and acknowledgment that I had been telling the truth all along.
As Donna waited for a response from the governor, the business of deposing each of the main players started. This lawsuit process, Maureen had warned, was going to take years, not months. The depositions alone would take a year or more. Then there was the chance that the city would want to settle out of court. Yet it all began with those grueling depositions.
The deposition process was long, frustrating, and labor intensive. Most of the depositions were done at Maureen’s office, and most of the time John would accompany me. Maureen’s partner Bob would join us for some of them. My stomach would do flips when officers would lie and I had to sit there without being able to speak. Eventually, I resolved myself to the process and would try my best to focus on what was being said and take notes to review with Maureen afterward. I knew that if we were to build a strong case that this was a necessary evil, and it gave us invaluable insight as to where they were coming from. It truly split the lines and showed for the first time exactly where everyone involved stood.
The biggest shock to Donna and John during the deposition process came when Detective Lou Cote stepped into Maureen’s office, sat down, took his oath, and then began talking about his role in the investigation and his thoughts about how the case had been handled. John remembered his earlier conversation with Lou and how Lou had expressed his disappointment with the Morans and how things had been handled.
Would Cote stand behind those words?
It was now September 29, 1995, just over two years since Donna’s assault. Cote began by telling the lawyers exactly what Donna had relayed to him about her attack. Cote’s version was pretty much on par with what Donna had said in her first interview. It was obvious Cote had gone through the report (or some sort of notes) to prepare for the deposition.
The first surprise for Donna came when Maureen asked Cote, “After you reviewed the initial report and spoke with [Donna] and got her statement, and did whatever else that you did . . . was it your belief that [she] had been sexually assaulted on September 11, 1993?”
Cote seemed stunned by the question, asking, “After I did that?”
“Yes.”
“At that time, I had no opinion.”
When asked if Cote thought the information provided by Maria Cappella (at the time) was relevant to Donna’s case, Cote answered, “Yes.”
Then Maureen raised the question of whether Cote had placed Maria Cappella’s statement into Donna’s file. This had been a point of contention. The “talk” Cote had with Maria—he would not call it a statement—had been missing. No one seemed to know where it went.
“Did you place that statement into [Donna’s] file?” Maureen asked.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I did the report, and I laid it on Lieutenant Moran’s desk, which is what, you know, is normal procedures, because he reviews the report. And then it is placed in the file. I don’t place it in the file.”
Cote admitted he “had no knowledge” of Moran placing that specific report into Donna’s file.
The detective went on to say that there came a time when he disbelieved Donna had been sexually assaulted. It began, Cote testified, when he reread Donna’s statement. Her story began to fall apart for Cote there. From the way Donna reacted to an intruder coming down the hallway toward her bedroom, to how she had claimed that, with a pillowcase covering her head, she was still able to discern that the attacker had gone through her drawers, tossing clothes on the floor, looking for money and jewelry and even a set of panty hose to tie her up. This didn’t add up for the detective after he thought about it; he couldn’t fathom how someone could see well enough through a pillowcase to come to those determinations.
Certainly it would have been easy to figure all this out after going back into the house and seeing the clothing all over the floor. And Donna had gone back up to the bedroom after her attack.
Then, Cote said, it was the gun being placed on the floor. This particular statement by Donna made Cote think that perhaps she had been making up the story as she went along.
“If it was a gun,” Cote said, “by laying it on the floor, you are not going to know if it is metal. That gun is solid. It is not going to ring. It is not going to make a metal sound if it’s a solid item.”
Cote never said whether the WPD conducted its own test, placing a gun on Donna’s floor to see if it was the least bit possible to recognize, with your eyes closed, as a gun. The WPD, in fact, never reenacted Donna’s attack; they merely assumed the metal gun would not “ring” against the wood floor.
Maureen never pressed Cote on the issue, but any seasoned investigator would have done a simple reenactment to see if it was possible.
What truly got Cote to think that Donna was lying turned out to be Donna’s behavior.
“And another thing,” he said, not making eye contact with Donna or John. “When a victim goes through a very serious trauma, as this would be called, it is known that the brain has a mechanism that shuts down.” Donna sat, listening in total disbelief to what this man was saying. She had always considered Cote an ally, someone who believed in her. Cote had even walked up to John at that stag party last year and told him he would testify against the Morans; he said he was backing Donna all the way and didn’t agree with the way she had been treated. Now this?
“It is called a release valve,” Cote added, describing the part of the brain that shuts down during a traumatic situation. “And it blocks out certain episodes of the crime. You don’t remember. You may never remember them. A year later you may. A month later. You don’t know. It may never come back.”
He was suggesting that Donna had given the WPD too many details about her attack; she had recalled too much! Donna was being judged on her memory now.
Donna had a hard time controlling her emotions while listening.
Here’s the thing about Lou Cote: He [nor Doug Moran] ever bothered to even step foot inside my home. The most Moran did was take photos of the outside of our home. Yes, I did think that if they had had so many questions, why didn’t they bother to explore each of them further? During Cote’s deposition I felt incredibly betrayed that this detective who looked John and me in the eyes and shook our hands and appeared sincere had suddenly turned on us. What kind of person does that? I felt sorry for him. It was pathetic.
For perhaps the first time, the following idea was considered: If Donna had been lying, making up this elaborate story to cover for herself and her lover, why wouldn’t she smash a window, cut a screen, or somehow make it look like her intruder had forced his way into the house? Why, if she had given the WPD so many details, so many specifics of that night that they thought it odd, would she not cover up her crime in some staged way? Most falsified claims of break-ins, sexual assaults, and other crimes include some tangible, hard evidence of falsification: a story that just doesn’t line up, a window broken from the inside out, maybe a timeline discrepancy. There was none of that in Donna’s case.
“No,” Cote said, he did not find anything Donna did in the beginning unusual.
“Are you aware that [the victim] suffered a scratched cornea as a result,” Maureen said rather bluntly, maintaining her argument that had Donna made all this up, she would have had to scratch her own eye—a very serious, potentially blinding injury.
“Yes,” Cote said. “I believe that was in her statement.”
“How do you think that was inflicted?”
“I would have to see the medical [reports] and talk to her doctor on that, because I don’t know what kind of an injury that was inflicted.”
“Don’t you think before you made a determination such as this, you should have talked to the doctor?”
“This case was taken away from me. I am telling you . . . You asked my opinion. And I am giving you my opinion.”
Donna looked at John.
Unbelievable.
The Moran brothers had gotten to Cote, they believed. He was playing it safe. Protecting his job, perhaps.
Further along into Cote’s deposition, during what became almost an hour of a back-and-forth between Cote and Donna’s attorney, she asked, “Did you ever hear that Lieutenant Moran taped the conversation . . .?”
“I don’t know nothing about no tapes,” Cote said.
Maureen pressed.
Cote stood his ground, and it was clear where his loyalty remained: “I don’t know anything about the tapes. The tapes have never been discussed with me. I have never heard it. I have no knowledge of the tapes. I don’t know about tapes . . .”
After several more questions regarding whether Cote had an opinion as to why he was taken off the case, Maureen concluded her questioning.
As he left the room, Donna sat hurt and confused by what she had heard.
With regard to Lou Cote’s deposition, I could not believe that he had turned against us. Detective Cote took my statement, and he saw me when my eye was still healing. I went down to the WPD that day with John. I tried to be as calm and composed as I could be, relaying as much information as I could about what happened. I wanted to come across as being strong enough to get through this. I didn’t want to be an extra burden to the detectives investigating my case. I wanted to show them that I was ready and willing to see this through and was emotionally strong enough to weather it all. Well, Lou appeared to be concerned and sensitive to both John and me as I sat there giving him my statement. Then to find out he thought the way I was acting odd. And the fact that I had remembered details was not in line with how a victim of sexual assault should act. The guy did a complete 180-degree turnaround in his deposition, and it was not the same Lou Cote we met that day.
There were no surprises from the Moran brothers during their depositions; they stood firm and strong in solidarity, willing to see the case through to an end they had already established as fact from day one. There was something immutable between these two men, even Neil O’Leary commented later, regarding their stated belief that Donna was lying. Nothing could ever change their minds. It wasn’t as though they had set out to conspire against her and frame her; it was that they believed she had lied. With the measly training they’d had with sexual assaults, according to Neil, there was no way they could see between the lines of the case and admit they had made a terrible mistake. In other words, they were too far into this now and were going to stick with their story to the end, no matter what anyone said.
As for the Morans’ depositions, I braced myself to expect anything and was more prepared. But no matter how prepared I was, it was surreal to sit in the same room across from Doug Moran (knowing what he had done to me), unable to say a word, listening as he spun his web of lies. The Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) I had suffered from already was raging during those days of the depositions. I could feel my heart pounding, ears burning, and this feeling of nerves racing through my body as if I could jump out of my skin. I would rather do physical labor all day than deal with the mental torment that had become part of the norm while we prepared for trial.
The depositions dragged on for years. Yes, years. Detective Cote’s deposition took place in September 1995, but it wasn’t until March 12, 1998, more than two years later, that Captain Joseph Cass, IA’s chief investigator on Donna’s case, sat and talked about how IA went about investigating the WPD.
The slow, grinding wheel of bureaucracy disenchants, disenfranchises, and disheartens the innocent. Think of the people who have spent decades on death row only to later be exonerated. Justice seems to take forever when you fight. But Donna, despite all her frustration and turmoil and disbelief, had weathered the storm quite well. She was in this for the long haul. By the time Cass testified, Donna basically expected him to cover for his counterparts, to continue facilitating what she felt was the big lie.
Certain aspects of Cass’s deposition were simply absurd. For instance, Cass admitted he had never spoken to any of the responding officers other than Sergeant James Griffin. It became clear from Cass’s testimony that instead of going to the source—let’s say Donna, for example, or John—he opted to ask Captain Moran about specific items within the investigation. So Cass’s source for investigating misconduct by Douglas Moran was Lieutenant Moran’s brother, the captain.
It appeared, from listening to Cass, that he never challenged the Morans regarding anything they did. He just took their word.
This way of handling an IA investigation was inexcusable.
In the end Cass believed the case had come down to a he said–she said dilemma; and in those particular cases, the IA investigator made clear, Internal Affairs always erred on the side of law enforcement. Donna would lose every time.
By the end of 1998, Donna was itching to get the case settled and move on—she knew she would always carry with her this one night of her life, in which she had been brutally assaulted, but it wasn’t supposed to take years and years of anguish and discomfort like this. Donna was a forty-two-year-old mother of two growing kids, a career woman, a pillar, really, within her community of friends and family. She had resolved not to allow this one episode to define her. But it was, in many respects, consuming her. She couldn’t escape the thoughts of the assault and the revictimization as she went to sleep every night—the darkness itself always being a point of trauma and fear since the attack. Then every morning she woke up to the thoughts again.
An incredible moment came after the depositions concluded, when John’s relative, the woman who had supposedly started the rumor that solidified the Moran brothers’ already-established belief that Donna was lying, signed an affidavit stating that she was “aware that someone broke into Donna Palomba’s house in . . . 1993, however . . . [she] was not aware of any of the details of the crime.”
Further, she stated, “I never had, nor do I now have, any reason to suspect that Donna Palomba was or is having an extramarital affair . . . That I never, on any occasion whatsoever, said to [the informant’s mother], or any other person, that Donna Palomba was engaging in an extramarital affair or that I suspected that she was.”
The substance of the rumor that had initiated the tongue-lashing and threatening interrogation Donna had endured from Lieutenant Moran, the main reason why the WPD had not believed Donna’s account of being sexually assaulted, had never taken place, according to its alleged source. Someone had made up a rumor of a rumor, and spread them both. And to think, all the WPD had to do was interview this woman, and investigators—including Cass and his team—would have gotten the same information.
This was that rock solid evidence the Moran brothers had against me? This was that supposed 100 percent proof that I purposefully lied to the police—the “countless interviews and photographs,” as Moran had said to me during my interrogation, that proved I was lying? This unconfirmed, unsubstantiated, uncorroborated piece of gossip is what they had? And, as it turned out, the “family source” denied she ever said it. How on earth could this have turned the investigators to point a finger at me? It was clear that it didn�
��t matter what I said, they were not going to back down from their theory, even if it meant revictimizing someone who had been traumatized already, not to mention having an armed rapist out there, within the community, running free. Reading this affidavit just inspired me more to go forward and fight these people.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A New Lease
With the depositions behind her, by early summer 2000 Donna Palomba was determined to force change. No matter how her lawsuit against the city turned out, she wanted to fix the way in which sexual assault cases were handled by police departments (starting with the WPD) from the moment police arrived on scene. Donna’s lawsuit was aimed toward the implementation of these changes within the WPD. There needed to be a standard policy in place, something like an A to Z instructional manual for the police to follow after arriving on the scene of a sexual assault. Every police officer, Donna knew by firsthand experience, needed to know what to do.
“This was the main reason for the lawsuit,” Maureen Norris explained.
The lawsuit outlined what Donna had gone through over the years, including “mental anguish, nervousness, dizziness, nauseating feelings, sleep disturbance, PTSD, paranoia, psychological disorders, phobias, humiliation, depression, headaches, weight loss, anxiety, weakness, trembling, nightmares, loss of appetite . . . a great loss to her marital relationship and . . . psychiatric care.”
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