CLEARFIELD – The case against a Madera man who has been accused of forcing a girl to have sexual relations with him over a three-year period beginning in 2012 will go to the jury Thursday morning.
Robert Philbert Myers, 36, of Madera is standing trial on charges, which include 20 counts each of rape forcible compulsion; statutory sexual assault-11 years older; involuntary deviate sexual intercourse-person less than 16 years of age; and indecent assault-person less than 16 years of age.
Clearfield County District Attorney William A. Shaw Jr. presented the case on behalf of the commonwealth. Myers is being represented by defense attorneys Carl Zwick and Leanne Nedza. Judge Paul E. Cherry is presiding over the case.
Myers is facing the charges for allegedly raping and sexually assaulting a girl over a three-year period, beginning in July of 2012 and ending in July of 2014. The victim, who is now 18, detailed the abuse for jurors when she took the witness stand Monday.
According to her, Myers started out making inappropriate comments when she was about 12 or 13 years old. She said it progressed to him having inappropriate contact with her and eventually forcing her to have sexual relations with him in his truck’s sleeper cab and at a Madera residence.
She said when the abuse first began it was occurring once or twice a month. But as she got older, it was occurring more frequently and sometimes two or three times a week. She didn’t tell anyone for a long time out of fear of Myers and embarrassment.
Myers resumed his testimony to defend himself Wednesday morning, telling jurors he’d been elected Bigler Township supervisor after all the allegations had been made against him. He took office in January.
Later under questioning by Shaw, he agreed charges weren’t filed against him until Nov. 30, 2015, which was actually after the General Election.
Myers denied that he set up his e-mail and Facebook accounts when he got his first smartphone device in 2014. The victim, he said, had his phone, entered the information and created both accounts after he expressed interest in Facebook.
When asked, Myers denied sending any private Facebook messages to the victim that was sexual in nature in April of 2015. He also denied ever making inappropriate comments toward her, inappropriately touching her and forcing her to have sexual relations with him anywhere.
So far as working for him, he said the victim split fire wood, and she asked to help him because she enjoyed it. He compensated her $10 per hour. On her 16th birthday, he bought her a car as a surprise, which was “free and clear.”
He said he never changed the terms and asked for monthly payments for the car. He said he also never traded her car payments –or anything else – for sexual favors. Myers said he bought the car for the victim, as he eventually expected her to get her driver’s license.
When he found out about the sexual abuse allegations made against him, Myers said he was confused more than anything and upset. He felt he and the victim had a close relationship, and she’d always given him that impression.
Under cross-examination, Shaw pressed Myers for an explanation about why the defense presented numerous pictures and measurements of his truck cab and Madera residence, where the victim had alleged the abuse occurred at.
He asked Myers if he was trying to say he was physically too big to have sex with the victim in the truck cab, for example. Myers said he never made that claim when the pictures were presented to him in court.
However, under questioning by both Zwick and Shaw, Myers claimed that he was not physically capable of abusing the victim in the position she alleged because his stomach would “get in the way.”
The defense subsequently called several character witnesses, all of whom told jurors that Myers had a good reputation as being honest and truthful in their Madera community.
After the lunch break, the defense indicated it had four more potential character witnesses. Both sides agreed their testimony would be very similar, and the four individuals’ names were put on record. After that the defense rested its case.
In closing, Nedza argued the victim’s testimony was riddled with major discrepancies. For this investigation, the victim was interviewed multiple times, and she said each time her account of the alleged sexual abuse changed.
Nedza told jurors when she pressed the victim about these discrepancies, she had a “million excuses” from she hadn’t thought about it or had forgotten about something to she wasn’t asked the right question.
She accused the victim and her mother of making false allegations against Myers and plotting to file the report. This, she said, was why the victim’s mother wanted to be present for the interview with the trooper “to make sure they got their story straight.”
Nedza said the district attorney would get up and say the victim didn’t script her report and of course there will be discrepancies. She said that would be expected of a child sex abuse victim who was four or five years old but not for the victim who was 16 years old at the time of her report.
“She knows it’s wrong. She knows she can ask and get help,” she argued. “She doesn’t ask because nothing happened.” She questioned how it was possible for the victim to experience multiple rapes but not remember which one was the first incident.
Nedza said although the victim testified that she was blocking it from memory, it still would have been traumatic for her, and she would have remembered exact details of where and how it happened.
She went on to describe how Myers took the victim camping and fishing, let her ride along in the truck to see different places and to work with him to teach her about work ethic. She said it was all being turned around and used against him.
“Now they [the commonwealth] want to say that’s grooming,” Nedza said. She said if that was the case, she was “scared,” because people could take acts of love and kindness and use them to label others they don’t like as a pedophile.
Nedza played the audio of the victim’s interview with state police at the start of her closing. In concluding, she called jurors’ attention to the fact that the victim lacked emotion in her voice and demeanor.
Shaw countered, telling jurors the victim went through multiple interviews with each person asking different questions. Each interviewer also had the benefit of reviewing information from previous reports.
So far as the victim not remembering which incident was the first, he suggested it wasn’t intimate or romantic but instead something traumatic. “It’s not something she wants to remember,” he said. “She’s been traumatized for years.”
Shaw also argued that when the sexual abuse started, the victim was only 12 or 13 years old. He asked jurors if they really thought she was thinking: “Hey, I need to write this all down because someday Ms. Nedza is going to ask me a million questions, and I better be able to answer her so the jury doesn’t think I’m lying.”
Shaw called Nedza’s cross-examination of the victim an “attack” that lasted the entire afternoon. He said the victim was the only witness Monday and she was “unshakeable” when giving her testimony.
He went on to say it wasn’t any wonder parents and children don’t come forward in these types of cases. He said, “It’s because they don’t want to get caught up in this nonsense, and it’s offensive” for the defense attorneys to shift fault from defendants onto the victims.
“Don’t deny her justice because she acted like a child sex abuse victim,” Shaw concluded his argument. “Find him guilty so it lets her know that it was worth it.”
Cherry will charge the jurors promptly at 9 a.m. after which he will send them into their deliberations.