Lawyer of ‘That '70s Show’ star Danny Masterson challenges new details in former girlfriend’s 2001 rape story

foxnews.com:

An attorney for Danny Masterson challenged his former longtime girlfriend during cross-examination Wednesday on why her trial testimony alleging the actor raped her in 2001 included several new details that were missing from the accounts she gave authorities at the beginning of the investigation. "Is your testimony today that you can now remember things in 2023 that you didn’t remember in 2017?" Masterson's lawyer Shawn Holley asked the model and actor who is the first witness to take the stand in the Los Angeles courtroom at Masterson's trial on three rape charges.

The woman responded that her memory had not improved, but that she "opened up more than I have before" a day earlier when she described an attack from Masterson, then her boyfriend of five years, in their Hollywood-area home.

She testified Tuesday that she woke to find Masterson on top of her and raping her, that she shouted for him to stop, that he put his full weight on her and pinned her arms down, and that she finally got him to stop by pulling his hair.

He responded by hitting her in the face and spitting on her. Holley dwelled on each of these elements in her cross-examination, asking why she had not mentioned in her initial interviews with Los Angeles police detectives and a prosecutor in 2017 that she had said that she was merely trying to go to sleep when she found Masterson trying to have sex with her. "That’s the same thing to me," she responded, "I’m Southern, we say trying to when we mean you’re doing it." Holley also suggested that her testimony didn't make physical sense when she said Masterson was looking at her with "dead eyes" the entire time while also putting his full body weight on her. "I’m trying to understand how a person’s dead weight.