A man who prosecutors said faked his own death and fled to Scotland was sentenced on Monday to five years to life in prison for having raped a former girlfriend in Utah 17 years ago.
Judge Barry G. Lawrence of Third District Court in Salt Lake County said the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole would determine how long the man, Nicholas Rossi, 38, of Rhode Island, ends up serving in state prison.
Statements from women across the country indicated that Mr. Rossi was a “serial abuser of women,” the judge said. Pointing to Mr. Rossi’s history of “duplicitous conduct,” the judge said he could not be trusted to serve his sentence on probation, as Mr. Rossi had requested.
“He is the very definition of a flight risk,” the judge said on Monday, according to a video feed from the courtroom. “He fled the country to avoid investigation. He took on an alias and, even in response to this case, refused to admit who he was.”
Mr. Rossi was convicted by a Salt Lake County jury in August of first-degree felony rape, which carries a sentence of five years to life in prison. Prosecutors said he sexually assaulted a former girlfriend after she tried to break up with him in 2008.
In September, a separate jury in Utah County convicted Mr. Rossi of having raped another former girlfriend in 2008. He faces five years to life in prison at his sentencing in that case on Nov. 4.
Prosecutors said Mr. Rossi had a pattern of meeting women online, sexually assaulting them and then telling the police that the woman was the aggressor.
Both of the victims in the Utah cases testified at his sentencing on Monday. The woman in the Salt Lake County case said she had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, major depression and severe anxiety.
“This crime stole far more than my peace of mind,” she said. “It stole who I was.”
The woman in the Utah County case described how trauma from the assault had damaged her self-esteem and her ability to enjoy life and carry out daily tasks.
Mr. Rossi made his own brief statement after the women spoke.
“I am not guilty of this,” he said in court. “These women are lying and, in due course, we will lodge an appeal.”
Samantha R. Dugan, a lawyer for Mr. Rossi, said her client had a troubled childhood in group homes and had already served more than three years behind bars since his arrest in Scotland in 2021. “This idea that he is beyond help is not true,” she said in court.
The judge said that it would be up to the Utah Board of Pardons and Parole to determine whether Mr. Rossi gets credit for the time he served.
Prosecutors said that Mr. Rossi’s attempts to fake his own death and live in Scotland were part of a pattern of deceitful behavior that suggested he was trying to avoid law enforcement.
Brandon Simmons, a Salt Lake County prosecutor, said in court that Mr. Rossi’s online search history in 2020 included searches about extradition, how to create a fake identity and missing birth certificates for Irish orphans, which was one of the identities he had assumed.
“He’s a danger to this community and to all other communities,” Mr. Simmons said on Monday.
Mr. Rossi was convicted in 2008 in Dayton, Ohio, of sexual imposition and public indecency, which required him to register as a sex offender. That charge stemmed from an encounter he had with a college student who told a police officer that he had groped her and masturbated in front of her, prosecutors said.
Law enforcement officials said he fled in 2017 to Britain or Ireland and then settled in Scotland.
Using the name Nicholas Alahverdian, investigators said, he orchestrated an elaborate ruse to fake his death in 2020, creating an obituary that said he had died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 32. An online memorial page contained glowing tributes to Mr. Alahverdian, including purported messages from a congressman and the mayor of Providence, R.I.
By that point, the authorities in Utah County had identified him as a suspect in the rape there after they entered DNA evidence from a backlog of rape kits into a national database of registered sex offenders. Prosecutors charged Mr. Rossi with rape in Utah County in 2020.
He was arrested in Scotland in December 2021, after he went to a hospital in Glasgow, where he was treated for Covid-19 and placed on a ventilator. Investigators identified him through photographs after his DNA and fingerprints were provided to Interpol, the international police agency.
Appearing in a Scottish court after his arrest, he identified himself as Arthur Knight, an Irishman who had never been to the United States. But the court said that information could not be trusted and ruled that he could be extradited to the United States. In 2022, he was chared with the rape in Salt Lake County.
Utah prosecutors praised the women for coming forward and holding Mr. Rossi accountable.
“While justice may have been slow, the defendant was convicted and now sentenced to prison, consistent with the harm he caused to our survivor,” Sim Gill, the Salt Lake County district attorney, said in a statement on Monday. “She can rest assured he did not escape punishment.”
Michael Levenson covers breaking news for The Times from New York.
The post Man Who Fled to Europe Gets at Least 5 Years for Rape, Prosecutors Say appeared first on New York Times.
