From the archives: How clothing, lies and money complicated a Florida rape case

This article was originally published in the Miami Herald’s Tropic magazine, under the headline “The Whole Story,” on Nov, 26, 1989.

Fighting words

It wasn’t just the verdict. The verdict alone might have merited a small newspaper story, maybe a 10-second TV spot. Accused Rapist Found Innocent.

What made the difference was a comment by the jury foreman, volunteered to reporters outside the courthouse after the eight- day trial:

“We all felt she was asking for it, the way she was dressed,” Roy Diamond said.

The remark would turn a white lace miniskirt into a holy shroud of feminist outrage, set up South Florida as the world capital of leering, Neanderthal sexism, and make the victim -- a 22-year-old woman from Coconut Creek described in news accounts as an “heiress” -- into an international celebrity.

Within days of the verdict, she had posed for photographs and given an interview to The London Daily Mail, in return for $3,000. The newspaper called her “Blondina Ortega, an innocent, convent-educated girl” from a “close-knit Catholic family who are standing by her.”

It said her name had been “blackened” by the “extraordinary court ruling,” and attributed to her the quotes: “I was kidnapped, I was beaten, I was almost murdered before being raped three times. My life has been ruined, not only by the brute who raped me but by a jury who decided I was to blame because of what I was wearing. I am a decent girl trying to live a decent life and I believed until then that the decent people on the jury would protect me. It is so unjust.” The American supermarket tabloids loved it.

Three days later, she was sitting beside national talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who displayed the offending ensemble on a hanger for her 15 million viewers: the miniskirt, the cropped, lime-green tank top and the wide, black leather belt the woman had worn early on the morning of Nov. 6, 1988, when she encountered Steven Lamar Lord in the parking lot of an all-night Denny’s in Fort Lauderdale. Winfrey -- adhering to an informal media convention not to identify victims of sexual crimes -- agreed to call the woman only “Susan.”

Dressed in a demure royal blue suit over a high-necked white blouse, and camouflaged under an ill-fitting black wig -- she looked like a face from a 1968 high-school yearbook -- Susan related to Winfrey the horrors of her ordeal. Speaking in a small, childlike voice, she seemed icy, eerily detached, like someone retreating into mechanical recitation to avert emotional collapse.

That night, she would appear on Larry King Live! in a more stylish blond wig and sunglasses, calling herself “Susie.”

“I was kidnapped, held at knife point, raped repeatedly, hit over the head and cut up and left for dead in a car accident,” she repeated identically, almost robotically, on both shows.

The studio audience of 150 at the Winfrey show maintained a respectful silence -- interrupted by an occasional gasp -- as Susan related not only the details of her abduction and abuse, but of the six harrowing days she’d spent in jail before the trial, for refusing to cooperate with prosecutors.

She told of an ambush by sadistic sheriff’s deputies who neither identified themselves nor told her why they were seizing her.

Her indignant lawyer thundered that she’d never received any rape counseling.

In jail, she said, “I got no food or water for two days.”

“Unbelievable!” blurted Oprah.

The audience -- mostly young women -- wanted desperately to believe her, and by and large they did, despite a few uncomfortable moments. There was a minor but troubling inconsistency in her story: Was she forced to unlock her car at knife point, or was it already unlocked? She gave both versions, in successive sentences.

“Her story is still not jibing,” one woman in the audience said to Winfrey, uncertainly. “Maybe she’s just nervous, I don’t know.”

Sympathetic nods. She was indeed nervous, people agreed.

Then there was the question of what she was wearing at the time of the assault -- more accurately, what she was not wearing.

No underpants, no panty hose. A disquieting fact.

“That’s just a personal preference I have,” Susan explained.

There was no dispute among members of the studio audience that it should not matter what a woman wears, that even if she chooses to walk down Main Street “buck naked,” as Winfrey put it, she has a right to be safe from rape.

Still . . . Winfrey rose to Susan’s defense: “It’s a style. People wear that all the time in Florida and California.”

More nods. In warm climates with torrid night life, it was presumed, women routinely go bare bottomed. But not here in Chicago, Winfrey assured, drawing a laugh.

After the show, the audience milled about the lobby. The talk was about rape and courage. Susan was a martyr in a sick society.

Then, suddenly, a side door opened and Susan appeared. With her was Alexander Siegel, the portly, balding Fort Lauderdale attorney who’d been at her side through the program and who was brokering her media deals. The two dashed through the lobby and hopped into a black stretch Lincoln Continental waiting at the curb. This all took only a few seconds, but it silenced the room.

It’s a funny thing about appearances. Everyone agrees they shouldn’t mean much, that people should be judged by what they are, not what they look like. Still, appearances wind up meaning quite a bit -- when you meet someone for the first time, when you are sizing up a job applicant, when you are sitting on a jury, or in a studio audience, trying to decide who is telling the truth and who is not.

The Susan who burst into the lobby and sprinted for the limo wasn’t the prim, meek, aggrieved victim these women had seen in the studio moments before. This Susan was laughing. Her dowdy wig was gone, and as she ran, her normal hair -- wild, with a waist-length weave dyed the color of cheap red wine -- streamed out behind her.

The studio audience stared after her, dumbfounded.

Her name is not Susan. Her name is Blandina Isabella Chiapponi.

She is not an “heiress.”

She is not an “innocent.”

She has no “close-knit family” standing staunchly behind her.

These are just the beginnings of the misunderstandings that surround this very public case of rape and abduction, a case that led to one of the most widely maligned jury verdicts in recent history.

The clear point of outrage burned into the national consciousness, a point with which all right-thinkers agreed, was simple: a woman’s background, deportment or choice of clothing should be irrelevant to proving a charge of rape.

But the irony -- lost in the post-trial furor -- is that nobody involved in this case disagreed with that fine moral point. The attorney for the accused rapist said as much in his summation. In their deliberations, the jurors agreed: how Blandina Chiapponi chose to live her life, how she chose to dress, did not matter.

What mattered to the jury was this: Blandina Chiapponi had clearly misrepresented herself under oath, not once but several times; her story had inexplicably changed from one statement to the next; her explanation of the events leading to the alleged rape, and her behavior during and after it, were vague, evasive, suspect. Although it pained them, in a case where the physical evidence was inconclusive the jury had no choice but to look to the victim’s credibility in order to remove that last shred of reasonable doubt, as the law demands. They looked, but they still doubted.

If Blandina Chiapponi was a victim, she was not alone. The six citizens who sat on the jury had done their duty and they were publicly vilified for it, largely because the myth of this case -- a rape of justice -- was a much simpler, better story for the mass media than was the difficult and subtly shaded truth.

Strangers In The Night

Robert Avera and his ex-wife, Shirley, were driving northbound on I-95 a few miles from Vero Beach. It was Sunday, Nov. 7, 1988, between 7 and 8 a.m.

Trouble ahead: a red, 1985 Pontiac Fiero swerving on and off the road, then spinning out, ending up facing southeast on the swale, half in a ditch.

The Averas pulled over, got out of their car and trotted over to the Fiero, where they found a man bent over a woman who seemed to be passed out in the passenger seat. The Averas watched as the man patted the woman’s face, trying to wake her. Shirley Avera went to the woman, while the two men tried to re- start the car.

“Please help me, help me,” the woman whispered.

Robert Avera did not hear this. His attention was riveted on something that made him uneasy. On the front seat, on the driver’s side, was a six-inch, bone-handled hunting knife. As he worked with the driver, Shirley Avera and the young woman -- now clearly awake -- ran back to the Averas’ car. A moment later, Robert heard his ex-wife calling him. He recognized real urgency in her voice, and hurried to join her.

Inside the car, the young woman locked all the doors. Help me, the woman said. He raped me. He’s going to kill us all.

Avera gunned the engine, and took off to find a phone.

“She was more or less shaking like a leaf,” he would later say in a deposition in the case of The State vs. Steven Lamar Lord.

Indian River County sheriff’s deputies found Lord trespassing in a nearby orange grove the next day. After the first crash, he’d sped north on the interstate, then he crashed again and took off on foot.

It looked like an open and shut case: They had the victim, and they had two eyewitnesses to the victim’s dramatic escape from her attacker. They were five hours and 130 miles from home. The victim’s car was stolen, wrecked and abandoned with the defendant’s belongings in it. The suspect still had the hunting knife.

A doctor’s exam certified sexual penetration. A background check on the 26-year-old suspect turned up a gold mine of incriminating information. In Georgia, Lord had been charged with sexual crimes remarkably similar to the one Chiapponi described, including two cases of abduction at knife point.

Open and shut, apparently.

However, there were complications. Lord had a cover story. Chiapponi, he claimed, was a hooker who’d picked him up at Denny’s. He said she agreed to have sex with him for $100 and some of the 35 packets of cocaine he had stolen from a Fort Lauderdale man. When the car crashed and it seemed likely the police would come, Lord said, Chiapponi fled and cried rape to avoid a drug arrest.

In almost any other circumstances, that story could have been dismissed quickly as ludicrous -- a transparent, self- serving lie. But not necessarily here. Chiapponi’s background was sketchy. She did not work or go to school, but owned a condo and two expensive cars. She had been alone in the Denny’s parking lot at 3 a.m. wearing a lace miniskirt, tank top and white high heels.

In a Dec. 13, 1988 memo, Assistant State Attorney Lisa Bechert, a Fort Lauderdale prosecutor, noted some additional liabilities in taking the case to a jury. The first was that Chiapponi, the state’s star witness, admitted using cocaine in the hours before the abduction. The second liability, though not a crime, was of greater concern to the prosecutor:

“The victim,” she wrote, “does not wear underwear.”

There it was. The underwear. A short skirt and no underwear, at Denny’s, at 3 a.m.

But Bechert ultimately decided the state could deal with the problem: Chiapponi had no arrest record -- not for prostitution or anything else.

“I have thought about all the pros and cons in this case,” Bechert wrote, “and have decided due to the defendant’s prior history, due to the credibility of the victim, that there is a solid case against the defendant and I will file charges.”

But there was one other difficulty: Chiapponi did not want to prosecute. She failed repeatedly to appear for meetings with both the prosecution and the defense. By the spring, Robert Burns, an investigator from the state attorney’s office, was dogging her.

On May 11, Burns received two subpoenas for Chiapponi. The next day, he went to her Coconut Creek apartment and left his card in the door. On the 15th, he called and left a message on her recorder. Two days later, he phoned again.

“A female answered and was very upset, stating she was not Chiapponi and was tired of being harassed,” he said. The woman hung up abruptly.

On the 17th, Burns checked with neighbor Joan Fowler, who pointed out Chiapponi’s white Alfa Romeo and red Fiero in the parking lot. That afternoon, Burns saw a young woman and a male companion leave Chiapponi’s apartment and head for the Alfa Romeo. He approached them and called her name.

“I’m not Blandina,” she told him. “I’m Monica and quit harassing me all the time.” Convinced this was Blandina Chiapponi -- he later identified her from photographs -- Burns left two subpoenas in her door.

On May 30, Burns went back to the complex to serve Chiapponi with a show-cause order as to why she should not be held in contempt for failing to cooperate with prosecutors. He saw a Federal Express truck pull up to her place. The driver told Burns he’d picked up a letter from the apartment.

He said the woman who gave it to him -- a woman with a small voice and long red hair -- called herself “Monica Taylor.”

On June 6, Broward Circuit Judge Mark A. Speiser issued a writ of attachment authorizing sheriff’s deputies to bring the recalcitrant Blandina Chiapponi to his court. Ten days later, about 2 p.m., Sgt. Paul Lauria of the BSO fugitive squad, with detectives Eric Britz and Peter Fortunato, went to the Applewood IV condo complex. They were in a white Plymouth, in plainclothes. Lauria says they had their badges in plain view on their belts.

Britz stayed at Chiapponi’s door while the other two headed for the pool area in their unmarked car. They saw a young woman in a dark, oversized T-shirt walking across the parking lot. She looked just like the photo of Blandina Chiapponi they’d been given.

Lauria called her name. He says he told her he was from the sheriff’s department. She told them to get away, that they had the wrong person. He says he took her by the arm, whereupon she “proceeded to try to disable me by kicking me in the groin . . . The other officer grabbed her arm and put her down.”

Then, according to Lauria, she “started screaming rape.”

They led Blandina Chiapponi away in handcuffs.

“I thought I was being kidnapped all over again,” she would later say on television. She says the police are lying -- that they came at her like thugs, never identifying themselves as police, never telling her why she was being arrested.

She was taken to the Broward Sheriff’s Office North Detention Annex in Pompano Beach.

“This was not a bolt out of the blue to her,” Lauria said. “The person in this case should have realized what was going on. She had been advised that the proceedings were underway. Her attitude was, ‘I don’t care what the judge wants. I’m not going to testify.’ There was a defendant in jail who had a right to a fair trial.”

But no one will now claim they believe the victim in a rape case should be thrown in jail for six days, regardless of how uncooperative she was being. It was a scandal, and the bickering over who was to blame continues to this day. Jail personnel said they were only following the judge’s orders -- to keep her in custody until she could be brought to court. The judge blames the sheriff’s office for misinterpreting his instructions; he said he’d ordered her to court, not to jail. The sheriff’s deputies say they notified the state attorney’s office immediately that Chiapponi was in custody, and expected the state attorney’s office to notify the judge. The state attorney’s office refuses to comment.

The story of a rape victim being victimized again by the system made powerful copy. On July 23, it appeared on the front page of The Miami Herald under the headline, Broward Judge Jails Rape Victim.

The national tabloid, The Star, “reconstructed” the scene by posing a model in a chaise longue near a pool, being stalked by thugs. A Current Affair ran a segment on it.

The Herald article was the first that attempted to characterize the alleged victim: she had “a model’s good looks” and “lived off a substantial trust fund left to her by her late father, a wealthy businessman.” The article said she had been ignorant of the subpoenas because she had been out in California where she had one of her three homes.

Some of that, as it happens, was in error. It is highly doubtful there was a trust fund. Chiapponi wasn’t rich; she had to work for a living. She wasn’t in California the whole time; she knew of the subpoenas and was deliberately ducking them.

Despite visits from two lawyers, Chiapponi languished behind bars for nearly a week. Later, she would claim she was brutalized by other inmates who burned her curls off with their cigarettes to make tails for their own hair and that she was denied food and water for two days.

Harold B. Wilber, department of detention director, says the latter complaint is impossible.

“We have strict rules about feeding,” he said. “They get three meals a day. There can’t be more than 14 hours between evening meal and breakfast. I can’t conceive of anybody denying her food. We provide it, and if it’s thrown back, we log it. There is no evidence on her contact card of refusal of food.”

He called her claim of having been denied water “preposterous. Water is available everywhere in jail, he said, even in holding cells.

The “brutalization” at the hands of police and jail officials was just one part of the ordeal Chiapponi broadcast to the nation on Oprah. During the entire police and hospital response to the rape, Chiapponi claimed, she was never once offered counseling.

Rosanna Crawford was the nurse in Indian River County who examined Chiapponi after she reported the rape.

“Walking away, when it was all over, I believed her,” Crawford said. “It was just a gut feeling. The ones you don’t feel that way about, maybe they were in a domestic argument and they were trying to get back at their husbands. They usually don’t want to press charges either.”

But all these months, something has been bothering her.

“I know it’s been said she never received counseling,” Crawford said. “We called the sexual assault counselor and someone came. A woman. It’s documented on the chart. That’s standard with us and I was kind of upset that it looked like we didn’t take care of her psychological needs. We more than did . . . I told her over and over that Sexual Assault was more than willing to help her or refer her in another county. I’m almost sure this woman gave her a card and said to call her to make contact for further counseling.”

The Whole Truth?

The trial began on Sept. 25 with the empaneling of a three- man, three-woman jury.

Most first-time jurors, weaned on TV courtroom theater, are surprised and dismayed to learn that real cases seldom deal in absolutes. Rarely are there stammered, tearful confessions wrung from the wretchedly guilty in withering cross-examination. Real cases usually mean conflicting stories without obvious resolution, and this case was no different.

What became clear, almost from the start, was that no one was admitting anything, and corroborating evidence in either direction was scant. Two pieces of evidence -- Steven Lord’s alleged involvement with a similar crime in Georgia, plus the roadside scene witnessed by the Averas -- weighed against the defendant. But they were circumstantial, and even taken together, they weren’t decisive.

Nor was anything else. Medical evidence showed only that Blandina Chiapponi had had anal and vaginal intercourse in the dirt shortly before she was examined. There were no serious rips or abrasions or any other conclusive signs of violence.

The cut on her hand (“I was cut up and left for dead,” Chiapponi had told Oprah) was a small, superficial wound to a finger, resembling a paper cut. It required no treatment.

She said she had been hit in the head so hard with a rock or other heavy object that she swooned. But a post-rape hospital report makes no mention of a head injury. The examining physician never even ordered an X-ray.

And so, the jury realized, the verdict would depend on a matter of credibility: Would they believe Lord, who claimed their sex acts had been consensual, or would they believe Chiapponi, who said she had been forced into oral, anal and vaginal sex at knife point in the dirt along an interstate highway?

Lord’s version on the witness stand was relatively straightforward: Chiapponi was a hooker. She picked him up for $100 and the promise of cocaine and more money when they reached Jacksonville, where he said he was to deliver the stolen drugs.

He said they had sex, willingly, three times on their trip: once, on the trunk of a car in the parking lot of a Fort Lauderdale Holiday Inn; twice in the underbrush beside I-95. The knife, he said, was out on the seat because he needed it to hack away comfortable clearings in the grass.

Straightforward, if unsavory.

Under oath, Chiapponi was another story:

* Denying indignantly that she was a hooker cruising for tricks, she claimed that prior to the assault she had been at a movie with friends from out of town. But she could not recall the last names of her friends, or the name of the hotel where they stayed, or how much time she had spent with them prior to meeting Lord. She claimed that these friends had also “forced” her to snort cocaine.

* She testified that at the time of the abduction, she was going into Denny’s for something to eat. But she also said she had locked her purse in her trunk. Her miniskirt had no pockets, nor did her tank top. She was not carrying money in her hand. How was she going to pay for her food? Against that inconsistency, the jury measured Steven Lord’s testimony that Chiapponi had told him she had come to Denny’s not to eat, but to meet a man who didn’t show.

* She testified that the first instance of rape had occurred somewhere off the shoulder of I-95. But detective Tom White of the Indian River Sheriff’s Department, the first lawman to interview her after her rescue by the Averas, testified Chiapponi had told him the first forced sex act had occurred on the trunk of her car in the back parking lot of a Holiday Inn . . . precisely where Lord had said it occurred. Only Lord had called it consensual.

* Detective White offered something else that the jury found troubling: In her initial statements to him, Chiapponi said she’d been wearing underpants, but that Lord had torn them off and thrown them away. She also told that to the nurse at the hospital.

Before the jury, she said flatly she had been wearing no underpants. (In a deposition, she had claimed she had a medical condition which made wearing underwear uncomfortable. She said the condition had been diagnosed by her long-time family doctor as early as junior high school, but she couldn’t recall her family doctor’s name, even though she said she’d seen the woman once a year until she was 18.)

* Chiapponi had also told White several hours after the attack that she worked at a modeling and talent agency called World Images. But Robert Sutton, World Images president, testified she had worked only one day for him, modeling lingerie and career attire in a Valentine’s Day fashion show at the nightclub, Confetti.

And that’s not all Sutton testified. He also told the jury that Chiapponi had telephoned him when she learned that a former girlfriend of his had been subpoenaed to testify for the defense. He said Chiapponi had threatened to “tell everyone” that his girlfriend and her roommate had been running a brothel out of their apartment, “giving hand jobs and blow jobs.” Sutton said this was false, but that it so frightened his former girlfriend that she left town rather than testify.

In a deposition, Chiapponi admitted making the phone call but said she had only admonished Sutton to tell his girlfriend to “tell the truth” about her. Chiapponi also admitted that she’d lied about working at World Images. She said she only did so because her mother disapproved of not working. She said she lived on a generous trust fund from her father, dispensed, whenever she needed money, by her attorney.

But even that version was undercut in trial. The defense had pay stubs, amounting to about $4,000 over a three-month period, from a place called Natural Body Works.

Natural Body Works is a massage parlor.

Yes, Chiapponi then testified, she had worked there part time. But, she said, she had done nothing more than give back rubs.

“If she has condos in California and can get $10,000 from her lawyer,” Defense attorney Tim Day asked the jurors in his summation, “what is she doing rubbing backs at Natural Body Works?”

* In rape trials, the most emotional point, and the most devastating for the defense, usually comes when the victim is forced to describe in detail the sexual acts that were forced upon her. The jury was touched when a mother of two from Georgia wept on the stand, describing how Steven Lord had raped her at knife point.

But during her moment on the stand, Chiapponi was stolid, mechanical, and reticent -- as if it were numbingly painful to even say the words for the parts of her body that had been violated.

This backfired dismally, cutting to the heart of her credibility. Tim Day was relentless on that point in summation:

“Do you believe her . . . when she said, ‘I was penetrated in the lower area,’ . . . and she said, ‘I can’t say it. I can’t say the word.’ “

Day then quoted a statement Chiapponi had given to police, describing the same incident: “He f----d me in the a--. And after he did me doggie style he went back into my p---y.”

“Did you believe her,” Day asked again, “when she tried to create the impression with you that it was difficult to describe the vaginal area?”

As his summation drew to a close, Day said plainly what he had been hinting at all along: “The evidence seems to suggest that Steven Lord should be found not guilty because she is a hooker. Is that what should occur? Absolutely not. Ladies and gentlemen, no one deserves to get raped. No one deserves to be abducted. Steven Lord should be found not guilty, ladies and gentlemen, because Miss Chiapponi lied about being raped, lied about being abducted . . . “

It took less than two hours for the jury to return. The media showed up for the reading of the verdict. In the hall outside Judge Speiser’s courtroom foreman Roy Diamond made his notorious comment: She asked for it.

Predictably, the coverage the following day in The Herald and The Fort Lauderdale News/Sun-Sentinel led with the juror’s quote. Possibly because neither newspaper had attended the trial regularly, neither story included an explanation of the troubling inconsistencies in Chiapponi’s testimony.

Front Page News

By nightfall the miniskirt rape trial was national news. Local feminists were horrified, and made the case the focus of a “Take Back The Night” march on the Broward County courthouse. Among the protesters was a muscular man in a tan miniskirt that bore the legend “This does not say rape me!” and a woman in a mock chador asking, “Is this what women have to wear to keep from being raped?”

Roy Diamond’s quote was reported in the “American Notes” section of Time magazine. Two weeks later, a letter to the editor in Time said: “If I ever have the misfortune to be in (Fort Lauderdale), I’ll be sure to wear my winter clothes.”

Sally Goldfarb, an attorney for the National Organization for Women in New York, succinctly summed up the general understanding: “Sounds like this defendant got the benefit of sexist attitudes. This case can be a lesson to all of us that punitive actions against rape victims is not past.”

Broward Judge Kathleen Kearney, a nationally recognized expert on sexual assault cases, said she intended to use the case in lectures as a textbook example of how a trial can go wrong.

A man in Dania who teaches self-defense classes for women said, “If this is the way our system is going to handle rape cases, then women are going to have to learn to protect themselves better.”

The invitations from Oprah and Larry King were not far behind. Neither was an “exclusive” in the British tabloid, The Mail, which ended by quoting Chiapponi: “I worry that my case has given every pervert out there license to rape any woman who dresses in a manner they think is provocative.”

Chiapponi was paid $3,000 for the article. Siegel made no bones about it: His client’s trust fund had been ripped off by a crooked lawyer and so they were going public for money. But on the Winfrey show he put a slightly different spin on it. Chiapponi “got real upset” when she heard that one of the Georgia victims was so disheartened by Lord’s acquittal that she was considering dropping the charges, Siegel said, “so she decided the message has to be out.”

The Star used this quote from Chiapponi: “The jury made me feel dirty for wearing fashionable clothes, a white miniskirt and a green tank top. Yet they are the sort of clothes girls everywhere dress in every day. Does that mean they deserve to be raped?”

Rene Mochkatel, a women’s rights lawyer from Los Angeles, urged the Oprah audience to applaud “Susan’s” courage, which they did.

Some of the jockeying for the Miniskirt Rape story was never made public. The syndicated TV show Hard Copy wanted the story too. They wanted Chiapponi to come on and say her piece. Siegel said fine. For $15,000.

Hard Copy said they did not pay for interviews. Chiapponi stayed home.

Through it all, the nation came to know Chiapponi -- though not by her real name -- as the oppressed victim of a social injustice that revealed the crudely sexist nature of our society.

That wasn’t what happened, of course. Blandina Chiapponi self-destructed on the witness stand. She had shown herself to be a liar.

But why did she lie?

Was it for the reason that Steven Lord alleged: that she invented the rape to escape a drug charge? Not likely. To believe that is to believe that in the jarring instant after a car wreck, Chiapponi concocted a tale of rape and permitted her car to be stolen -- all in fear that police might happen on the accident, might search the car, might find some drugs, and might charge her with possession, even though the drugs would have been in the luggage of a man she could presumably prove was a stranger. Moreover, you would have to believe that the unsheathed knife on the front seat was not a weapon but a weed- eater.

It does strain credibility. But so did Blandina Chiapponi’s testimony.

The sad likelihood is that Chiapponi was indeed raped, and that the rapist got off -- not because a jury erred, but because, in the face of a lying witness, they could not shrug off a reasonable doubt.

Which still leaves the puzzle. Why did Blandina Chiapponi lie? What was she hiding?

Blandina’s World

When Scott Parks, the younger brother of a former boyfriend, came down from Massachusetts to visit Blandina Chiapponi last winter, he had already been warned by Chiapponi’s sister not to inquire about what she did for a living.

“She left for work at night and came back early in the morning,” Parks said. “You have an idea of what she might be doing and I have an idea.”

In Blandina’s world, it’s rare to find anyone who will talk openly on the record about her. This is not especially difficult to understand, as many of her compatriots live just inside the margins of polite society.

It’s a demimonde where some don’t have real names and many don’t have real jobs, where nights are danced away at G. Willikers, Confetti and Club Boca in the surreal freeze-frame of strobe lights, driven by the primal thud of disco.

In Blandina’s world, work means odd hours at places named Dolly’s, Grecian Tanning, and Natural Body Works. She has worked at all three in the past three years, according to former friends, co-workers and bosses. All of these places have been raided by vice cops.

Whatever euphemisms their names suggest, these are places where men pay a lot of money for sexual gratification.

Blandina Chiapponi is known at many of these places by her street name, the name under which she services men. It was the alias she gave to investigator Robert Burns when she did not wish to be bothered by the courts:

Monica Taylor.

In depositions, Blandina Chiapponi said that her father -- a Cape Cod restaurateur who died in 1983 -- left a trust so substantial that she need not work.

But after the verdict, when Alex Siegel began marketing her -- refusing interviews that would not pay or provide wide national exposure -- she claimed she needed the money because her trust fund had been looted, that she’d had $82,000 ripped off by Fort Lauderdale attorney Keith Nassetta. She claimed Nassetta -- who is in jail awaiting trial on charges of defrauding other clients -- told her he’d invested her money in a cosmetics company that she discovered doesn’t exist.

Fred Haddad of Fort Lauderdale is Nassetta’s lawyer. He said:

“Mr. Nassetta did not administer any trust fund for her. As far as he knows, there was no trust fund. He did not disburse any family money to her. As far as he knows, there was no family money.”

Blandina Chiapponi will not talk to The Herald. Neither will her younger sister in Massachusetts. Her father is dead, and her stepfather has blocked access to her mother, a Colombian immigrant, who was absent from her daughter’s rape trial.

“What that girl does is her business,” said a livid David Kushner of Hollywood, the stepfather. “She doesn’t live here. She doesn’t come here. Talk to her lawyer.”

But Alexander Siegel, furious that this newspaper published the photograph of his client for which The Mail paid her, refuses to co-operate or permit his client to grant an interview.

In the massage parlors and tanning salons, however, you’ll find plenty of women who will talk, if they’re not named.

Chiapponi got started at Tanning Odyssey, now closed. It featured nude body shampoos. That’s code for mutual masturbation and, in some cases, more.

After stints at Grecian Tanning in Fort Lauderdale, and Dolly’s, in Pompano Beach, Chiapponi became one of the star attractions at Natural Body Works, where the women set their own prices for specific services.

“It was that little baby voice,” said one former co-worker, who has been convicted of prostitution. “The way she acted so timid. Guys like that. . . . With her, there was always a lot of garters and cleavage.”

This woman says she has worked at two salons with Chiapponi, has taken cocaine with her, and participated with her in what is known as a “double:” two women servicing a man together.

She described Chiapponi as “very competitive” in a business where most of the women know each other and you have to be “aggressive but nice.” She charged “top dollar,” the woman said, and had private clients outside the massage parlors.

In fact, according to this woman and one of her colleagues, when Chiapponi tried to get a job at the massage parlor known as Pampered Samurai, she was blackballed, in part because she was known to overcharge.

The one place that even Chiapponi acknowledges she worked was Natural Body Works, the massage parlor whose name was raised at the trial.

Chiapponi said her work there was innocent: she acted as a receptionist, and did occasional back rubs. This assertion makes the public-defender’s investigator, Jim Kiick, the former Miami Dolphin, scoff.

In a letter to The Herald, he said, “I visited Natural Body Works to determine the truth of the allegation that it was merely a front for prostitution. Having been a professional football player . . . and traveled extensively throughout the United States, I pride myself on my knowledge of the street, which was not necessary in this case as the object and intentions of the staff of Natural Body Works was made perfectly clear to me.” He says it is a house of prostitution, pure and simple.

Miami Herald reporter Neely Tucker visited Natural Body Works early this month.

Outside the small, concrete-block building at 345 E. Commercial Blvd. is a sign that says “Massage parlor.” A customer has to be buzzed through two locked doors to get inside the building.

“We don’t really massage, you know, go into the muscle,” said a lanky, sloe-eyed woman who identified herself as Tammy. “We just trace and tickle. We touch. We’re soft. We just stimulate the skin.”

What skin you want stimulated, by whom and for how long depends on the thickness of your wallet. Or the depth of your plastic -- they honor Visa and MasterCard.

Tammy explained the services: “A massage is a simple back rubdown with baby powder or baby oil. That’s $40 for a half-hour and $65 for the full thing. The girls work on tips.”

The private massage chamber is a bedroom. There is a queen- sized mattress pushed against one wall, a few brown chairs covered with velour, a table with a clock radio and a lot of mirrors.

Two very weak fluorescents are overhead. The clock radio is a digital. It flashes the time, like the electricity has cut the circuit, then returned. It flashes a random time -- 5:32, 5:32, 5:32 -- before changing to the next minute. The time itself doesn’t matter. Only the amount that elapses from when Tammy walks in and shuts the door. It’s a stopwatch.

Once inside the massage room, Tammy offers a customer a drink. “Have a sip,” she says, and sits on the table next to the clock. She turns on the tinny radio, a local rock station. “That OK with you? Good. I like that music. Now. Like I said out front, the massage is $40. But nude, full-body mutual massage is just another $65 for each half-hour.”

What’s a nude, full-body mutual massage?

“That’s where I’m nude, you’re nude, I rub you down and you rub me down. It’s $65.”

I can touch you?

“Yes.”

Where?

She smiles. “Anywhere you’d like.”

And you’d touch me?

“Yes.”

Where?

“Wherever you’d like me to.”

In this place, one mystery is solved.

At trial, defense lawyer Tim Day tried to introduce into evidence almost $4,000 in pay stubs from Natural Body Works, from March to June 1989 -- the same time period in which the state attorney had been trying to serve Chiapponi with subpoenas, and the same time she’d claimed she was out of town. There’s even a pay stub from June 26 -- just a few days after her release from jail.

One stub was for $1,500, another for $65, the others for amounts ranging from $140 to $800. Although Chiapponi suggested these were salary for work as a receptionist, the disparity in the amounts seemed puzzling.

Now here was an answer: Though most transactions are cash, the place accepts credit cards. For credit card payments, the women who worked there say, the establishment will write a check to the woman for her tip. In some weeks, she might have no credit-card sessions. In others, she may have several, thus the disparity in the amounts. And why some weeks they are so comparatively low. They only represent a small portion of a woman’s income.

A top girl, say the women who work the strip, might have seven or eight sessions in a good night. A brisk week might earn her $2,000. Tax-free.

Some of the women on the strip can’t understand why Chiapponi wasn’t forthright about her occupation.

“She should have just said she had a bad john,” one woman said. “She should have went with the truth. Her lying makes us all look bad.”

Morris Fast, who has operated tanning studios in Fort Lauderdale and elsewhere, including Grecian Tanning and Tanning Odyssey, says he hired Chiapponi at least two years ago before losing her and several other women to Ultimate Tanning, which had “looser rules” about womens’ sexual conduct with patrons (Ultimate Tanning is now closed).

Fast has been in the Broward County Jail since early September. He and partner Thomas Whatley were charged last fall with operating tanning salons as houses of prostitution.

In the original case, Whatley’s lawyer moved to have his client released without bail because he is descended directly from a signer of the Declaration of Independence.

“He’s a very patriotic individual,” said Whatley’s lawyer, one Alexander Siegel Esq.

Chiapponi herself has, indeed, never been arrested for prostitution. The women say that’s not unusual. One on the strip says she’s been in the business eight years and has never been nabbed. Police records support her story.

“You can go a lifetime,” the woman said. “You just have to not be there when they come.”

BSO keeps a “hooker book,” a portfolio of known prostitutes. Scores of them. Generally, according to officers in the vice division, when they raid a place, they warn a new girl. The second time, they arrest her. In either case, she ends up in the book.

Blandina Chiapponi is not in the hooker book. But many of her close friends are. The morning of Sept. 24, officers went to Chiapponi’s apartment after an anonymous neighbor called Coconut Creek police complaining about excessive noise. Though no arrests were made for disorderly conduct, officers took the names of the occupants of the apartment. There were several men and women. Four of the women were in the hooker book.

They were Cheryl Leroy, 29, of Tamarac; Tiffany Williams Betit, 19, of Pembroke Pines, known as “Angel”; Diane Campo, 21, of Lauderhill, knownas “Malibu”; and Abigail Kaylor, 30, of Hollywood. In his report, Cpl. Richard Lawrence notes that his requests to see the owner of the apartment -- Chiapponi -- were ignored for about 10 minutes. Two of the revelers later told Tropic why: They had to get dressed.

In his worst nightmares, Roy Diamond couldn’t have imagined how 13 one-syllable words could cause such chaos: “We all felt she was asking for it, the way she was dressed.”

His life, said the 47-year-old Fort Lauderdale man, has been “total hell” ever since. Hate mail, anonymous threats on his answering machines, national ridicule.

“A lot of people were crucifying me.”

His statement, said Diamond, the statement that started all the furor, was misinterpreted.

“ ‘It’ meant sex, not rape. People heard it and they just took it for the worst . . . if a woman goes out at 3 a.m. in that kind of a skirt, she is advertising for sex, and she got what she advertised for.”

Her outfit “was a factor” in the verdict, he said, but not the determining one. It was a factor only in that it delivered a certain visual message in the same way that a police officer’s uniform or a nun’s habit does: it suggested this woman was a hooker. And she denied that. And in denying that she told a web of lies, and it was those lies, Diamond said, that persuaded the jury nothing she said could be trusted.

“Every time she turns around, she can’t remember what she’s just said.”

Diamond says the jury was frustrated by their inability to convict Lord:

“The guy was dirt. I hope they hang him in Georgia.”

The other jurors who will talk about it all say they were stunned by the viciousness of the public response: threats of violence, disparaging comments even from relatives. Juror Mary Bradshaw said she and others have had to have police protection. She is afraid to answer her door.

“My doctor says he’ll see I won’t go through (jury duty) again,” she said.

Juror Dean Madieros says: “I don’t think I’ll register to vote again.”

Saturday Night

“Before the rape, I was a happy 22-year-old with everything to look forward to. Now I am scared to death to go out alone, scared to drive my car.”

This is a statement attributed to Blandina Isabella Chiapponi on Oct. 8 by The Mail, the first publication to pay for her story after the verdict.

Three weeks later, on Saturday night, Oct. 28 at 10:46 p.m., she peeled out of the parking lot of her condo in her white Alfa. Her best friend, Britany Ann Robinson, followed behind her in another car.

Robinson, 31, is tall and slim. She moves with exaggerated grace, like an actress. She has a curiosly heavy face for such a slender build. The customers at Natural Body Works call her Coco.

The two women headed for a costume party at Confetti, on Commercial Boulevard, a long block east of the Denny’s where it all began.

Chiapponi was dressed as a miniskirted cowgirl. The white fringe of her royal blue skirt brushed the tops of her thighs. A matching sleeveless bolero tied at the midriff. She wore knee- high white boots and a white hat. Her hair -- with the hair weave -- streamed from under it.

Chiapponi spent part of the evening with a man in a cowboy costume. At one point, descending to a ground-floor bar, they stopped on a landing. She pressed into his embrace as he pinned her to the wall with his groin. For a moment, they ground together to the music.

At 1:15 a.m., Chiapponi was at an upstairs bar with two male friends, Britany (who wore a lace-trimmed black teddy and a single lace garter), a woman in a Viking costume (breast plate and thong bottom) and a woman who said she was a professional boxer, dressed as Lady Godiva in a thong, high heels and a knee- length, platinum wig.

A man was blocking the bar. Blandina Chiapponi could have tapped him on the shoulder. Instead, she rubbed her pelvis against his right hip.

He turned, amazed, stared at his hip. She smiled.