Greitens’ lawyers challenge credibility of woman allegedly photographed while nude

As a statehouse investigative committee prepares to release a report this week on allegations of wrongdoing by Gov. Eric Greitens, the Missouri Republican’s defense team is questioning the credibility of a woman who has accused him of taking a nude photo of her without her consent.

The defense team also accuses St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kimberly Gardner, who is prosecuting the governor, of withholding or destroying evidence — in particular a videotaped interview of the woman — that they say could help exonerate him.

“The loss or destruction of such key evidence bears scrutiny,” the defense team wrote in the motion.

The circuit attorney’s office shot back that the governor’s defense attorneys are filing frivolous motions — and using a public relations firm that shares court filings to select media — to play political games.

“This week’s games are an effort to deflect public attention from other matters facing the Governor,” said Susan C. Ryan, a spokeswoman for the circuit attorney, in a statement on Monday.

Greitens was indicted by a St. Louis grand jury in February on one felony count of invasion of privacy stemming from allegations that he took a photo of the woman and threatened to release it if she ever spoke publicly about the relationship.

His trial is scheduled to begin May 14, but the Missouri House committee that’s been investigating the governor for more than a month is expected to release a report on its findings Wednesday. The committee has voted to extend its investigation until May 18, the last day of the 2018 legislative session.

Greitens’ attorneys interviewed the woman, identified only as K.S., in an hours-long deposition on Friday. On Sunday, they filed a motion that quotes the woman confirming that she cannot state under oath that she ever saw the governor in possession of a telephone or camera.

“Not to my knowledge. I didn’t see him with it,” she allegedly told the defense team during the deposition.

“Apparently recognizing the difficulty this testimony presented for the charges, the Assistant Circuit Attorney later asked K.S. ‘did you see what you believed to be a phone?’ ” Greitens’ defense attorneys wrote in the motion. “K.S. answered, ‘...I haven’t talked about it because I don’t know if it’s because I’m remembering it through a dream or I — I’m not sure, but yet, I feel like I saw it after that happened, but I haven’t spoken about it because of that.’”

The circuit attorney should have disclosed “these dreams or visions” to the defense, Greitens' attorneys argue.

“A witness who is ‘remembering it through a dream’ is not a witness upon which a prosecution can be based,” they wrote.

The woman previously has said she was blindfolded when she allegedly “saw a flash through the blindfold” and heard Greitens tell her, “You’re never going to mention my name, otherwise there are going to be pictures of (you) everywhere,” according to a secret audio recording made by her then-husband and released to television news station KMOV in January.

The woman’s attorney, Scott Simpson, issued a response late Monday that accused Greitens' team of misrepresenting the woman's testimony.

"Gov. Greitens has admitted to my client, on multiple occasions, that he took her photograph, without her consent, and threatened to release it if she ever told anyone about their relationship. Instead of taking responsibility for his actions, Gov. Greitens has decided to let his team attack my client by mischaracterizing her deposition testimony," the statement said.

Simpson said his team would support the release of the complete transcript of his client's testimony "to set the record straight" as long as her name and other identifying information remains redacted.

Greitens' campaign quickly latched on to the court filing and K.S.'s use of the word "dream," blasting out an email to supporters and the media calling the indictment a "political witch hunt." The governor posted the accusation on his Facebook page.

Greitens’ attorneys argued in Sunday’s motion and in another motion filed last week that the woman was participating in a consensual sexual relationship with Greitens and therefore should have had no reasonable expectation of privacy.

To bolster their point, they note that in their interview of the woman on Friday, she disclosed for the first time that she transmitted images of herself via FaceTime to the governor “while she was in a state of partial nudity” in June 2015.

“In a similiar manner,” the defense team wrote in Sunday’s motion, “K.S. acknowledged that for months after the alleged ‘invasion of privacy,’ K.S. continued to see the defendant willingly” and “acknowledged she never viewed anything that happened as a criminal matter.”

Greitens’ defense attorneys also wrote that they have had trouble obtaining information about what the woman has said in prior statements made to Gardner, in part because video recording equipment reportedly malfunctioned during a Jan. 29 interview of the woman by the circuit attorney and a private investigator working on the case.

Ryan, the spokeswoman for the circuit attorney’s office, accused the governor’s attorneys of working hard to try the case in the media by attacking the credibility of the victim and the investigation.

“In this situation, the defense team has cherry picked bits and pieces of the victim’s nine-hour deposition to attack her credibility,” Ryan said in a statement.

She said there is nothing substantially new about the victim’s testimony in the deposition, including the fact that the video camera had malfunctioned. The prosecution has complied with all rules about turning over evidence and will continue to do so, she added.

“Week after week, the defense team continues to waste the court’s time with their frivolous motions,” Ryan said.

“In May,” she said, “the jury will have the opportunity to hear the testimony first hand and determine for themselves what happened in the basement of Governor Greitens’ house.”

The woman’s ex-husband also was accused of stalking the governor’s wife, Sheena Greitens, in a letter obtained by The Washington Examiner and published on Saturday.

The letter reportedly was sent by the governor’s wife to the House committee investigating Greitens. It accuses the ex-husband of an “escalating campaign of harassment and spying” over a two-year period.

“When I didn’t respond to his anonymous emails, he sent me a letter,” the letter said. “When a letter to me didn’t produce the desired response, he contacted my parents. When letters didn’t satisfy him, he made his accusations public on Twitter. And finally, when targeting our family on social media didn’t fulfill his agenda, he secretly recorded his wife admitting to the affair and began shopping the audio tape to news outlets.”

The ex-husband’s attorney, Al Watkins, said he doubts Greitens’ wife actually wrote the letter.

“It was a very simple email exchange. It was very straightforward,” Watkins said of his client’s efforts to contact Sheena Greitens in June 2015. “It was polite reaching out trying to garner a phone call with her.”

The man didn’t explain why he wanted to talk to her “because he didn’t know if the governor was monitoring her email,” Watkins said.

“All he wanted to do was to get her up the learning curve about what was going on and to enlist her help in ending it because, remember, at the time he was trying to reconcile with his wife.”

Watkins said stories in the news media about his client and ex-wife over the last few days were clearly driven by the governor’s surrogates.

“In essence it’s like slut shaming a rape victim,” he said. That’s what this is all about. This is about putting this woman in abject fear. This is about putting the woman’s husband, my client, in abject fear.”

This story was originally published April 9, 2018 at 12:23 PM with the headline "Greitens’ lawyers challenge credibility of woman allegedly photographed while nude."