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| Mr.Zimmerman |
The woman, whose parents were close to the Zimmerman family, talked to investigators on March 20. Identified only as Witness 9, she said she had come forward now, a decade after her last encounter with Mr. Zimmerman, 28, because, after his arrest, she was no longer afraid of him.
It is unclear how, or whether, prosecutors plan to use the allegations in their case against Mr. Zimmerman, who's unpaid on $1 million bond. Mark O’Mara, Mr. Zimmerman’s lawyer, tried unsuccessfully at the last minute to block the special prosecutor from releasing the tape, which he said was irrelevant and prejudicial. He also sought to block the release of another tape in which the same witness describes Mr. Zimmerman's family as routinely disparaging black people.
The informant told that Mister. Zimmerman, who is about two years older than she is, first molested her when she was 6. She was staying in the Zimmermans’ Virginia home while her mother and father were moving from Louisiana to Orlando, Fla. The woman told Mister. Zimmerman had groped her with his hands while they lay under a blanket as they viewed TV with a group of children.
Other groping episodes followed, she said. She visited the family “at least once a year” and she was molested during some of those visits, she said, including once behind a curtain when she was 7 or 8 and another time on a bunk bed when she was around 12.
“Before we left the room or left any place, he would say we weren’t doing anything – we were just laying there or we were just playing hide-and-seek,” said the woman, whose voice cracked as she recounted the events.” He would always make sure that he told me that. And I did not know. I was a kid. I did not know some best.”
The acts typically involved “a lot of kissing, groping. He would set his hands below me shirt and just rub and grab my chest and put his hands down my pants again,” the woman said.
The woman told that she had been shocked by what happed and that she had blocked much of it from her mind. She said she had been too ashamed to tell anyone, including her parents. But she said she also feared that no one would believe her because Mr. Zimmerman came across as so likable.
“He just sucked up to my dad,” she said. “He was alike the boy he ne'er had. He was always very charming and personable with everyone in the family and would always just laugh and entertain everybody. But he was different behind closed doors with me.”
The last encounter, and the only one that took place in Florida, occurred shortly after Mr. Zimmerman arrived in Lake Mary, not far from where she accepted her household, the woman said. She was sixteen and Mister. Zimmerman was eighteen. He had invited her to a housewarming gathering, she said. When she arrived inside, he was alone. Frightened, she said, she followed his instructions and establish on the rang he started groping her again. At that aim, she told, she devised, ran out and jumped into her car. He followed her to the door but no farther, she said.
Always, she said, “I was so afraid.”
In 2005, when the woman was 19, she confided in her sister who told their parents, she said. She and her parents met with Mr. Zimmerman at a pizzeria in Lake Mary, she said. But she never described to them the full extent of the molesting, she said.
“Besides speaking about it, every he did was come in the room, come in the eating place, and sat down on the end of the booth and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and just got up and walked out,” she said.
Her mother imagined it better not to pursue criminal charges, she said, adding that they believed that Mr. Zimmerman would just deny the accusations and that the case would be dropped.
The witness said there had been a lasting effect.
“I tried so difficult to leave it all and to make it go away that I even forgot the good stuff in life,” she said. “There are things that my family talks about that sounded so awesome but I don’t remember them. It sounds like they are talking about somebody else.”
Mr. Zimmerman’s parents were also told about what had happened, she said. After she and her parents confronted Mr. Zimmerman, they did not see him again. He was never invited to any get-togethers where she was present.
In the other tape, the woman said the Zimmerman family had talked about race often and disparaged African-Americans. Mr. Zimmerman’s family said “they only like black people if they act like white people,” she said.
The murder of Mister. Martin set off a furor among African-Americans because of the suspicion that Mr. Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, and the Sanford police had profiled Mr. Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old, because he was black. Mr. Zimmerman shot and murder him on February. 26 in a nighttime encounter at the gated community in Sanford, Fla., where Mr. Martin was a visitor.
