Same Scripts, Same Looming Absence of Chief Witness in Kwentel Moultrie’s Rape Trial Redux

Emily and Olivia got a couple of bottles of vodka, played a game called “let’s get f’d up,” lived up to the game’s name, invited several friends over–who did not drink–then went to Walmart and Steak and Shake. While at the restaurant, one of the girls’ friends called Kwentel Moultrie, then 20, to join them. Olivia knew Moultrie and had dated one of his friends. Moultrie joined the group with his friend Linko. By then Emily and Olivia were literally fall-down drunk: Olivia threw up and passed out and Emily, who also threw up, chipped a tooth on a table. None of that is in dispute.

The group then went back to the P-Section house, including Moultrie and Linko. At some point Olivia had everyone leave. Emily and Moultrie exchanged phone numbers. Moultrie and Linko left–only to return a short time later. Emily let them sneak in through a back door. That’s not in dispute, either. Nor is the fact that Emily, Moultrie, Linko and Olivia all were in the same bed, that Moultrie and Emily had sex, and that sometime during that part of the night Destiny woke up because her two-month-old puppy was running down the hall.

Olivia met her sister in the hall and handed her the dog. Destiny did not notice anything amiss. The boys hid in the bedroom. Who made them hide is in dispute. Olivia had them leave. She had not witnessed the sex between Moultrie and Emily (she was feeling “not too great–tired, sick, nauseous,” she was still throwing up), but she recalled falling asleep, then having her back rubbed by Linko, and again throwing up, and




Again, none of those facts are in dispute. This one is: whether the sex between Emily and Moultrie was consensual. Emily did not think so. Olivia did not think so.

“I can hear crying, I can hear pretty heavy breathing,” Olivia testified today, “I hear her saying ‘stop.’ Over and over.” When she had the encounter with her sister over the dog is unclear. She went to the bathroom and got sick again, and saw Emily at the side of the bed. “She’s crying in the bed,” she said, right after she had Moultrie and Linko leave. “I walked them out, I locked the door behind them.” Emily meanwhile “is crying and she is on the bed with her shirt on.”

Olivia told the jury what she heard her friend say: “She says he raped me, and my body hurts, and she’s saying that over and over again. I talked to her, I’m trying to calm her down, understand what’s going on.” Olivia had just been vomiting. “I tried to get us to go back to sleep.” But there was no sleep to be had: Emily was so traumatized that she asked her friend to examine her private parts and tell her if she was bleeding (she was not).

The next day, the two girls went to different clinics, seeking a test for sexually transmitted diseases, and eventually Emily’s cousin took her to AdventHealth Palm Coast, where she had a sexual assault exam.




Moultrie faces a first-degree rape charge. (The unlawful sex component doesn’t enter into the case because of the four-year difference between Moultrie and Emily, and Emily being 16 at the time. It would have been a different matter had she been younger.) He was tried on that charge last April. An all-white jury (Moultrie is Black) could not reach a verdict. Circuit Judge Terence Perkins declared a mistrial.

On Monday, Moultrie was back in court for a re-trial on the same charge. A jury of five women and three men was seated this morning, again all white but for a Far East Asian woman, though there are no apparent racial elements in the case: the alleged victim is Black, the whole group of friends and acquaintances that mixed that night was representative of a post-racial diversity that appears indifferent to the presumptive differences of race.

And again the state and the defense repeated to the jury nearly the very same arguments, down to many of the very same phrases, in their opening arguments, which finally took place only just before lunch today after unusually lengthy jury selection. So did some of the witnesses, among them Olivia.




Emily, whom the defense wryly portrayed as the “star witness,” did not testify in the first trial. She is not testifying in the second trial, either. She was once a Palm Coast resident and a student in Flagler schools. But even by the time of the alleged rape, she had moved to Maryland, where she remains. That June, she was visiting Olivia. It is not clear why she did not testify in the first trial, though it’s not essential for the state to make its case, anymore than it’s essential, or telling, whether a defendant testifies or not.

But Emily’s absence clearly weakened the state’s case. During jury selection Monday, one of the questions Assistant State Attorney Melissa Clark asked the pool of 37 prospective jurors was: If the state is able to prove every element of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt, whether the victim testifies or not, would you be able to find the defendant guilty?

The answer Clark was seeking was a straight-forward yes. But one of the prospective jurors said no, not unless the victim had died. “I think it is fair for the defendant to face his accuser,” the juror said, words that likely resonated with other jurors. He was not picked for the jury.

The question was another example pointing to the state’s vulnerabilities. The state appeared to know that it had a weak case going into the first prosecution of Moultrie when, well before the first trial, it offered him a deal: instead of a first degree felony charge of forcible rape that carries a 30-year maximum prison sentence, and a minimum of eight years, plus the designation of a sexual predator, the state offered a third-degree felony charge of child abuse, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison. But it offered no prison time. Just probation for five years. With one condition: Moultrie would have to follow sex-offender probation status for those five years (but not beyond them), limiting or prohibiting his contact with children, his own included.

He refused: he did not want any conditions placed on his contact with his own children. It was a stunning rejection, considering the court’s leniency, even with individuals convicted of child abuse in these circumstances. The court often modifies probationary requirements when a person’s own children or family members are involved, and when there’s no evidence of abuse or violence in those relationships. Whether Moultrie got a full explanation of those possibilities is unclear. What’s beyond dispute is that the state yanked that offer away, and will not talk anything that lenient anymore, because of what happened in December 2021, when Moultrie was out on probation on the rape charge.




If Moultrie’s bad judgement or arrogance wasn’t in play the night of the alleged rape–he knew Emily’s age, he knew he was being snuck in, he knew the girls had incapacitated themselves with drink–the same kind of bad judgment, or hubris, appears to have fueled what led him to take part in an alleged home invasion robbery of Danial Marashi at Marashi’s parents’ house in the R Section last December. A man died during the incident: Zaire Roberts, who had allegedly planned the robbery with Moultrie and Moultrie’s girlfriend, Taylor Manjarres, 19. Marashi shot and killed Roberts, allegedly in self-defense. (He was arrested on drug charges months later.) Moultrie and Manjarres were charged with second degree murder, because they were the alleged assailants.

Moultrie’s bond on the rape charge was revoked and he was jailed back at the county jail, where he has been since February 25. The jury that was seated today will not hear about Moultrie’s other charges (he also faces an armed burglary charge and, in a separate incident, a felony charge for allegedly assaulting another inmate.) But it is likely because of the murder charge that Moultrie has no reason to settle the rape case. So he was back in trial on that charge this week.

Clark summarized to the jury the events of that night and the day and a half that followed, focusing on numerous parts of the account that are not in dispute–and on the DNA collected from the comforter, Emily’s underwear and from Moultrie, proving that sex had taken place,m though that, too, is not in dispute. She noted that Moultrie lied to detectives in an interview, when he denied having sex with Emily–just as he had denied it to Olivia the day after in a text, and she had warned him: “If you fucked her speak up because this shit is going to get bad if you lie.”

Olivia was right. But it also got bad for her this afternoon as she was cross-examined by Nunnally, who did her best to make her look like the way Nunnally’s co-counsel, Assistant Public Defender Alexis Nava-Martinez, argued to the jury ion opening arguments: “This case is all about a cover up. A girl who was scared and got in and over her head. She had unprotected sex, a one night stand and was almost caught by [Olivia’s] sister, was caught by her own best friend [Olivia] sneaking the boys back into the house while [Olivia] is asleep. This case has no merit, it has no truth. it’s a cover up.”

The claim relies on the assumption that Emily would, to further that cover-up, seek the humiliations of a sexual assault exam, or that Olivia, now testifying again in the re-trial, considers the stress and invasiveness of a public trial less traumatic than having to own up to her sister that she had people over who weren’t supposed to be there that night. Nevertheless, no matter how hard the prosecution tried to diminish it or make it seem irrelevant, the absence of Emily loomed over this day of testimony like an unspoken witness making the defense’s case.

(*) All names involving the alleged victim or her friends have been changed.