On Saturday, January 8, 2011, Venoy Overton was the starting point guard for the University of Washington basketball team. That afternoon, he played 29 minutes in the Huskies’ lopsided 103–72 home victory over Oregon State. Two days later, on January 10, KIRO 7 broadcast the news that a “prominent UW athlete”—later revealed to be Overton—was accused of raping a 16-year-old girl he’d met on Facebook. KIRO’s story, based on interviews with the girl’s family and a police-report narrative filed the morning after the sexual assault allegedly occurred, suggested it was an open-and-shut case of a predator who lured a teenage girl to his apartment, plied her with alcohol, and had sex with her even though she “told him repeatedly to stop and that she just wanted to meet an athlete she admired.”
Overton was demoted from the team’s starting lineup and endured merciless taunts from opposing crowds for the remainder of the season. Months passed and King County prosecutors declined to press sexual-assault charges in the case. Overton was eventually charged by the Seattle City Attorney with furnishing alcohol to a minor, a misdemeanor, and on March 31 a judge granted him a “dispositional continuance,” allowing the charge to be dropped if Overton performs community service and is not charged with another crime in the next year. The lack of punishment for the former UW star renewed speculation that Husky athletes live above the law, just as they did during the so-called “Victory in Ruins” era that coincided with the football team’s most recent Rose Bowl appearance in 2001.
But a 227-page report by Seattle Police—obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly via public disclosure request—suggests that Overton was falsely accused. The report recounts in explicit detail a wild sexual encounter with multiple partners in which the alleged victim was portrayed as a willing participant. The partially redacted document contains text messages exchanged between Overton and his 16-year-old accuser on the night of the incident, as well as transcriptions of recorded police interviews with Overton, the teen, her friend, and an unidentified UW football player who was in the room with Overton and the girl when the alleged rape occurred.
The incident took place on the evening of January 8, after the Huskies’ rout of Oregon State. The two girls explained to police that they told their parents they were going to the movies in Bellevue but instead took the bus to Westlake Center.
The accuser’s companion, whose name is also redacted in the report, bluntly described to police how her friend was dressed that night. “She was kinda dressed like a ho,” the girl’s friend said. “She [was] wearing, like, black pants, like these tight black skinny jeans, and then, like, this tank top where it’s, like, down here. Like, you could see, like, everything on that girl.”
The girls eventually rendezvoused with Overton and his two friends at a McDonald’s near the Space Needle. Overton recalled that the girls were drinking Tilt, a caffeinated alcoholic beverage, out of a coffee mug inside the restaurant. He claims he was unaware of the girls’ age, and that his eventual accuser “said she’ll be 18 in a month.” He says he asked the girls in no uncertain terms if they wanted to go back to his sister’s apartment to have sex.
“I just kept it, kept it real, like, blunt, like ‘OK, if you come with us, like what you guys want to do?’ ” Overton told police. “I was [like] ‘OK how about a orgy party?’ And then she like, ‘Yeah, where at?’ And I was like ‘Are you serious?’ “
The accuser’s friend confirmed Overton’s version of the McDonald’s conversation, but the accuser herself remembered things slightly differently.
“We’re eating and then we’re asking ‘What are we gonna do?’ ” the teenage accuser told police. “Then he suggested we have, what’d he say and how did he say it? He’s like, and, um, I think it was like an oral party or an orgasm party. And I was like, ‘What? Like, are you serious?’ And then my friend was, like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m down.’ And I was like, ‘Dude, no, like I don’t want to do that.’ So then we ended up leaving with him and then we went to his sister’s house.”
The party of five then piled into Overton’s car and headed to his sister’s apartment on East Fir Street in the Central District. They stopped at a liquor store along the way, where Overton bought a bottle of apple-flavored Smirnoff vodka. Once at the residence, the group hung out for a while, and Overton confessed to the detective interviewing him that he and his buddies smoked “half a blunt” of Spice synthetic marijuana. The girls said they did not partake in the drugs, but took a few shots of vodka.
Eventually the two girls went upstairs together to use the bathroom. Overton and his two friends followed and went into an adjacent bedroom. The girls told police they then went into the bedroom and struck up a conversation about a poster of the UW basketball team that was hanging on the wall. That’s when Overton says the girl initiated the sexual encounter.
“I’m just playing it off, tryin’ to [get] . . . the conversation off of the basketball, ya know,” Overton told police. “So finally, uh, [redacted] sees, like, she sees me and then on the poster, and she just, like, like oh, she just grabs me and [is], like, ‘Come on, I’ll just, come on, I wanna give you head.’ Basically she just grabbed me and pulled me to the bed.’ “
The accuser’s friend tells a similar tale. She said that she and her companion consensually—and simultaneously—began performing fellatio on Overton while his friends stood by and watched. The accuser’s friend told police the menage a trois continued until the accuser abruptly pulled Overton’s penis away from her friend’s mouth and whispered in her ear, “No, he’s mine.”
The accuser, however, claimed that she felt pressured into giving Overton a blow job only after her friend initiated the act. From her statement to SPD detective Kyle Kizzier:
“I seen her giving him head . . . and then I, like, kinda like push her away, and I was like, ‘Dude, what are you doing, like why are you doing this?’ And then, and then I remember, um, him, Venoy, being in front of me . . . like I don’t know, like, what they were gonna do if I didn’t, like, do what they wanted me to do.”
The accuser’s friend says she and the two other men then left the room to give Overton and the accuser some privacy. The two, however, weren’t alone together for long. Another of Overton’s friends soon arrived at the apartment. The SPD report states that this individual plays for the University of Washington football team, but his name is redacted from the report. But while his identity remains a mystery, what’s certain is that the new man at the party eventually made his way up to the bedroom and joined Overton and the teen.
From the report:
Kizzier: You went up [to the bedroom] the first time and you saw her giving Venoy oral sex and then you left, and then Venoy and the girl came back down and the girl invited you to come back up with them, is that right?
[Redacted]: Yes . . . she said to me, she says ‘I want you to come in the room too . . . I want both,’ she said, ‘I want both you guys’ . . . She grabbed me by there, my crotch area, by my pants [and] pulled me down.
The girl maintains that Overton offered her to his buddy without her permission. Overton’s friend, however, was adamant that the sex was consensual. “The word ‘Stop’ never came out of her mouth, sir,” he told the detective.
Overton said he then put his hands down the teen’s pants and penetrated her with his fingers. When Overton encouraged his friend to do the same, the newcomer made a comment that quickly turned the situation sour. From Overton’s statement:
“I was like [redacted] you finger-bang her, and then he, he was, like, ‘Na, it kinda stinks’ . . . he said that right in front of her and she was like . . . she like kinda just sat up, she sat up, she, like, ‘OK, I’m done with that.’ So I was, like, and she was like, ‘OK,’ and I was about to just walk out the room, [but] she was like, ‘I want you, I want you to jack off, though,’ she’s like ‘Jack off, like I’m done giving you head but I want you to jack off.’ “
Overton’s friend told police he left the room at that point, but overheard the girl not only asking Overton to finish up in front of her, but also on her. A graphic portion of Overton’s statement to the detective is summed up dryly in the Case Investigation Report with the line “Overton claimed that [redacted] invited him to ejaculate on her chest—which he did.” The detective adds that “the medical record notes there was a white stain on the victim’s top.”
Overton says he headed to the bathroom to find a towel for the girl, but when he returned she had already left the bedroom.
“I didn’t want to be there,” the girl told police. “And I was, like, I know, like I shouldn’t have done this cause, um, I didn’t want to do it, ya know, and I just felt like, I don’t know, I just felt like I didn’t, ya know, know what else to do if I didn’t do it.”
The accuser left the apartment alone in tears. At that point, the girl’s friend revealed her true age to Overton and his friends. (Overton was not charged with statutory rape because the age of consent in Washington is 16.)
The girl eventually called her family, and her father and uncle came and picked her up. The girl checked into Harborview Medical Center and Seattle police were notified of the alleged sexual assault.
Two days later, Overton told detectives that the girl “never said nothing like ‘I want to stop’ or . . . ‘why am I doing this.’ ” The accuser’s companion recalled that the girl was a willing, if not eager, participant in that night’s action.
“I just think she’s a liar,” the accuser’s friend told a detective three days after the incident. “She should know the consequences. Like, she’s ruining a guy’s life if he didn’t really do this.”
As for the accuser herself, when the detective asked her what she wanted to happen with the investigation—whether Overton should go to prison and be required to register as a sex offender—she replied, “I would like him to learn his lesson—kind of just, like, I mean—I don’t want to sound rude but, like, maybe be locked up for, I mean, I don’t know, like, locked, um, I’m not sure but I just think he needs to, like, learn his lesson or whatever.”
Overton did not return a message seeking comment for this story.
