Woman says Iraqi war veteran assaulted her
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By LORI PILGER / Lincoln Journal Star
What started as a party to celebrate an Iraqi war veteran’s homecoming has ended up in front of a Lancaster County jury.
Jacob Ford, a 24-year-old who was on leave from active duty in the National Guard, is accused of sexually assaulting a University of Nebraska–Lincoln junior at a house party Dec. 27.
If jurors believe the 23-year-old who says she woke to him on top of her, Ford could get up to 50 years in prison.
Ford told police it was consensual.
In a courtroom most of the day Tuesday, the jury heard what she said happened that night.
The story started two days after Christmas, in her Chevy Malibu. She was driving to Lincoln when she got a call from a friend about a party.
Her friend passed the phone to the guest of honor, Ford, a man she’d met once before who was on two weeks leave from Iraq. He said he was going to party like a rock star, and she laughed.
By 11:30 p.m., she headed to a house on Southwest 19th Street with a sixpack of Bud Light bottles.
She mingled with the dozen or so people there. She drank beers, a couple of half-shots, and a drink called an Irish car bomb.
By 3 a.m., she admittedly was drunk.
She held hands with a man — not Ford — who she’d seen that summer. She still liked him. They went to his room downstairs. Kissing led to sex. She passed out, naked, in his bed after. He woke her up to say he was going upstairs, back to the party.
She went back to sleep.
Around 7:30 a.m., she woke up to a man on top of her, having sex with her. She’d slept with her contacts in, so everything was blurry.
She didn’t know what was going on. She was confused.
Within seconds, he was off of her. She could tell he was a bigger man. It wasn’t the guy she liked.
As he got dressed, she pushed herself up. “You’re not Shaun,” she said.
“I told you that five times,” she said he told her.
When she heard his voice, she said she could tell it was Ford.
He went back to the party. But she could hear him upstairs telling people what he’d said to her. Then she heard laughing.
She got dressed and called her roommate, but her phone cut out, so she texted her: “I just got raped by Jake. I don’t know what to do.”
She went upstairs, straight for the door, then her car, then home. Her roommate called police.
Ford’s attorney, John Berry, asked if she ever told the man to get off of her or to stop.
“You never said no?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
She told Deputy County Attorney Matt Acton she was just out of it, “everything happened so quickly.”
The case is expected to continue through Thursday.
Reach Lori Pilger at 473-7237 or lpilger@journalstar.com.
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