Taylor Swift was groped by radio host, jury finds

DENVER - Jurors who weighed a Denver radio host’s protestations of innocence against Taylor Swift’s powerful testimony determined Monday that he had groped her during a preconcert photo session in 2013.

The six-woman, two-man federal jury found that the actions of the host, David Mueller, amounted to assault and battery of the star.

Mueller initiated the litigation with a 2015 suit that portrayed Swift’s accusation as false and said it had led radio station KYGO to fire him. Swift then countersued with the assault and battery accusation. The cases were heard together in a federal court trial that opened here on Aug. 7.

Jurors awarded Swift the $1 in compensation she had demanded. Her lawyer Douglas Baldridge had said she did not want to bankrupt Mueller, but saw the award as symbolically “immeasurable to all women,” proving that they could report an assault without fear of facing a lawsuit from the attacker.

Beyond that, Swift said after the verdict that she would be donating an unspecified amount to organizations that help sexual assault victims defend themselves.

“I acknowledge,” she said in a statement, “the privilege that I benefit from in life, in society and in my ability to shoulder the enormous cost of defending myself in a trial like this. My hope is to help those whose voices should also be heard.”

The verdict came on the first day of deliberations after closing arguments in which the two sides presented widely divergent views of what happened during the backstage meet-and-greet.

Swift was dropped from Mueller’s case Friday, after the judge ruled there was insufficient evidence to suggest she had simply made up the encounter. Her countersuit continued as did Mueller’s suit against her mother and a member of her management team who were accused of unduly influencing the Denver radio station KYGO to fire Mueller. The manager, Frank Bell, had approached the station after Swift told them he had lifted her skirt and grabbed her rear while posing with her.

On Monday, as the case resumed in U.S. District Court here, jurors were not told of Friday’s developments and were offered no explanation as to why the number of defendants in the initial suit had dropped from three to two. In its finding, the jury said it also had decided that Swift’s mother and manager had not interfered with Mueller’s contract to get him fired.

In closing arguments, Mueller’s lawyer, Gabriel McFarland, had repeated his client’s denials, questioned the credibility of witnesses who corroborated Swift’s account and said her actions during and after the photo session were not consistent with someone who had been assaulted.

In particular, he asked the jurors to review an image of the encounter, one that showed Mueller’s hand behind Swift and near her rear. Others have said Swift moved away from Mueller in reaction to inappropriate contact but McFarland asked whether Swift’s face in that instance was consistent with someone who had been groped.

Swift, who had testified to being too stunned to react and then concerned with not creating a scene in front of fans, slowly turned as she listened to McFarland’s arguments from facing him to facing her mother, who sat next to her.

While McFarland urged the jury to focus on his client’s desire to clear his name and to recoup about $260,000 in lost wages, Baldridge portrayed the stakes as much higher. Baldridge said the question before the jury was: “Will aggressors like David Mueller be allowed to victimize the victim?”

“Is the victimization going to result in that guy getting a payday?” he said, gesturing toward Mueller, who sat expressionless, facing the jurors with his hands folded on the table in front of him.

Describing Mueller as a “story-changing, evidence-destroying aggressor,” the lawyer quoted the radio host as testifying that he did not touch Swift inappropriately but that if he had touched her in a way she found offensive, it was inadvertent.

In his lawsuit, Mueller for the first time mentioned that his immediate supervisor at the station had said he placed his hands on Swift’s bottom, an account Baldridge portrayed as an attempt to take revenge on the manager.

Baldridge also noted that Mueller acknowledged having spilled coffee on a computer on which he had stored a secret recording of a conversation with his employers about Swift’s allegations, destroying the evidence.