2 lawyers and their client are acquitted in Waffle House CEO sex-tape trial
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Two Georgia lawyers and their client have been acquitted on charges that they violated a state eavesdropping law when the client secretly recorded a video showing her engaged in a sex act with her boss, Waffle House CEO Joe Rogers Jr.
Jurors on Wednesday acquitted Mye Brindle—Rogers’ former housekeeper—and lawyers, David Cohen and John Butters, report the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (in stories here and here) and the Daily Report. Prosecutors had alleged the lawyers advised Brindle to make the video to pressure Rogers to settle her sexual harassment claims.
Defense lawyer Reid Thompson had maintained that Rogers demanded Brindle perform sex acts, and she made the tape because Rogers is a wealthy and powerful man. According to the Daily Report, the trial “often resembled a trial of Rogers himself as defense lawyers accused the executive of dishonesty, infidelity and abusing employees.”
Prosecutors had sought to halt jury deliberations when jurors asked about Georgia’s one-party consent law, which requires the consent of only one person to a recording. The Georgia Supreme Court had previously ruled in the case that the one-party consent law doesn’t trump another state law that makes it a crime to record activities of a person in a private place without consent.
Judge Henry Newkirk sent jurors a copy of the one-party consent law, and refused prosecutors’ request to also send them the Georgia Supreme Court ruling, according to the Daily Report story.
Rogers’ civil suit against the three defendants is still pending.
Related article:
ABAJournal.com: “Judge tosses 1 charge against lawyers and client over Waffle House CEO sex tape”
