The Jameis Winston 911 Tapes and Witness Testimony Have Been Released

The office of State’s Attorney Willie Meggs of the 2nd Judicial District in Florida released the previously unreleased 911 tapes and witness interviews referring to the now dismissed rape case involving FSU quarterback Jameis Winston and an unnamed woman.

In the 911 tape from the night in question obtained by USA Today, her friend Jenna Weisberg describes the woman as “okay, just very shaken up.” She tells the dispatcher that the woman “got hit on the back on the head and then she ended up in [Winston]s] room” after meeting him at Potbelly’s. “She’s trying to tell me the story but it’s very in pieces,” Weisberg says, explaining that her friend told her she “kept blacking out.”

Almost a year after that phone call, which happened early in the morning on December 7, 2012, the police finally interviewed witnesses. While at face value the interviews with the woman’s friends versus Winston’s friends appear to tell different stories, in reality, they are but different perspectives on the same events.

Winston’s teammate Chris Casher described meeting the woman at Potbelly’s. He said the woman asked if he and Winston were football players. He described all of them taking a cab back to their apartment together and encouraging the woman to call her friend Monique Kessler to come along too, who wasn’t answering. He then described himself and teammate Ronald Darby watching the woman give Winston oral, then have sex. They did this in part through a broken door, just because they were “goofing around.” At one point, Casher walked into the room, apparently in an attempt to have sex with the girl himself, something he and his friends had done before. “It’s kind of a football player thing,” Casher said. “She was acting like a groupie type.”

“She probably had a couple drinks. She wasn’t like, out of her mind, didn’t know what was going on…she wasn’t forced to do anything,” he said.

One friend who the woman had been out with that night, Monique Kessler, said she did not think she was drunk when they were at the bar (her lack of intoxication was confirmed by another friend, Marcus Jordan) and said, “I felt weird about the situation, that someone pointed her out of all these girls and started talking to her.” She also explains that the woman willingly left the bar with Winston, but implied that a text message from Winston inviting her to leave the bar and go outside to find him might have been deleted by him or one of his friends. “I know for a fact that I saw a text message on her phone that said ‘Meet me outside,'” Kessler says. “And the next morning it was gone. She didn’t even remember texting someone at that point.”

“So the message that she didn’t even know she had was deleted from her phone,” confirms the investigator. Kessler also found it weird that her friend’s phone calls didn’t go through to her but “It’s hard to remember certain things.”

The police also interviewed 911 caller Jenna Weisberg. Weisberg said she was prompted to get in touch with the woman that night because of tweets she had sent out along the lines of “Oh somebody help, freaking out, somebody please call me” that she posted multiple times in a row. “I guess she didn’t really know who to call,” Weisberg said. When they finally talked on the phone, the woman was “hysterically crying” and said, according to Weisberg, “I think I like just got raped.”

After that, Weisberg describes the woman remembering only flashes of things, and her memory not fully coming back until remembering Winston driving her home on his scooter. “I guess maybe she was blacked out [because] she was describing it in little memories,” Weisberg says, explaining that the woman “knows that she did have sex because she had a lot of pain” and reiterating that she thought she had been hit on the head because her head hurt in one specific spot.

It’s in her recollection of the actual sex that Weisberg’s testimony differs from Casher’s:

She was in his apartment and he was on top of her and he was like, ‘Oh just let me do this or whatever’ and his roommate kept coming in and out of the room and being like ‘No, stop it, stop it’ and he was like, ‘No get out’ or whatever. I remember the roommate trying to get him to stop.

Weisberg says that the woman referenced her rape in tweets at the start of this football season, obviously upset about seeing Winston’s name everywhere. “She would always post like, ‘Oh like I hate it when everyone always says James is so great, I hate him.'”

Listening to the testimony and the 911 tapes, one thing is clear: there’s no reason this case could have been investigated fairly so many months after the events in question. When asked by the investigator if she could speculate accurately about how many drinks the woman had had, her friend Monique Kessler could only guess. “11 months ago I recalled it a lot more easily than now but I don’t remember it now.