Date-rape videos shock for 'friend'

By ANDREW GUMBEL

LOS ANGELES - For the past five years, the woman now known to the public under the pseudonym Tonja Doe, has thought many different things about Andrew Luster.

He was the affable, beach-bum playboy who sweet-talked her and her sister in a bar in central Santa Barbara on the night that they met in October 1996.

He was, over time, a phone buddy, a penpal, a friend and a lover.

But then things started to change. After three months, the relationship soured.

Luster ended up suing her in the small-claims court over an unpaid phone bill and a costly trip to the dentist. Over the next 2 1/2 years, Luster bombarded her with phone calls. They were, she said, tantamount to threats.

Then, in July last year, came the bombshell that even Tonja had not begun to suspect. Luster, who is an heir to the Max Factor cosmetics fortune, and believed to be worth at least $US30 million ($73.8 million), was arrested on suspicion of drugging and raping a number of women.

The police raided his home and found several videotapes, all date-and time-stamped, with footage of his alleged assaults. One of them was shot on the night that he and Tonja met, and it showed that he had pulled up her skirt while she lay unconscious on a couch and - in the legalistic language of the court - had "sex relations" with her.

On the night that they met, she recalled, he had offered her a drug called GHB that he said would give her a euphoric high a bit like Ecstasy - except, he assured her, that it was legal. (It is not.)

And that was the last thing she remembered until she woke up in the morning with her clothes rumpled around her - the result, he told her at the time, of unsuccessful efforts to make her comfortable as she slept.

Two things now seem particularly shocking to Tonja. The first is that a man with whom she was on her way to having a relationship, would, as she saw it, violate her in this way. The second is the grim realisation that she might never have known a thing about it but for the existence of other women better able to recall what happened to them after they had accepted Luster's hospitality.

Luster, who is 37, does not deny the evidence of the videotapes but insists that the sex and the drug-taking were consensual.

There are many reasons why the trial of Andrew Stuart Luster has become at once the most graphic and most alarming date-rape case to hit the United States courts in recent memory.

There is the fact that he is rich and carefree, the scion of a famous family who has hung out on the beach all his life.

There is the fact that, contrary to the popular, but frequently inaccurate, image of the date-rapist, his demeanour in the Santa Barbara bars and nightclubs where he picked up women was devoid of sleaziness or any obvious hint of impending trouble.

According to prosecutors in Ventura County, where the case is being heard, Luster would spend evenings in bars near the Santa Barbara campus of the University of California, or else on State St in the centre of town.

In one of the three cases being considered in court - and possibly in others still being investigated - he would pick on women accompanied by male friends. They would then be invited back to his place in Mussel Shoals and allegedly given - either knowingly or unknowingly - a dose of GHB, or gamma hydroxybutyrate. (It is also known as liquid Ecstasy.)

The drug can have a heavy sedative effect, meaning that subjects often have no memory of what happened to them while they were under its influence. It leaves the body within 12 hours, making it hard to prove to police or medical authorities that it was ever administered in the first place. GHB is, in fact, the perfect drug for date-rapists.

In California, these days, it is easy to come by, in part because it is used peripherally in the rave scene. Unlike the other drug favoured by date-rapists, Rohypnol, it is very cheap to buy (no more than $US10 for a hit) and, failing that, relatively straightforward to make at home.

Testifying in court, David Smith, of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury Clinic, said: "It's spreading across the country. It is quite a serious problem and over the internet there's a lot of do-it-yourself chemistry."

- INDEPENDENT