Danny Masterson, a star of "That '70s Show," was given a 30–life term by a court on Thursday for raping two women in the past.
The 47-year-old Masterson was sentenced by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo after the ladies spoke about the trauma they had endured and the anguish brought on by the upsetting recollections in the years that followed.
The actor, who has been detained since May, was in a suit as he sat in court. Masterson silently listened to the women as they spoke.
One of the victims Masterson raped said, "After you raped me, you took from me," in 2003. "A steal of the spirit is what rape is," a witness said.
You are absolutely violent, pitiful, and disturbed, she said. "The world is a better place without you here"
According to the other victim of Masterson's rape, he "has not shown an ounce of regret for the anguish he inflicted." "I knew he deserved behind bars for the protection of all the ladies he came into touch with," she said to the judge. I'm sad and really apologetic. I wish I had called the cops on him sooner.
Prosecutors retried Masterson on all three charges earlier this year after a first jury was unable to reach convictions on three counts of rape in December and a mistrial was declared.
This time, Masterson was convicted of two charges on May 31 by a jury made up of seven women and five men. At the height of his celebrity from the Fox network comedy "That '70s Show," Masterson was the target of two attacks in 2003 that took place at his house in the Hollywood region.
On the third complaint, which claimed that Masterson allegedly sexually assaulted a longstanding girlfriend, they were unable to come to a conclusion. The verdict had received an 8-4 vote in favor.
After rejecting the defense's plea for a new trial, which was debated earlier on Thursday, the court condemned the actor. The defense requested a sentence ranging from 15 years to life and asked that the terms for the two offenses be served concurrently. The entire punishment of 30 years to life that Masterson was deserving of was requested by the prosecution.
Before the court handed down a sentence, Masterson's attorney Shawn Holley pleaded with him: "It's his life that will be affected by what you decide today." And his 9-year-old daughter's life, who is everything to him and to whom he is everything.
He has led a model life and has excelled as a spouse, brother, son, coworker, parent, and community servant, according to Holley.
Authorities said that Masterson exploited his position of power within the Church of Scientology, of which all three women were at the time also members, to dodge punishment for years following the attacks.
The ladies attributed their reluctance to contact the police regarding Masterson to their religion. They said that when they reported him to Scientology officials, they were informed that they had not been sexually assaulted, sent through ethics training, and advised against reporting a high-ranking member to the police.
The church said that the "testimony and depictions of Scientology doctrines" during the trial were "uniformly incorrect" in a statement following the decision.
In the statement, it was said that "The Church has no policy forbidding or discouraging members from reporting illegal behavior of anybody – Scientologists or not — to law authorities."
No witnesses were cited by Masterson's attorneys, and he declined to testify. The defense said that the actions were consensual and worked to undermine the women's accounts by calling attention to changes and contradictions that they claimed indicated collaboration between the parties.
The women whose evidence resulted in Masterson's conviction said that he offered them alcohol in 2003, causing them to get drunk or pass out, and then forcefully assaulted them.
Olmedo only let the ladies describe their state in the first trial but enabled the prosecution and accusers to directly state that Masterson drugged the women in the second trial.
There were no drug-related charges against Masterson, and there was no toxicological data to support the claim. The matter may come up in a future appeal from Masterson's conviction defense.
Those who claim they have been sexually abused are not routinely named by The Associated Press.
Masterson was in "That '70s Show" from 1998 until 2006 alongside Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, and Topher Grace.
In the 2016 Netflix comedy "The Ranch," he had reconnected with Kutcher, but the project was abandoned after the results of a subsequent LAPD investigation became public knowledge.
The prosecution and imprisonment of Masterson, coupled with the conviction of Harvey Weinstein last year, signal a significant #MeToo era achievement for Los Angeles prosecutors, even though the probe started before a wave of women rattled Hollywood with accusations about him in October 2017.
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