Breaking: Woman Who Accused Missouri Gov. of Blackmail Admits it Could Have Been a Dream
Attorneys for Missouri Republican Gov. Eric Greitens raised new doubts about charges that Greitens is guilty of a felony invasion-of-privacy in regards to a sexually explicit photo he allegedly took of his mistress.
In a court filing dated Sunday, defense attorneys claim prosecutors withheld evidence that a woman who accused Greitens of taking a partially nude, non-consensual photo of her during their extra-marital affair may have only seen the camera that took the photo in a dream.
According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the governor’s attorney said when the woman testified during a deposition on Friday, she admitted to never seeing Greiten with a camera or even a phone during the time he had allegedly taken the photo.
“I don’t know if it’s because I’m remembering it through a dream or I — I’m not sure, but yes, I feel like I saw it after it happened, but I haven’t spoken about it because of that,” she said, according to the filing.
Greiten’s attorneys claim prosecutors never divulged that statement to the defense. Sunday’s filing has been labeled as a motion to compel prosecutors to hand over undisclosed evidence that may benefit the Missouri governor’s criminal defense.
Susan Ryan, a spokeswoman for St. Louis Circuit attorney Kim Gardner, accused defense attorneys of having “cherry-picked bits and pieces” of the woman’s nine-hour testimony in order to effectively attack her credibility.
Ryan said the motion filed Sunday was “frivolous” and that prosecutors have done nothing but comply with the rules of evidence-sharing.
Sunday’s filing also claims the woman admitted sending nude or partially nude images of herself to Greitens through the Facetime app in 2015, an admission that was not disclosed to a St. Louis grand jury or to a special Missouri House committee investigating the charges against Greitens.
The filing also claimed the woman said she never viewed what happened with the partially nude photo allegedly taken of her as a crime, and that the “last thing on (her) mind” as recently as January was a potential prosecution.
The governor’s defense team has been pleading for the special Missouri House committee to postpone its own investigative report on the matter until after his trial next month.
In January, Greitens was forced to acknowledge an extramarital affair he had in 2015 — prior to him running for governor — with his hair stylist.
The acknowledgement of the affair came after KMOV-TV in St. Louis aired a segment with a woman who described an encounter with Greitens that was secretly recorded by the woman’s husband.
According to the segment, the woman claimed Greitens had invited her into the basement of his St. Louis home, blindfolded and tied her to exercise rings and “partially undid” the clothes she had been wearing.
It was during this time the woman claimed to have seen a flash of light through the blindfold and said Greitens told her, “You’re never going to mention my name, otherwise there will be pictures of me everywhere.”
The woman also claimed that Greitens said he deleted the photo hours after it was originally taken.
Though the Missouri governor denied all allegations of blackmail, he has not yet denied that he took the photo in question.
Greitens had been indicted Feb. 22 by a St. Louis grand jury for allegedly taking the photo and “transmitting it in a way that it could be accessed by a computer.”
The governor’s attorneys maintain the revealing photo of the woman does not exist and there’s no evidence it was ever sent to anyone.
Prosecutors have admitted that they do not have the photo, but are still trying to determine if it might still exist in cloud-based storage.
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