A document filed in a lawsuit brought by a former Las Vegas cocktail waitress against the governor of Nevada contains a shocking allegation.
Chrissy Mazzeo brought suit in 2008 against Jim Gibbons, alleging that he sexually assaulted her in a Vegas parking garage in 2006, then covered it up. Earlier this year, lawyers for Gibbons, a Republican seeking re-election this fall despite a host of personal problems, filed a motion to have the case dismissed for lack of evidence. Yesterday, Mazzeo’s lawyers responded with a filing of their own.
During the evening in question, Gibbons and his top political fixer, Nevada GOP consultant Sig Rogich, had been drinking at a restaurant with Mazzeo and another woman. In the new filing, Mazzeo says Gibbons hit on her at the restaurant, playing footsie with her and telling her they could “crawl” to his hotel room from there, then accompanied her to a nearby parking garage to find her car.
Here’s what Mazzeo alleges happened next:
Chrissy and Gibbons walked into a parking garage, and then Gibbons pushed and pinned her against a wall, gave her the alternative to either have sex with him or try to escape, banged her against the wall, fastened his grip on her upper arms with increasing pressure, and said,”You can try to run away or you can let this happen. I’m not going to fuck you. I’m going to rape you.”
Chrissy tried to talk Gibbons out of raping her, said she had a baby, pleaded with him not to do it, said there was a camera, reminded him he was running for Governor, asked him, “Are you seriously going to rape me?” and began to pray.
Mazzeo managed to free herself from Gibbons’s grip, according to the document, and called 911.
A version of these allegations came out in February when Gibbons was deposed by Mazzeo’s lawyers, but the document filed yesterday adds specificity.
Mazzeo has also alleged that Gibbons and Rogich then worked with the local sheriff, a political ally, to ensure that videotape of the encounter was edited out of videotape from the parking garage’s security cameras.
Gibbons has denied all wrong-doing and said that Mazzeo is making the story up.
Mazzeo’s allegations are hardly the only blow to Gibbons’s reputation as a family man. During their 2008 divorce proceedings, his wife charged that he had cheated on her with “many” women, including one to whom, records showed, he sent 860 text messages in a two-month period.
