Christina Heaslet Beard (b. 1978) is a U.S. citizen who falsely accused a fellow citizen of raping her in her college dormintory room. The man she accused spent five years in prison.

Heaslet Beard is a graduate of the University of Akron. She now lives with her husband and child in Missouri.

The accusation

Oct. 12, 1996, University freshman Heaslet Beard invited fellow student and pro football hopeful Nathaniel Lewis, then 19, to her dorm room. She drank alcohol in Lewis' presence. She called her roommate to ensure she and Lewis would be alone. She took a birth control pill in front of Lewis. They then engaged in a five-minute sexual encounter.

Later that day she contacted the police and accused Lewis of physically restraining and raping her after gaining entry to her room under the pretense of borrowing CDs. She claimed that she cried for him to stop with repeated pleas of "Don't do this."

Journal

In April 1997, Heaslet Beard wrote some entries in her personal journal that later seemed to support Lewis' contention that the sex was consensual. One entry read:

:"I think I pounced on Nate because he was the last straw. That, and because I've always seemed to need some drama in my life. Otherwise I get bored. That definitely needs to change. I'm sick of men taking advantage of me ... and I'm sick of myself for giving in to them. I'm not a nympho like all these guys think. I'm just not strong enough to say no to them. I'm tired of being a whore. This is where it ends."

Trial and conviction for Lewis

During the trial, a Summit County judge refused to admit certain parts of the journal into the trial, saying allowing them would violate Ohio's rape shield law.

Beard, who had filed a lawsuit against Lewis for physical and emotional pain then later dropped it, asked for the maximum sentence. She wrote in her journal that she knew suing him was wrong and said she "will probably feel guilty about this some day."

A jury found Lewis guilty of rape in June 1997. The prosecutor was female and she smiled upon hearing the verdict. He was sentenced a month later to eight years in prison.

Release and exoneration for Lewis

He was released on appeal in 2002. In 2003, the conviction was overtunred at the federal appeals court level which found that the lower court had erred in not accepting the journal parts into evidence.

In 2004, Summit County Common Pleas Judge Marvin Shapiro ruled that Beard was not a victim of rape and that Nathaniel Lewis was a wrongfully imprisoned inmate eligible to collect damages from the state, specualted at being in the range of a a quarter-million dollars.

Response to exoneration

In a phone interview in 2004, Beard called Shapiro’s reasoning “cave-mannish” and said his words “threw rape-victim rights back into the 1950s.”

References

The Ann Arbor News, Sunday, June 5, 2005 An innocent man, he spent 5 years in prison by Amalie Nash Christina Heaslet Beard&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=9 Google cache link

Quote

:I think it’s absolutely ludicrous. I’m sorry I wasn’t the Virgin Mary, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t say no and not have the word ‘no’ respected.

External links

Convicted Rapist Gets Vindication June 4, 2004

Woman denounces rape conviction reversal Alt URL June 25, 2004