Danny Masterson appears in LA court for a preliminary hearing on three rape charges

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An alleged rape victim of That 70s Show star Danny Masterson burst into tears today as she told a court how he plied her with a ‘fruity drink’, threw her in a jacuzzi, then carried her to his bed and had sex with her as she tried to fight him off.

And afterward, the Scientologist actor held up a gun and told her, ‘Don’t say a f***ng word. You’re not going to tell anybody,’ 46 year-old Jennifer B – whose full name is being withheld – told a criminal court in downtown Los Angeles.

When Jennifer – who was also a Scientologist at the time of the alleged rape in April 2003 – asked permission from the Church of Scientology to report the alleged rape to the police, church officials said no and threatened the since Masterson was ‘member in good standing,’ to talk about the incident with outsiders could mean she would be cut off and shunned by the church, her family and friends.

Masterson, 45, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he raped three women in separate incidents at his Hollywood Hills home between 2001 and 2003. The actor showed up at a criminal court in downtown Los Angeles today for a preliminary hearing on the three charges of rape he is facing. 

He posted a photo of himself in the passenger seat as his wife Bijou Phillips drove, with the caption, ‘Had the most beautiful Uber driver drop me off at school today. #uberwife #bijouphillips,’ and the location ‘Court House’.

The Scientologist actor – wearing a light blue suit, tie and white shirt – sat at the front with his attorneys, Tom Mesereau and Sharon Appelbaum, in Judge Charlaine Oledo’s courtroom.

The preliminary hearing – which will decide whether Masterson will stand trial on the rape charges – is expected to last four days. 

Masterson’s twin brother Christopher and half-sister Alanna were in court today to support their sibling. 

Jennifer told the court today that while at Masterson’s house in the early hours of April 25 2003, the actor made her a vodka drink with ‘fruity tasting’ sweet red liquid in it. 

After she started to sip the drink, Masterson announced that Jennifer was ‘going in the jacuzzi’ at his home and despite her protests, he picked her up and dumped her in the hot water with some of her clothes still on. 

While she was in the jacuzzi she started to feel ‘blurry’ and disoriented, she told the court. ‘I kept saying, ”something’s wrong….my vision was not good.”’ 

Another friend who was there, Luke Watson, helped Jennifer out of the jacuzzi because she said, ‘I couldn’t walk or stand. I was swaying. I couldn’t see anything….It was really hard to breathe.’ 

When she said she wanted to vomit, Masterson stepped in to take her to the bathroom – even though Watson objected and said he would look after her. 

Masterson told Watson, ‘Oh no. She’s my homey. I would never……..,’ the court heard. 

Jennifer said Masterson ignored her when she yelled ‘No, put me down,’ and he carried her upstairs to the bathroom where she was sick. 

He helped her into the shower to get cleaned up, she said, telling her ‘You’re disgusting. There’s vomit all over. You need a shower.’ 

Fighting back tears, Jennifer told how she was drifting in and out of consciousness when she realized her top was off and Masterson was ‘soaping my breasts.’

‘I punched him in the chest because I could not believe that he was touching my breasts,’ she said. 

The star picked her up and carried her from the shower to his nearby bed, where, Jennifer told the court, ‘I passed out.’ 

‘When I came to he was on top of me and inside me. I think I was completely naked at that point. I can recall grabbing his hair to pull him off and I also recall taking a pillow and pushing it toward his face because I could not get him off me. I couldn’t breathe and I felt myself going unconscious again,’ she said.

 When she woke up again, ‘He was still inside me……I grabbed his throat. He put his hand on my throat and squeezed. With the other hand he was holding my wrists. He was saying, ”You’re not going to f***ing tell anybody.” 

When there was the sound of a man’s voice outside the bedroom door, said Jennifer  ‘He told me, don’t f***ing move. Don’t say a word.” And he reached for his nightstand draw, took out a pistol, held it up and said, ”Don’t move. Don’t f***ing move,” before putting the gun back, she added.

When Masterson left the room, Jennifer said that though she was still barely conscious, she managed to crawl cross the floor and hide in a closet, curled up in a fetal position behind some clothes. She recalled that when she woke up freezing the next morning, the tried to talk to the friend Luke Watson – also a Scientologist – who didn’t want to listen to her and said, ‘You are going straight to the president’s office’, meaning a high official at the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Center in Hollywood. 

Instead, Jennifer went to home of her parents, also Scientologists, because it was her father’s birthday and the family was heading to Florida for a celebration.

In the meantime, Jennifer tearfully told the court, ‘I felt like I had been stabbed repeatedly in my vagina. I was bruised and I had a lot of pain in my anus. I kept checking for blood.’ 

She said she had bruises on her neck, hips, thighs and wrists. ‘I told my parents I had fallen down…….I had never heard of anyone in Scientology to report rape.’ 

When a church official, Julian Schwartz, talked to her after her return from Florida, she told the court, he told her, ‘If you are going to use the word rape, don’t. We don’t use that word here.’ 

She added that Schwartz gave her several Scientology textbooks which outlined that if she went against the church strict policies, she could be excommunicated by the church and branded a ‘suppressive person.’

‘My parents would have to disown me, everyone who had been my friend would view me as an enemy. I could be lied to, cheated on, destroyed…’ 

It was fear of those reprisals that she didn’t got to the police to report the alleged rape till June 2004, she said.

Asked by assistant deputy district attorney Reinhold Mueller if she had asked the Church of Scientology for permission to report the alleged rape to cops, she was told she ‘could not go to the police because Danny is a member in good standing with the church.’

‘If I were to report a member in good standing for rape, I would be declared a suppressive person.’ 

But what finally made her go to the police she told the court, was ‘I heard he did this to another girl.’

Jennifer told the court that after Masterson’s longtime girlfriend, Chrissie, broke up with him, the star started drinking more and acting obnoxiously.

‘I saw him intoxicated more frequently,’ dark-haired Jennifer – who at the time in 2003 was a fellow Scientologist and part of Masterson’s circle of friends. ‘He could be extremely vulgar.

‘He once physically lashed out at me. He made obscene gestures.’

Jennifer – dressed in a white flowered dress, white cardigan and white slippers – told of one incident where, in front of other people, Masterson ‘took off his pants and pulled out his penis.’

One of Danny Masterson’s alleged rape victims received a payoff of ‘hundreds of thousands’ of dollars after the alleged crimes, she confessed at Los Angels criminal court today.

And Jenny B – whose last name has not been disclosed – also admitted to having sex with Masterson at his home in September 2002, nine months before the alleged rape.

In her June 2004 police report to LA cops about the alleged rape, Jenny told police that the previous incident of sex with the actor was consensual.

But Masterson’s attorney, Tom Mesereau, told the court today that when Jenny B recently brought a civil suit against Masterson over the alleged rape, she changed her story and said the first episode was consensual.

Earlier in today’s hearing, Masterson’s attorney, Tom Mesereau, accused prosecutors of ‘blatant religious bias’ against the Church of Scientology and asked the judge to ban witnesses from mentioning Scientology during testimony.

But judge Olmedo denied Mesereau’s request.

At a hearing last month,  Mesereau accused TV actress and fervent anti-Scientologist Leah Remini ‘of using ‘scandalous’ tactics to persuade Masterson’s alleged rape victims to file police reports against him.

Some of the women Masterson is accused of raping were interviewed by Remini for her TV documentary Scientology and the Aftermath, about the controversial church the actress quit in 2013 and has been crusading against ever since.

And, blasted Mesereau, ‘Leah Remini, an anti-Scientologist, interviewed the alleged victims and told them, ‘If you don’t file a police report, you won’t be on my show.’ That is scandalous.’

He has thrown a slew of accusations at the prosecution in the Masterson case, including withholding evidence, a secret ‘double agent’ LAPD detective who was working a second job as security for Remini, and a 2004 police file in the cases that mysteriously went ‘missing.’

And he described as ‘worthless’ many of the polices reports and witness statements the district attorney has handed over to the defense as discovery because they are so heavily redacted.

Mesereau also addressed claims that the Church of Scientology had ‘harassed and stalked’ the alleged rape victims and he insisted that Masterson ‘had nothing to do with’ the alleged harassment.

Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller has denied Mesereau’s claims, calling them ‘a fishing expedition.’

Mesereau, has tried several times to get the case tossed before it even reached the preliminary hearing stage, filing motions to dismiss the rape charges, saying they were ‘politically motivated’ and beyond the statute of limitations. These motions were denied.

The veteran attorney – who defended Michael Jackson when he was charged with child molestation – has also repeatedly tried to have the press banned from court hearings, accusing law enforcement of ‘leaking’ information to media about the rape charges. He argued that publicity about the case would prejudice the jury at Masterson’s future trial.  

Each time, a judge denied Mesereau’s efforts

Mesereau did win one small victory for his client when Judge Olmedo denied a prosecution request to have Masterson surrender his passport.

Judge Olmedo ruled that the $3.3 million bail the star has been free on since his arrest last June, ‘is sufficient to ensure Mr. Masterson’s appearance in the future.’ 

Masterson – who has been married to actress and model Bijou Phillips since 2011 – stands charged with raping a 23-year-old woman between January and December 2001, raping a 28-year-old woman in April 2003, and raping another 23 year-old woman between October and December 2003. 

He was also accused of sexual assault in two other cases but the DA’s office said they declined to file charges on those, one for insufficient evidence and the other based on the statute of limitations.

In 2019, four women – including the three alleged victims in the criminal case – filed a civil lawsuit against Masterson, claiming he drugged, raped and sexually assaulted them in the early 2000s.

The lawsuit also named the Church of Scientology and its leader David Miscavige as defendants, claiming the women were stalked in a ‘conspiracy to cover up that Daniel Masterson sexually assaulted four young women’.

Two of the women named in the suit were Masterson’s ex-girlfriends – Chrissie Bixler and Bobette Riales – while the other two are listed as Jane Does.

Bixler is being lent support by Remini, the former Scientologist who is now one of the church’s harshest critics. Remini was at Masterson’s criminal court hearing last October.

In the civil lawsuit, the alleged victims’ lawyer said, ‘When those women came forward to report Masterson’s crimes the Defendants (The Church of Scientology) conspired to and systematically stalked, harassed, invaded their and their family’s privacy, and intentionally caused them emotional distress to silence and intimidate them.’

Masterson – who played wise-cracking Steven Hyde on That ’70s Show from 1998 to 2006 – called the lawsuit against him and the Church of Scientology a ‘shameful money grab’.

In statement to DailyMail.com, the Church of Scientology branded the lawsuit ‘baseless’ and the claims ‘ludicrous and a sham’. ‘It’s a dishonest and hallucinatory publicity stunt. Leah Remini is taking advantage of these people as pawns in her moneymaking scam.’