After four days of testimony from more than 20 witnesses, both sides in the Kathryn Knott gay-bashing case delivered fiery closing statements Tuesday.
Knott, 25, is charged with aggravated and simple assault, conspiracy and reckless endangerment in connection with the 2014 attack on gay couple Andrew Haught and Zachary Hesse.
Prosecutors say Knott was part of a group that physically and verbally attacked Haught and Hesse at 16th and Chancellor streets Sept. 11, 2014. The melee started, they say, when Kevin Harrigan, a friend of Knott’s, made a derogatory comment about the men being a couple. Harrigan and co-defendant Philip Williams accepted plea deals this fall and will receive no jail time; Knott rejected a similar plea deal.
Throughout his presentation, defense attorney Louis Busico repeatedly contended Knott did not take part in the melee.
“It was horrible that [Haught] was the victim of a crime. It’s beyond reproach. But it’s also bad to be falsely accused and to endure the baggage that comes along with that,” he said.
Busico referenced Knott’s attire that evening — a white dress and sandals — and her small statute numerous times, suggesting her involvement wasn’t logical.
“Look at Kathryn Knott and think about how she was dressed that night; would she insert herself between one, two, three, four men? Does she want to insert herself between guys who are pushing and shoving each other?”
Assistant District Attorney Mike Barry argued in his closing that Knott did indeed want to get involved, prompted by her own antigay animus. He repeatedly referenced a series of antigay tweets shown in court, in which she used the words “gay” and “dyke” in derogatory manners.
“She didn’t see Zachary Hesse. She saw a faggot. She didn’t see Andrew Hesse. She saw a dirty fucking faggot,” Barry said, using language he contends Knott used during the incident. “That’s what you do when you hate someone because of the category they’re from. It’s easier to yell and scream and jump in and hit someone when you’re not looking at them as a person but rather as someone who, much to your chagrin, happened to be born gay.”
He referenced Knott’s testimony on the stand that morning as further evidence of her LGBT opposition, such as when she acknowledged using the word “dyke” about herself to mean she “looked terrible.”
“I had no idea she was going to say that. She just can’t help herself,” Barry said. “It’s right below the surface and with just a couple questions it comes out.”
He likened another tweet in which she posted about a gay couple kissing at a club to her actions the night in question.
“Two gay people kissed and it bothered her so much that she stopped what she was doing, took out her phone and told the world. Just like that night she saw a gay guy fighting with her friend and she had to get involved and start calling him a fucking faggot,” Barry said.
In his closing, Busico said the tweets were used to distract from what he said is a lack of evidence of Knott’s involvement in the incident.
“The record is devoid of evidence” of Knott’s wrongdoing, he said. Instead, he argued, the evidence to only Harrigan and Williams being aggressors.
“I don’t know Philip Williams but I apologize to you on his behalf,” he said, directing his comments to Haught, who suffered the brunt of the attack by Williams.
Barry, however, countered that four of his witnesses positively linked Knott to being physically involved. Two bystanders said they saw a woman punched a man, one of whom identified Knott from a photo array. Haught also picked her from a photo array as the woman he said punched Hesse. Hesse described the woman who struck him in the face as blonde and wearing a white dress.
“There were seven girls out there, but everyone keeps saying it’s Kathryn. It keeps on being Kathryn. There’s no other answer other than she did it,” Barry said. “We didn’t put her in that chair; she put herself in that chair.”
Barry closed his statement showing video of Knott and her friends walking away from the scene, followed by a photo of Haught in the hospital, with his face swollen and bloodied.
“She walked away that night,” Barry said. “Don’t let her walk away now.”
Defense calls Knott
The defense rested Tuesday morning after a series of character witnesses, as well as Knott’s own testimony.
Throughout her direct examination by Busico, Knott repeatedly said she was not involved in the physical altercation.
“I saw Phil go to pull up his arm [to strike Haught] and I went to stop him,” Knott said. “I didn’t want to see Mr. Williams hurt or Mr. Haught hurt, even though I didn’t know him.”
“I was trying to calm the situation,” she added. “That’s why my hand was on [friend] Fran, to say, ‘Stop. Everyone, stop.'”
Knott said she was about 10 feet from Williams when she saw him punch Haught.
“As soon as I saw him connect, I turned and ran in the opposite direction,” Knott testified.
“Did you at any time punch, strike or hit anyone?” Busico asked.
“No.”
“Did you use the word faggot?”
“No.”
On a frequently hostile cross-examination by Assistant District Attorney Mike Barry, Knott acknowledged that the day after the incident, Williams, Harrigan and another friend asked her to ask her father, a police chief, what they should do. Knott testified her father advised them to contact authorities.
When asked why she didn’t contact authorities herself, Knott replied, “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Knott’s character was brought into question numerous times.
Busico went on the offensive, addressing the defendant’s infamous antigay tweets.
“Let’s talk about those tweets,” he said.
Busico walked Knott through each of the four tweets in question, all of which she said were “taken out of context.”
She suggested one tweet, in which she used the hashtags “gay” and “ew” in response to two men kissing in a club was prompted by her disdain for public displays of affection.
“I’m not a PDA person,” she told Busico. “They were aggressively making out. That was strange to me.”
On cross, Barry hammered the point that a deeper dislike of LGBT people could be to blame.
“Do you find gay people disgusting?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” she replied.
When questioned about a tweet in which she described her own hairstyle with the hashtag “dyke,” Knott said the word is not in her “everyday vocabulary list.” She acknowledged it could be considered a “slur” but objected to Barry’s suggestion that it’s a “hateful” word.
“I’d have to disagree with you,” Knott said, noting she used to word to mean she “looked terrible.”
She acknowledged using the word “gay” to mean “lame,” when referring to a song she disliked in one tweet.
“I guess that’s OK,” Knott said about equating the two words.
In a humorous moment that broke up the hostility, Barry fired off lines from Will Ferrell movie “Anchorman,” like “Baxter, is that you?” and “I love lamp.”
He asked Knott why she tweeted the movie line “Jazz flute is for little fairy boys.”
“Do you have a friend who plays jazz flute?” he asked. “Why, in the middle of the day when you were at home, would you pick this line to tweet?”
Knott said she didn’t know.
She contended she would never use derogatory language to an LGBT person’s face and added the tweets don’t speak to her feelings about LGBT people.
“I have gay friends and family members,” she said, prompting Barry to interrupt with, “Sure. Glad you got that out.” His commentary elicited a warning from Judge Roxanne Covington.
Barry also questioned Knott about a tweet in which she said she was kicked out of a bar in Hilton Head, N.C. After a sidebar, Covington allowed the question.
“So you said you’d never been in a situation like [Sept. 11, 2014], but you were kicked out of — banned — from a bar in Hilton Head?” he asked.
Knott said she didn’t recall the circumstances of the incident.
After Knott stepped down, Busico called seven character witnesses, beginning with Knott’s best friend, Megan Malatesta.
Malatesta, 25, said she’s known Knott for 23 years and she has a “stellar reputation for being a peaceful, nonviolent and law-abiding person.”
On cross, Barry challenged the “law-abiding” comment by introducing tweets of Knott’s in which she referenced having her father issue a ticket to a driver who she said ran her off the road, and another in which she said her father allowed her to kick down a door in a police raid.
The other character witnesses included childhood and college friends, friends of her parents and former teachers.
On cross, Barry and Assistant District Attorney Allison Ruth emphasized that none was present for the incident in question.
Busico called four friends of Knott on Monday as “fact witnesses.” They all contended they didn’t see Knott strike either man and more than one alleged Haught and Hesse were the aggressors.
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