Parolee James Ernest Bledsoe was a registered sex offender and sported crooked teeth, Dumbo-sized ears and a bowl haircut.
But some women in Huntington Beach and Costa Mesa bars couldn't resist Bledsoe.
The 30-year-old managed to get more than 30 women to leave local drinking holes to visit his bachelor pad, where he secretly DVD-recorded his sexual assaults.
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Bledsoe's game officially ended late yesterday. An Orange County jury rejected his claim that the sexual encounters were consensual. Jurors
convicted him of committing multiple felonies and misdemeanors
involving four of the women.
According to prosecutor Jennifer Walker, Bledsoe had a secret weapon to
score: he got the women either so intoxicated or drugged that they were
incoherent before he assaulted them.
Walker's key evidence? Bledsoe's secret DVD recordings.
This can't be repeated often enough for California men–especially
college men: It is illegal to have sex with a person who is incoherent or not mentally
able to give consent. Intoxication is not your ticket to score. Is that so difficult to grasp?
Bledsoe won't need to try to master that simple lesson anymore. Orange
County Superior Court Judge John Conley will punish him with–get
this–a likely minimum 100-year prison term at his January sentencing hearing.
(His ugly past helped bolster the pending punishment. He was convicted in 2003 for committing lewd and lascivious acts on a
minor and sentenced to prison for three years. He has also been
convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and possession of marijuana
with intent to sell, according to court records.)
Bledsoe's good news? He'll have to keep the Dumbo ears, but he can get those crooked teeth fixed at taxpayer expense in the slammer.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.