Talk about a bad roll of the dice: The 24-year-old Yorba Linda man known as the “MySpace rapist,” who under a deal with prosecutors pleaded guilty in August 2011 in exchange for 15 years in prison, only to withdraw his plea two months later and represent himself at the second trial where he tried to argue sex with the victims was consensual, was sentenced Friday to the maximum punishment allowed under the law. “It's very deserving,” Deputy District Attorney Mark Birney said of the 24 year prison term Judge James Rogan ordered for Jason Ara Erpinar.
]
Jason Ara Erpinar, MySpace Rapist Who Previously Pleaded Guilty, is Convicted Again
The second trial ended Aug. 30, 2012, with a jury finding Erpinar guilty of raping three women, who of whom he'd met through MySpace.
Besides the max years behind bars, Rogan also ordered Erpinar to register as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
The judge had heard what Birney told City News Service was “a very powerful, very emotional statement” from one victim, who explained the emotional not only from the rape but having to come to court to be cross-examined by Erpinar, whose victims were 17, 18 and 22 at the time of his attacks. In two of the rapes, Erpinar had plied his victims with alcohol, causing one of them to vomit.
“He is a very difficult defendant to deal with,” Birney said. “He's a narcissistic, sociopathic, serial rapist. He is without sympathy for anyone else's feelings whether they are physical or emotional.”
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.