Long Island- A Long Island woman enabled the rapes of her 13-year-old daughter and a young friend by two men at a hotel – telling the teens it was OK because “what happens in White Plains, stays in White Plains,” Westchester DA Jeanine Pirro charged yesterday.
“This is outrageous,” Pirro said after announcing grand-jury charges against the 41-year-old Suffolk County mom and the men. “This is a very disturbing example of the sexual mores in our society today.”
Pirro said the woman, who faces up to seven years in prison, did nothing to stop the men from having intercourse with her daughter and a 14-year-old girl on April 9 in a White Plains hotel because her attitude was “sooner or later they have to have sex.”
The woman, who is not being identified to protect her daughter’s privacy, is considered an accessory to the assault, but has been charged with two counts of rape, as have Gilberto Gonzalez, 19, of Pleasantville, and Michael Berger, 18, of White Plains.
She also is charged with endangering the welfare of children and other crimes.
Pirro said the woman, the two victims and another 13-year-old girl had gone to White Plains for a shopping trip, and were staying at the Crowne Plaza hotel.
The group encountered Gonzalez and Berger – whom they previously did not know – in a hotel elevator, and then bumped into them again at an Applebee’s restaurant, the DA said.
The mom invited the men back to the hotel, and bought beer and other booze, which they all drank in their room, Pirro said.
As time passed, the girls got drunk and started “making out” with the men on a bed as the woman watched, according to Pirro.
Gonzalez had sex with the 14-year-old in the bathroom. The woman was aware of it and did nothing to intervene, the DA said. Then Berger and the woman’s daughter had sex in a hallway outside the mother’s room.
The next day, when they were leaving to go home to Sayville, the woman allegedly told the girls, “What happens in White Plains, stays in White Plains,” a takeoff on a Las Vegas tourism slogan, Pirro said.
After they returned home, the 14-year-old told her own mother what happened, and Suffolk police were notified. Those cops informed Westchester police, who last month arrested all three defendants.
Following the indictment, the mother was being held on $100,000 bail and Gonzalez was being held on $25,000 bail. Berger had posted $7,500 bail.
“Scary stuff,” Pirro said of the allegations. “I think the message is that parents need to know, when they allow their kids to go for a sleepover with a friend, they need to know who the mother is, what her values are, and what her morals are.”