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Criminal charges were dismissed Thursday against a New York City couple who had been accused of sexually assaulting a woman during last year's Sundance Film Festival.
Anne Hardcastle, 28, and Michael Taylor, 45, were charged last September with object rape, sodomy and forcible sexual abuse. They were accused of giving a Utah woman alcohol and drugs before sexually assaulting her during a threesome in their Park City hotel room.
A trial was expected to begin next week, but prosecutors on Wednesday asked a judge to dismiss the case, citing "evidentiary issues that have recently arisen." Third District Judge Paige Petersen granted the dismissal Thursday.
Deputy Summit County Attorney Patricia Cassell would not elaborate on what issues led to the dismissal.
Defense attorney Tara Isaacson, who represents Hardcastle, also did not detail the exact evidence that led to the dismissal, but said that evidence came to light recently that showed "both of the defendants were innocent and this was consensual."
Taylor's defense attorney, Kenneth Brown, said they were "very happy" that the case was dropped, and said they appreciated prosecutors taking a close look at the case before deciding they didn't have enough evidence to go to a jury.
"From our perspective, the case was always one where the sexual activity was consensual," Brown said. "That's always been the defense."
The alleged victim, a 23-year-old Midway woman, testified during a December preliminary hearing that she met the couple at a Park City bar the night of Jan. 26, 2016. She remembered that the man bought her tequila shots and a cocktail, that the couple promised her a Sundance Film Festival after-party and brought her to their hotel room. She recalled champagne in the room, followed by some Ecstasy and conversations on the hotel couch.
Then, everything was blank.
She had a slight memory of waking up in a bed that morning with Hardcastle and Taylor, but she did not recall the rest of that morning — including an Uber ride home from the couple's hotel room to her friend's house in Park City.
The woman testified that she did not consent to any sexual activity. However, she had scratches, bruises, suction marks and bite marks, along with genital pain, that led her to believe she had been abused.
"I just felt like it had happened," she testified. "Something had happened sexually."
While at the hospital for an examination, the woman said she realized she had an Instagram friend request on her phone from Hardcastle. This led to six months of correspondence, where the alleged victim said she acted as if the sex acts were consensual in order to get Hardcastle to admit to the alleged crimes.
When the Utah woman asked how she got the bruises on her body, Hardcastle responded: "You said you liked it rough, so I gave you whatever you wanted."
Taylor, in an emailed statement, called the prosecution a "nightmare concocted by an individual and the representatives of the State and County ... Sadly this is a nightmare that should never have happened if both law enforcement and the judicial process had properly assessed the facts and acted in a manner consistent with the truth."
Taylor claimed the he and Hardcastle "were the victims of lies and fabrications and a prosecutorial process predicated on, among other things, an ill conceived police investigation that was blatantly biased and an abuse of power."