A Minnesota nursing home administrator is claiming the allegations that an 89-year-old resident was raped are false, and that she is a "flirt," the Star Tribune reported.
Andrew Scott Merzwski, a caretaker at the Edgewood Vista nursing home in Hermantown, was sentenced in January to a little more than four years in prison for sexually assaulting an 89-year-old woman.
But now another investigation into the rape was opened after the Edegewood facility was accused of withholding critical information from medical officials and lead investigators, including a claim that the sex was consensual.
Marilyn Moore, Edgewood's clinical services director, allegedly asked the nurse examining the victim: "Did she tell you that this was consensual? Did she tell you that she flirt's with the boy mercilessly?" the Star Tribune reported.
Moore then told another sexual assault advocate the 89-year-old "was making it up," and that she was a "flirt," according to court testimony obtained by the Star Tribune.
Court records say that Merzwski assaulted the elderly woman after she asked him to watch a movie with her on Jan. 18. Merzwski stood beside the woman's bed and began taking off his clothes.
"It's not right," the woman said as she pointed to a photograph of her husband, the Star Tribune reported. "This wouldn't be right."
The woman ended up spending three days in the psychiatric ward of St. Luke's Hospital in Duluth after the rape. The woman was apparently locked in the ward while officials investigated her story. But Edgewood officials did not report the rape to local police until two days after the incident, and did not begin an internal investigation until ten days after the rape, the Star Tribune reported.
On top of that, Edgewood officials allegedly did not tell the hospital where the woman was that Merzwski admitted to having sex with her. Moore then told the examining nurse the sex was consensual a few days later.
"I was just shocked that somebody was so blatantly putting the blame on this woman," the examining nurse, Theresa Flesvig, testified in court, according to the Star Tribune.
"Is this a situation where the state doesn't understand where a woman is harmed if she's raped?" said Mark Kosieradzki, the victim's attorney, the Star Tribune reported.
