Superfly actor and rapper Kaalan Walker once “manipulated” a 16-year-old girl into filming an impromptu sex tape at his apartment building while her mother, who thought her daughter was posing for headshots, waited outside, a prosecutor told jurors Wednesday in closing arguments at Walker’s serial rape trial in Los Angeles.
Walker was 22 years old at the time and purportedly told the girl he could introduce her to famed rapper Drake if she simply followed his lead, Deputy District Attorney Cynthia Wallace said, adding that Walker dubiously name-dropped Drake with most of the 10 young and naïve Jane Does whose allegations underpin his felony charges.
“There’s no evidence he had any connection to Drake. It was just a thing that he used to lure the girls in. It was a trap, a ruse, his way of getting these girls,” Wallace tells Rolling Stone.
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Speaking to the jury, Wallace said once Walker separated the teen girl from her mom that day in 2017 and started asking about her career aspirations, he seized on the girl’s dream to be a Victoria’s Secret model.
“We’ve got to take more provocative photos. We’ve got to sexualize you a little bit,’” Walker allegedly told the girl as he convinced her to strip down to her underwear, Wallace said.
“He talked about Drake, taking her to a Drake party. What does he tell her? ‘Well, you know what? If you want to do all of these things, if you want to be at parties with Drake, if you want to be a Victoria’s Secret model, you know what we have to do? We have to film a sex tape,’” Wallace said. “He’s a 22-year-old man telling a 16-year-old girl, ‘We have to film a sex tape.’”
The girl testified during the six-week trial that she resisted “multiple times,” but Walker “doesn’t take no for an answer,” Wallace said.
“He keeps insisting, pushing and persisting, talking over her,” and eventually wearing the girl down until she finally relented, Wallace said. “She said, ‘Well, I thought: ‘He knows all these people. He’s going to help me.’ I thought what I was doing was going to help my career.’”
Wallace said the law is clear that a child’s consent is “never” a defense to statutory rape. “Minors are not developed in the same way emotionally and mentally that adults are, and we know this,” Wallace said. “That is why children are protected from adult men. You don’t have to do a lot of work on them. You promise them a few things and you get a naked 16-year-old girl who will let you penetrate her from behind.”
“He manipulated her and twisted her dreams, manipulating her into sex,” Wallace said. “He used her for his own pleasure, and then he discarded her and her dreams.”
Walker, 27, is facing the possibility of life in prison if convicted as charged. He has pleaded not guilty to five counts of forcible rape — one related to a different minor — two counts of rape by an intoxicating substance, two counts of statutory rape, one count of sexual penetration by force, and one count of assault. Two counts related to an 11th Jane Doe were dropped during the trial after the alleged victim declined to testify, prosecutors tell Rolling Stone.
Walker’s defense lawyer, Andrew Flier, is due to deliver his closing argument Thursday. He said during opening statements last month that Walker may have been a lying Lothario, but he never forced anyone into sex.
“They fell for his BS. That’s what this case is about. He made false promises, and they fell for it, and now it’s time for revenge,” Flier said when the case kicked off March 8. “They gave up their integrity and their bodies, and that’s why they’re here in spite. It’s payback to Mr. Walker.”
According to Wallace, Walker’s first crime in the case was the forcible rape of a 16-year-old victim in 2013. Walker allegedly contacted the girl online and offered her $5,000 to appear in a music video. After the girl took a train to meet him, thinking she was going to sign a contract, Wallace raped her as she lay crying, believing her life was in danger, Wallace said.
“She did not expect to lose her virginity this way,” Wallace told the jury. “This memory and this trauma sticks to her forever.”
Wallace said the “Achilles’ heel” of Walker’s defense is the alleged victim who was raped in a parking lot outside a Tyga show at the Belasco nightclub in Los Angeles in January 2014. The woman testified she got too drunk on a party bus to gain admission to the show and was led to a car by someone who promised to help her but ultimately raped her. The woman had no idea who her assailant was until she got a rape exam and the DNA in her vaginal cavity matched to Walker, Wallace said.
While Walker claims his accusers consented to sex because they wanted to capitalize on his fame and industry connections, Wallace said the woman raped outside the Tyga show was too intoxicated for that. And either way, the attack was before Walker appeared in Kings with Halle Berry in 2017 and played gang member Juju in Superfly, a 2018 action movie produced by rapper Future as a remake of the 1972 blaxploitation film Super Fly.
Walker, who’s out on bail, listened to Wallace’s closing argument from a defense table and frequently leaned over to confer with Flier through a plexiglass partition. He testified in his own defense for several hours during the trial, Flier said.
“He put on a little show,” Wallace told jurors Wednesday, arguing Walker “deliberately lied” on the stand, including when he claimed he didn’t know his youngest victims were 16. “He memorized those lines, as an actor does, to lie to you.”
Wallace showed jurors a text message one of the alleged victims sent to Walker saying, “I’m interested in modeling. I’m 16 and I’m 5’5.””
Dude is done , not surprising he was a lunatic in the superfly movie he played that role way too good
