A 33-year-old man was acquitted Thursday of sexually assaulting a woman in a Garden Grove hotel about 5 1/2 years ago.
Jurors deliberated for about a day before acquitting Fouad Alyasini of two counts of forcible oral copulation, kidnapping to commit oral copulation, dissuading a witness from reporting a crime and assault with force likely to produce great bodily injury, all felonies.
Alyasini was accused of attacking the woman at the Hyatt Regency Orange County on Aug. 8, 2020.
Alyasini, who said he spent about a month in jail in the case, told City News Service it “was nerve racking waiting to hear (the verdict) and watching the bailiffs standing around me” in case he was convicted.
Alyasini said he was married “less than a year ago” and was frightened he would face prison time.
Alyasini testified on his own behalf and denied assaulting the woman. He said it was a case of “cheating gone wrong.”
Alyasini’s attorney, Cameron Talley, said his client was “flawless, polite, charming” on the stand and was “always courteous with the prosecutor, a real class act.”
Alyasini faced 25 years to life in prison if he had been convicted, Talley said.
The victim “expected a fun girls’ night out” when she got together with her friend, Deputy District Attorney Sarah Rahman said in her opening statement of the trial.
“What she didn’t expect was to be manhandled like a rag doll,” Rahman said.
The victim’s friend was acquainted with Alyasini and planned to get together with him that evening, Rahman said. But when the accuser’s friend did not respond to her boyfriend’s messages, he began to grow angry, demanding to know where she was, the prosecutor said.
About 2 a.m., the friend told Alyasini to pick them up at a hookah lounge in Upland, Rahman said.
The accuser texted her boyfriend asking for money to take a rideshare home, but when he refused, she went with her friend and Alyasini to the hotel in Garden Grove, Rahman said.
The accuser testified that she and her friend lived in Los Angeles at the time and had rented the hotel room so they could visit hookah lounges.
The accuser said she was unaware of her friend’s plan to meet up with Alyasini. She testified she ended up taking an Uber to a hookah lounge in Upland.
During the drive from Upland to the hotel, Alyasini “was being kind of aggressive” with her friend, the accuser testified.
She said she felt “unsafe” and characterized the defendant’s skills behind the wheel as “like someone drunk driving.”
When they arrived at the hotel, Alyasini and the accuser’s friend began having consensual sex, prompting the accuser to retreat to the bathroom, she testified.
While in the bathroom, the accuser said she texted her on-again, off-again boyfriend to come get her.
“I said, oh my God, hurry. I do not feel safe and they’re having sex,” she testified.
When she left the bathroom to grab her purse and leave, Alyasini asked where she was going, she testified. The accuser’s friend “got up, putting her clothes on… She was telling him, `Oh, you want her?’ She put on her clothes and left because she was mad,” according to the testimony.
After the friend left, Alyasini “became aggressive,” the accuser testified.