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Defense: Witness lied about academy doctor’s videos

The prosecution’s chief witness in a case against a Navy doctor accused of secretly videotaping Naval Academy midshipmen having sex at his home lied under oath at a preliminary hearing earlier this year, a defense lawyer said Monday.

William Ferris, lead defense attorney for Cmdr. Kevin Ronan, told a jury of five captains and one commander that former midshipman Abby Strasdas lied during a June Article 32 hearing when he testified that, after discovering tapes of midshipmen having sex in Ronan’s home, took only two of the tapes from the house.

Both tapes were later turned over to police, Ferris said, but Strasdas later admitted that he took two other sex tapes from Ronan’s house, leaving one with a family member and another with a lawyer for safekeeping. Ferris used this to call Strasdas’ credibility into question.

Monday marked the first day of the court-martial against Ronan, who is charged with 11 counts of conduct unbecoming an officer and seven counts of breaking state and federal wiretapping laws.

He could be stripped of his medical license, dismissed from the service and sentenced to 18 years in prison if he is convicted.

Prosecutors told jurors that even if they don’t find Strasdas believable, there is still ample evidence — including handwriting samples, proof that Ronan ordered surveillance equipment, and gay pornography found on his computer that proved his sexual attraction to “young, athletic males” — to convict him.

“The circumstantial evidence against Dr. Ronan will be so overwhelming and so strong that it will leave you with only one reasonable choice,” Lt. Cmdr. Peter Clemow said in his opening statement Monday afternoon.

At a minimum, Clemow said, Ronan was guilty of a “flagrant abuse of trust” by ordering a surveillance camera hidden inside a dehumidifier from a New York company, linking it to a television set in his master bedroom, and secretly monitoring the midshipmen he unofficially sponsored. Ronan edited hours of footage down to eliminate any non-sexual content and put the rest on a computer file named “lectures,” Clemow said.

Strasdas, a former Navy soccer player who was living with Ronan after he was expelled from the Naval Academy one semester before his class was to graduate, testified in June that he found the sex tapes when he went in Ronan’s room to borrow toothpaste and turned on his television set.

He said he then called a male midshipman who was also on the tapes, and that midshipman went to police to file a complaint.

Ronan is assigned to the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery in Washington, D.C., but was previously assigned to the Naval Academy as a brigade medical officer and officer representative for the Naval Academy gymnastics team.

He had served as an unofficial sponsor for as many as 12 midshipmen, providing them with keys, food, access to computers, video games, and electronic equipment, basement bunks and beds in two upstairs bedrooms that midshipmen began calling the blue room and red room.

Ferris said Strasdas’ statements to the Article 32 hearing, and prior admission that he fabricated an acceptance letter from a civilian university and doctored a Naval Academy transcript while applying for a substitute teaching position in local schools, called into question his credibility.

In a blistering opening statement, Ferris went on to accuse Strasdas of having “undressed” pictures of himself and another male midshipman stored on his personal computer and of having asked his girlfriend to make a sex tape with him around the same time the two sex tapes from Ronan’s home were turned over to Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents.

Ferris went on to say that the charges are part of an elaborate extortion attempt by Strasdas to get Ronan to pay his way to a civilian college to finish his degree so he could avoid serving as an enlisted man in the fleet.

Strasdas is expected to testify later this week.