SALT LAKE CITY — The man convicted of raping a woman in Salt Lake County in 2008 — and then faking his death and fleeing to another country where he tried to assume a new identity — was sentenced on Monday to prison.
Nicholas Edward Rossi was sentenced to no less than five years and up to life in the Utah State Prison. Third District Judge Barry Lawrence said it will be up to the Board of Pardons and Parole to determine how long Rossi serves in prison, and he made no recommendation on giving him credit for the time he has been in custody since his arrest.
Despite his conviction and sentence, Rossi continued to deny that he did anything wrong.
“May it please the court, I will be incredible terse. I am not guilty of this,” he told the court before being sentenced. “These women are lying, and in due course, we will lodge an appeal.”
Rossi, 38, was convicted in August in 3rd District Court of rape, a first-degree felony. He was also found guilty in September of a second rape charge in Utah County and is scheduled to be sentenced in that case on Nov. 4.
Before being sentenced, both of the women he was convicted of assaulting in 2008 in Salt Lake County and Utah County addressed the court. Both women expressed to the judge how fearful they still are of Rossi and believe he will seek retaliation if released as well as repeat his crimes on others.
“This crime stole far more than my peace of mind; it stole who I was,” the woman from his Salt Lake case told the court. “My life has been defined by pain and survival ever since.”
She says her nights are filled with either nightmares or insomnia, and she now lives in a state of hypervigilance. The woman called Rossi “extremely dangerous” because of his pattern of manipulation and violence. “He lies without hesitation.”
The woman from the Utah County case talked about Rossi’s narcissistic personality.
“He is a man who thrives on control, attention and power over others,” she said. “He has shown no genuine remorse or empathy for the victims.”
The woman says she now has trust issues, severe anxiety and often feels isolated.
“I feel unheard, judged and alone,” she told the court. “There must be consequences to reflect the seriousness of the crime.”
Rossi committed both of his Utah crimes in 2008. But it wasn’t until 2017 when a rape kit from the Utah County case was submitted to the Utah State Crime Lab for testing as part of the Utah Sex Assault Kit Initiative, an effort by the state to test hundreds of backlogged rape kits that had been submitted by police departments but sat in storage for years. In 2018, the test results came back and matched the DNA profile of Rossi, who was investigated in a sexual assault case in Ohio, according to the attorney’s office.
“In researching Nicholas Rossi, (the investigator) located police reports involving criminal cases of sex assault, harassment, and possible kidnapping from 2007 through 2019. The police reports were obtained from Rhode Island, Ohio, Utah and Massachusetts,” charging documents state.
Investigators also learned that Rossi had fled the country to avoid prosecution in Ohio and “attempted to lead investigators and state legislators in other states to believe that he was deceased,” prosecutors stated at the time. “Rossi was discovered to be living under an assumed name in Scotland.”
But Rossi’s case took a bizarre turn when, even after being arrested, he refused to acknowledge his identity. He claimed his name was Arthur Knight, and that he was an Irish orphan who had never been to the United States, when he was arrested at a Glasgow hospital after being treated for COVID-19.
While awaiting extradition to Utah from Scotland, he was charged in 2022 with rape in Salt Lake County. Even after arriving in the United States, Rossi continued to claim in court that he was Arthur Knight and that the allegations against him were “complete hearsay.”
Rossi’s identity was confirmed, however, by DNA and his tattoos.
Before being sentenced on Monday, defense attorney Samantha Dugan asked the judge to consider the more than three years her client has already been in custody and that if the judge wouldn’t sentence Rossi to probation, to at least recommend he get credit for that time already served. And while she couldn’t comment on his culpability because Rossi — whom she addressed by his birth name, Nicholas Alahverdian, in court — maintains his innocence, Dugan also asked the court to consider his traumatic childhood as a mitigating sentencing factor.
“This idea that he is beyond help is not true,” she said.
However, Lawrence noted there were more “significant” aggravating factors in Rossi’s case than mitigating, beginning with the fact that there are allegations “literally from all over the country” from other women who say Rossi “is a serial abuser.” Lawrence also noted that Rossi “is the very definition of a flight risk” since he already fled the country once to avoid prosecution, and then continued to claim he was someone else after being arrested.
“He did everything he could to thwart the prosecution of him in this case,” the judge said. Lawrence said the only reason Rossi finally admitted his real identity was because he became aware the consequences could be worse if he maintained his charade — “But not out of the goodness of his heart.”
Lawrence said the “only appropriate sentence” in this case is prison.
“While justice may have been slow, the defendant was convicted and now sentenced to prison, consistent with the harm he caused to our survivor. She can rest assured he did not escape punishment,” Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill said Monday in a prepared statement.
Rossi now has 30 days to appeal his conviction.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
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