VIRGINIA BEACH — A 23-year-old woman who claims she was sexually assaulted by a Virginia Beach DJ testified against him in court Thursday.
During a preliminary hearing, the woman testified that she did not know Jesse Michael “DJ Chino” Lui, 33, when she caught his eye at Spades Lounge on Jan. 13.
She was at the Holland Road club as the guest of another musician, and Lui was the club’s DJ.
The pair didn’t meet that night, but Lui messaged her via Instagram and asked her to text him.
Now, more than four months after they first began to talk, Lui is charged with sexually assaulting her while she was under the influence of drugs and alcohol.
“I wasn’t okay. I wasn’t fine. I wasn’t myself,” the victim told Virginia Beach District Court Judge Teresa N. Hammons. “I wasn’t in my conscious state of mind.”
The drinks
The woman said after a few days of texting and chatting about “regular stuff” she and Lui decided to go out to dinner on Jan. 17.
Lui invited her to his South Military Highway apartment. When she arrived around 7 p.m., he mixed her a drink.
First, he poured her an “original” mixed with juice. The woman testified that it tasted like some variety of vodka, but she didn’t recognize the label on the bottle.
Lui told her it was his own brand of alcohol.
The woman said she took the red Solo cup from Lui and sipped on it for about an hour until she finished it. She described it as moderately strong, and she said she watched him pour it.
The woman said she didn’t intend to drink much that night because she had to work the next day; however, Lui offered her a second drink – this time a peach flavored liquor with juice – and she took it from him.
“I was just sipping on it, kind of drinking it slowly, when he mentioned I was babysitting it,” she testified.
The term “babysitting” is slang to mean that a person is taking too long to consume a substance.
The woman said she watched Lui pour the second drink, but that he took it away from her to refresh it with ice several times.
Lui also had a drink, although the victim said she didn’t know what type of alcohol he used for himself.
Around 9 p.m. the pair decided to leave the apartment and go to Spades Lounge where Lui planned to buy marijuana. The woman testified that she wasn’t finished with her second drink yet, and set it down intending to leave it at the apartment. She changed her mind when Lui encouraged her to bring it in the car while they drove.
The marijuana
The woman said she stayed in the car while Lui went into the club to buy the drugs. She felt fine, and was texting her best friend.
Lui showed her the marijuana after he bought it, and the pair drove to a restaurant to get a to-go order of chicken wings. They also stopped by 7-Eleven to buy rolling papers for the marijuana.
Sometime between the restaurant and the gas station, the woman said she began to feel intoxicated.
As the pair drove back to Lui’s apartment, he got pulled over by a police officer for speeding. While they spoke to the officer, the woman said she’d been drinking. After their interaction with the officer, the pair went back to the apartment, and the woman said she went to use the bathroom while Lui rolled the marijuana.
When she got out of the bathroom, Lui lit the marijuana and took a puff. The woman testified that she took two puffs, and felt the effects of it “instantly.”
After she’d smoked the marijuana, the pair started kissing in the kitchen. They’d already shared their first kisses in the car.
That’s when her memories started getting fuzzy, she said.
“It was kind of like I was dreaming,” she testified.
The alleged assault
The woman tearfully testified she remembers blinking, and opening her eyes to her pants being down and Lui pulling her body suit to the side and making contact with her genitals. She said she didn’t know how her pants had been removed.
“It was as if time had passed. I lost a period of time,” she testified. “I just blinked and it was happening.”
The woman told the judge that she said no to his actions three times and tried to lift him up and away from her, but he was too heavy.
“I wasn’t okay,” she said again. “He just kept doing it.”
The woman said she blacked out. The next memory she has is of being in Lui’s bathroom without pants on, throwing up into the toilet. She testified that Lui, completely naked, was behind her, continuing to violate her while she was sick.
She said that she was crying and asked him to stop.
“I had to raise my voice. I said ‘Please stop,'” she testified. “I threw up a lot.”
The woman said that she blacked out again, and woke up completely naked in Lui’s bed. He pulled a trashcan beside her and held it for her.
“I kept saying I wanted to go home. I just wanted to go home,” she testified.
Lui started to put her clothes back on her before dressing himself, and walked her to her car, according to documents filed in Virginia Beach Circuit Court.
The woman said that she got into her car and turned it on before passing out again. She awoke some time later to a woman she didn’t know knocking on her window and asking if she was okay.
“I told her I wasn’t okay, and I needed help,” the woman testified.
The woman called her best friend, who came to pick her up. When they got back to her house, some of the woman’s male friends helped her out of the car and into bed. That’s when she began to cry and told her friends that she thought she’d been assaulted.
The woman told police that she didn’t know if she and Lui had sex, but believes it may have happened while she was unconscious. She went to Riverside Hospital the next day where a rape kit was administered, according to court documents.
The woman said that she is a social drinker, and that she’d smoked marijuana many times before that night. She said the effect she felt from the alcohol and drugs was not normal.
She also said she’d had a big lunch before she’d gotten to his apartment, and that he’d prepared a drink for himself before she arrived, according to court documents.
An officer who filed a search warrant for Lui’s apartment in February wrote that Lui may have given the woman a high level of alcohol or laced the drinks with drugs. During the search, police found a green tube, three bottles of vodka and a plastic bag with white residue, court documents state.
Hammons told Lui that she found enough evidence against him to certify his charges of object sexual penetration and attempted sodomy with an incapacitated victim to Virginia Beach Circuit Court.
Lui, who declined to comment on the case when asked by a Southside Daily reporter, is scheduled to appear in court on June 8.
“She was so intoxicated that she was unable to stop him,” said Virginia Beach Prosecutor Brandon Emery. “She was both helpless and incapacitated.”
Mayfield can be reached at [email protected].
