They should lock her up and throw away the key.
The bitter wife of an NYPD cop who beat a rape rap sneered yesterday that her husband's accuser is a money-grubbing liar who should be jailed herself.
"She can go to hell," ranted Julia Moreno, wife of veteran cop Kenneth Moreno, 43, who was acquitted last week along with partner Franklin Mata, 29, after a sensational two-month trial.
"She should go to jail for this," the wife barked in a bitter attack sure to outrage the accuser's legions of supporters. "She had two days to make up this story with her lawyer friends before she went to the hospital."
Asked whether she thought the woman, a California fashion exec, lied, Julia Moreno spat, "Yes."
With the accuser's $57 million civil suit pending against the officers, Moreno's wife thinks she knows what motivated the 29-year-old woman.
"Money," Julia Moreno sneered, speaking outside the couple's 20th Street basement apartment in Greenwood Heights, Brooklyn.
In a shocking verdict that followed graphic, gripping testimony from the accuser, Moreno and Mata beat rape and burglary raps Thursday but were convicted of official misconduct. They were immediately fired and stripped of their pensions by the NYPD.
The accuser and the cops crossed paths on Dec. 7, 2008, after she spent a night partying with friends in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and her friends called a cab to take her back to her Manhattan apartment on East 13th Street. Concerned that the drunken woman, who had vomited in the car, couldn't get into her five-story walk-up safely on her own, the cabby called 911, and Moreno and Mata responded.
Video evidence showed Moreno, a 17-year veteran, and Mata, who had three years on the force, helped the woman upstairs, spent seven minutes inside, and then returned three more times during the night to check on her. The pair, who used the woman's own key to get back inside, admitted in court to faking a 911 call in the accuser's neighborhood to cover up one of the return trips.
Moreno, a father of two, had claimed he was a recovering alcoholic himself, and sympathetic to the woman's plight. He admitted only to cuddling with the woman in her bed while she was clad in just a pink bra.
His wife said she is standing by him.
"I know him. He's the guy on the force that they call to take home partners' girlfriends when they're too drunk. He's trusted by everyone. He's been on the force 18 years without ever having any incident with women," she said.
Moreno and Mata face a June 28 sentencing, in which each could still face up to two years behind bars on the official-misconduct convictions.
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