NEED TO KNOW
- Nicholas Rossi, 38, who spent years in Europe to evade prosecution, was convicted Wednesday of a 2008 rape in Orem, Utah, prosecutors said
- Rossi fled to Scotland in 2017 and faked his own death in 2020, according to authorities
- He is awaiting trial on another alleged rape charge in Utah County in September
A Rhode Island man accused of fleeing to Scotland and faking his own death to evade rape charges has been found guilty of sexually assaulting a former girlfriend in Utah in 2008, according to the Salt Lake County District Attorney’s Office.
On Wednesday, Aug. 13, after a three-day trial, a jury found Nicholas Edward Rossi guilty of first-degree felony rape, Salt Lake County District Attorney Sim Gill announced in a statement.
Rossi, 38, a Rhode Island native whose legal name is Nicholas Alahverdian, faces five years to life in the Utah State Correctional Facility when he is sentenced on October 20, Gill said.
“We are grateful to the survivor in this case for her willingness to come forward, years after this attack took place,” Gill said in the statement. “It took courage and bravery to take the stand and confront her attacker to hold him accountable.”
Rossi is also awaiting trial on another alleged rape charge in Utah County in September, according to the Associated Press. He pleaded not guilty.
According to the statement from the Salt Lake County district attorney, Rossi and his former girlfriend in the Orem case, identified only as M.B., met online in 2008 and dated for a month — between November and December of that year.
Shortly after they began dating, Rossi told the woman, who was 21 at the time, that they should get married and buy wedding rings.
That December, during a trip to a jewelry store to buy the rings, the two got into an argument after Rossi was rude to the girlfriend, according to the district attorney’s statement. When they got back to Rossi’s apartment in Orem, they argued about breaking up and not getting married.
“During the argument, the defendant threw M.B. on the bed and raped her,” Gill said in the statement.
In 2017, he fled to Britain or Ireland and ended up in Scotland using one of his many aliases, local authorities said, according to The New York Times.
The sexual assaults first came to the attention of law enforcement in 2018 when Utah authorities reviewing old rape kits identified Rossi as a suspect in another 2008 rape case in Utah County, according to The New York Times.
In that case, Rossi allegedly raped another woman, also a former girlfriend, at his apartment in Orem in Sept. 2008 when she came to get money she claimed he stole from her, authorities said, CBS News reports.
Months after he was charged in that case, and while he was still in Scotland in 2020, Rossi allegedly faked his own death with the help of an online obituary that claimed Nicholas Alahverdian had died on Feb. 29, 2020, of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
He was arrested the following year at a Glasgow hospital, where he was being treated for COVID-19, after someone recognized his distinctive tattoos shared in an Interpol notice, according to the AP.
Insisting he was Arthur Knight of Ireland and that he was being framed, he appeared in court in a wheelchair, wearing an oxygen mask and speaking in a fake British accent, the AP reports.
He was extradited from Scotland in Jan. 2024.