‘That ’70s Show’ star, Danny Masterson, has been sentenced to life imprisonment for the rapes of two women two decades ago.
He will be eligible for parole after serving 30 years. The sentence was handed down on Thursday (7) by Judge Charlaine F Olmedo of the Los Angeles Superior Court after she rejected a defense appeal for a new trial.
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The 47-year-old sitcom actor was found guilty on two counts of rape by a jury of seven women and five men on May 31, after seven days of deliberation.
Masterson was initially charged with drugging and raping three women at his home between 2001 and 2003. He was convicted of raping two of the women in 2003, but the jury could not reach a verdict on the third allegation from November 2001, made by a former girlfriend.
His first trial ended in a hung jury in December, with jurors deadlocked on all three charges.
The Church of Scientology, of which Masterson is a member and all three women are former members, played an even larger role in the second trial than in the first.
The victims blamed the church for discouraging them from reporting the actor to the police. They testified that when they reported him to Scientology authorities, they were told they had not been raped and were put through ethics programs and warned against going to the police to report a member of such high standing.
Masterson is best known for his role alongside Ashton Kutcher, Mila Kunis, and Topher Grace in ‘That ’70s Show’ from 1998 to 2006.
He had reunited with Kutcher in the Netflix comedy The Ranch in 2016, but was written out of the series when a Los Angeles Police Department investigation was revealed the following year.
With information from independent
