Donald “Whitey” Taylor Jr., owner of the Trump Town store in Boones Mill and a recent unsuccessful mayoral candidate there, was acquitted Monday of multiple assault and battery charges and one indecent exposure charge.
Franklin County General District Judge A.J. Dudley said that he could not find Taylor guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of allegations made by three former employees.
Taylor, who also owns the Franklin County Speedway, took the stand in his defense, saying “none of this happened.” He declined to comment after the hearing, which lasted nearly three hours and featured sharply conflicting testimony about events alleged to have happened in September and October.
Dudley, after calling witnesses back to the courtroom, began to explain his decision by noting that the truth of a matter doesn’t necessarily come out in front of him.
“This room is not a chemistry experiment, where you put in a bunch of ingredients and the result is the truth,” the judge said.
The first witness alleged three incidents. She said that on one occasion, Taylor exposed his genitalia to her in a back room of Trump Town and made a lewd request of her. On another, she said, he grabbed her rear end, and on the third, he violently assaulted her in front of an eyewitness who was “petrified” by what he saw.
That eyewitness, a 16-year-old boy, said that Taylor did not assault her and that she was not in distress afterward, though she had testified to suffering neck and shoulder injuries as a result.
The women filed their charges on Oct. 23, while Taylor was still engaged in the race with Mayor Victor Connor.
The woman’s own daughter took the stand but on Taylor’s behalf, to testify that her mother was not trustworthy, often running scams of some sort.
It was part of a “pattern that happened many times over,” the daughter testified.
Cardinal News does not publicly identify complainants in cases involving assaults of a sexual nature. The judge told media members not to identify the juvenile witness.
The second complaining witness testified that Taylor grabbed her, pulled her toward him and ran his hand down the front of her pants. There were no eyewitnesses to that alleged incident.
Onetime Taylor employee Melinda Davison, testifying for the defense, said the woman drank on the job and paid Davison out of the Trump Town cash drawer for a plant stand she bought from her. The woman, under cross-examination from Taylor’s defense attorney, Chris Kowalczuk, had denied both of those allegations.
The third woman testified that she worked at the store for 3½ weeks before quitting, after Taylor grabbed her breast as they hugged.
All three visited the magistrate’s office together, where they swore out warrants against their former boss.
Embezzlement accusations take center stage
Two of the women faced their own charges about a month after they swore out their warrants. Taylor went to the county magistrate, alleging that the two had embezzled thousands of dollars from his store. Franklin County prosecutors declined to prosecute the charges, said Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Andrew Bassford.
Despite that, both sides spent significant time on that aspect of the case.
Kristin Wilson, who did an audit of the store’s financial records late last year, testified that employees wrote down transactions in a notebook, part of a system that she replaced after she investigated it. Wilson, who has done bookkeeping for Taylor and helped him at Trump Town and the speedway, said she noted numerous discrepancies dating back to July 1, but none of the figures were double-checked at the time they were alleged to have occurred.
Taylor testified that he didn’t spend much time at the store, as he often stayed in Florida or Texas.
Kowalczuk grilled the first two witnesses about thousands of dollars of money that went missing over multiple days last year, with both denying they had stolen anything. Taylor testified that one of the women had stolen $50,000 from him.
Bassford said he wondered about the timing of the embezzlement accusations, noting that Taylor didn’t “catch on” until after the women had filed charges against him. The prosecutor wondered why anyone would give up “riding the gravy train” and “getting away with it” to instead charge Taylor with assault, in hopes of making money.
The case, however, centered on whether Taylor exposed himself and committed the assaults.
Regarding the first two complaining witnesses, Dudley said there was sufficient defense testimony to impeach their accounts. As to the third, the judge said that he “struggled more with that case than the others,” but he decided there was reasonable doubt that the possibility of “taking advantage of a consensual hug” was committed with “criminal or malicious intent.”
