Plaintiff: After showing a 'porno,' city cop began violating me

A Philadelphia police officer dabbed her eyes and withstood the urge to break down yesterday while telling a jury of how her childhood was polluted by a city police officer who forced her to engage in sex acts for more than eight years.

Tyrone Wiggins, 51, began the attacks when she was a 12-year-old sixth-grader at Benjamin Rush Middle School, the now-25-year-old officer testified.

"He showed me a porno [video] in his living room," the woman said under questioning by Assistant District Attorney Mark Cipolletti, on the first day of Wiggins' rape trial.

"He asked me did I like what I saw. I didn't say anything," she said, sobbing.

Wiggins, dressed in a crisp, brown suit, at times whispered to his attorney, Scott Sigman, but otherwise was stoic as the woman accused him of sex crimes and physical violence.

The married father of four will testify in his own defense, Sigman told the Common Pleas jury during his opening statement.

Wiggins has pleaded not guilty to a battery of charges including rape, corruption of a minor, aggravated indecent assault and involuntary deviate sexual intercourse.

He ended his 23-year police career by retiring on Nov. 18, 2009, one day before his arrest. The department's Internal Affairs Bureau had been investigating the woman's allegations for two years.

His alleged victim, also dressed in a brown pantsuit, is assigned to the 14th Police District in Germantown. She said she met Wiggins at age 10 when she and one of her four brothers began taking karate lessons from him at the Olney Recreation Center.

He first touched her inappropriately at age 12, she said, when he drove her from his job at the 39th Police District building in Nicetown to a secluded spot in Fairmount Park.

"He took out his penis. He told me to jerk it," she said. "I didn't know what he meant, so he showed me. . . . He made me jerk it back and forth."

She told the jury that Wiggins ejaculated. A week later, she said, Wiggins again took her to the park and raped her inside his van.

"He cried and told me, 'Don't tell anybody,' " the woman said.

Sigman told the jury that Wiggins was a good husband to his wife of 24 years, a good father to his daughter and three sons, and a hero police officer who took a bullet in the line of duty in 1994.

He said that no DNA evidence or witnesses exist to support the woman's rape claims and that any physical injuries she suffered were the result of her participating in karate with Wiggins, not from his beating her.

Sigman said Wiggins was like a father to the woman and vouched for her when she applied to the Police Academy.

But she turned on him, Sigman said, when he learned that she had lied to the department about not having sold drugs in the past. Sigman said that Wiggins told her to tell the truth about her drug past and that he had given the department an audio tape he'd made in 2003 of his chastising her about drug dealing.

After that, Sigman said, she took out a protection-from-abuse order on Wiggins and shortly thereafter accused him of raping her repeatedly over eight years.