Celebrity chef Mario Batali faces trial over allegations of groping in the era of #MeToo

BOSTON (Reuters) – Celebrity chef Mario Batali is on trial Monday over allegations he forcibly groped and kissed a woman in the only criminal case to result from multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault in the #MeToo era, helping fuel his business. Dropp off.

Batali will appear in Boston Municipal Court Monday on charges of indecent assault and beating of a woman in a bar who came forward to report her experience after other women accused the chef of aggressive sexual behavior.

The woman, Natalie Tenney, said Batali assaulted her after posing with her in 2017 to take “selfies” at Towne Stove and Spirits, a bar near Eataly in Boston, an Italian market and restaurant chain that he partially owned at the time.

Batali’s lawyers described the allegations as fabricated and said Tine went to the police to support a lawsuit against him to win a financial settlement. “Our defense is that she lies and lies all the time,” Batali’s attorney, Anthony Fuller, said at a hearing in April.

Tene’s lawyer declined to comment.

The case is one of the few criminal prosecutions of celebrities in the wake of the explosion of the #MeToo movement in 2017, which exposed widespread patterns of sexual harassment or abuse of women in multiple areas of American life.

If convicted, Batali will face up to two and a half years in prison and will have to register as a sex offender.

Prosecutors said Tine filed her account after food website Eater.com in December 2017 detailed the allegations of four women who said Batali had inappropriately touched them over the course of at least two decades.

This report prompted Batali’s expulsion from ABC’s cooking and talk show “The Chew,” and Batali subsequently cut ties with restaurants such as Babbo in New York and part-owner Del Posto. He denied the sexual assault allegations but apologized for the “extremely inappropriate” behavior.

Batali and his business partner agreed in July to pay $600,000 to at least 20 former employees to solve New York attorney general’s claims that their Manhattan restaurants were riddled with sexual harassment.

In the run-up to the trial, Batali’s attorneys and prosecutors wrangling over what evidence Judge James Stanton, who is overseeing the trial, would allow the jurors to hear.

While prosecutors say Tine came forward to show solidarity with the other women, Stanton ruled that she may not ask her about the allegations made by Eater.

But, Stanton also ruled that Batali’s lawyers might not play a voicemail left to the police by a friend of Tinny who was at the bar saying he didn’t want to see “someone go up into the river for something not quite right or right.”

The judge said Batali’s lawyers could, however, ask Tenney about a questionnaire she filled out in February 2018 during jury selection in an unrelated assault case in which she said nothing about being a victim of crime while claiming to be a fortune teller.

Text messages obtained by Batali’s lawyers show that she then wrote to one of her friends that she searched for the defendant online and that he “did just that,” despite instructions not to do an outside search and to keep an open mind.

When the text messages surfaced, Middlesex County prosecutors agreed to overturn the man’s conviction for jury mutilation and charged Tenney herself with contempt. Court records show she struck a deal Thursday to dismiss the case within a year after a period of administrative control.

(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalfi and Cynthia Osterman)

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