Brooklyn Teen Cleared Of Playground Gang Rape Fears He'll Never Live Down Accusations

This week, the Brooklyn District Attorney's office announced that they were dropping allegations that a young woman was raped by multiple teenagers in a Brownsville playground in January, citing "multiple inconsistent accounts" and the woman's desire not go further with the criminal case. But one of the teens who was initially charged has spoken out about the ongoing harassment and stigma he faces: "Yesterday I went to the rec center and a girl said, 'There goes the rapist,'" Ethan Phillip, 15, told the Daily News in an exclusive interview.

Phillip was one of five teens who had been arrested and charged for raping a woman at gunpoint inside Osbourne Park around 9 p.m. on January 7th. The 18-year-old woman and her 39-year-old father initially told police that the group of teens approached them with a gun and ordered the father to leave; then the teens allegedly took turns raping the woman and fled before the father returned with the police.

In the days after the incident was publicized, it was revealed that the father, who appeared drunk at the time, took 20 minutes to get help and didn't tell bodega clerks that his daughter was being assaulted. Then after the teens were arrested, two claimed that the father and daughter had been having sex in the playground when they got there. One of the suspects, which turned out to be Phillip, had a cellphone video that showed the teens talking to the victim, indicating that she may have consented to the encounter as well.

Phillip told the News that when the teens first saw them that day, "We thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend the way they were hanging on each other outside the store." Later, they heard the woman moaning: "They were on the ground having sex," he told the News. "The girl had her pants off. The guy still had his pants on but they were pulled down by his knees. He was on top of her. When the man, who turned out to be the woman's father, realized they were being watched by the boys, he got up and said to her, 'Let's go.' She didn't leave with him. She was laughing."

Phillips had been charged as an adult with rape, sex abuse and two counts of criminal sexual act. Since his arrest and his name was released in the media, he was expelled from Brownsville Collegiate Charter School and has been hounded in real life: "People are looking at me like I did something wrong," he said. "They (the police) only put my name out there (not the woman and her father), that's not fair. I don't see how I can overcome this."

He said people have been particularly vicious online: "I was scared because they were going crazy on us in social media saying crazy things about us, about killing us, calling us animals. And it was all false," he said.

His lawyer Amy Rameau, compared the case to the Central Park Five, "because these kids were convicted in the court of public opinion without a trial," and blamed the police for jumping the gun on the charges: "The girl and her father should be prosecuted for having incestuous sexual relations in public, for making false statements, and wasting city resources."

While Phillip thinks the father and daughter blamed the incident on the teens "because they were embarrassed," a police source told the News that the changing stories means, "it’s impossible to know what really happened."