It was a bizarre scene that unfolded last week in Waterbury Superior Court as New Haven attorney Rob Serafinowicz opened his civil case against former Middlebury First Selectman Edward B. St. John by asking Judge Jane S. Scholl to force St. John to submit to a photograph of his penis, fully aroused.

The jaw-dropping request, made forcefully but without dramatic flourish by the 29-year-old Serafinowicz, came nearly three years after his client, Westport firefighter Neil Perrotti, filed a lawsuit against St. John for allegedly sexually assaulting him in a cottage in Charlestown, R.I. when Perrotti was 17 years old in 1987. The case is finally coming to a bench trial expected to last at least a week.

Serafinowicz explained that the photograph was crucial to his case because Perrotti, in a statement he gave to State Police about the alleged incident, claimed that St. John’s penis bent to the left when aroused.

“Mr. St. John was naked and was masturbating himself and Mr. Perrotti,” said Serafinowicz of John R. Williams and Associates. “It’s relevant.”

Admitting that it was a “little awkward” to talk about, Serafinowicz went on to suggest that if St. John preferred not to submit to the forced arousal of his penis — either by pill or injection — he could take matters into his own hands with “visual material.”

“It would seem Mr. St. John would want to do this to set the record straight,” said Serafinowicz without a hint of sarcasm.

Serafinowicz also offered to drop the whole matter if St. John would just admit that his penis is bent when in a state of arousal. “Then this is moot,” he said.

Veteran defense attorney Hugh Keefe of Lynch, Traub, Keefe & Errante, also in New Haven, began his response by noting that when he attended law school he never dreamed he would find himself in this position. Questioning whether Judge Scholl even had the authority to enforce such an “unbelievably preposterous motion,” Keefe said things had only gotten worse in the last 10 minutes, thanks to Serafinowicz’s remarks that his client could “use porn” to get aroused.

“There is not a single case not only in the state of Connecticut but in the world that a court has ordered a defendant to get in a state of arousal,” said Keefe. The precedents Serafinowicz offered were in criminal cases, and therefore not applicable in this case, according to Keefe.

Keefe went on to mock Serafinowicz’s assertion that St. John should welcome the chance to vindicate himself with an erection.

“Well of course in a bogus case, a false case, everyone should want to do this,” Keefe said.
Serafinowicz objected to Keefe’s characterization of his case as bogus, noting that the Connecticut legislature has given plaintiffs 40 years after they reach the age of majority to bring sexual assault cases.

“It doesn’t matter if anyone likes it or not,” said Serafinowicz of his client’s right to sue nearly 20 years after he says he was assaulted.

Judge Scholl, a middle-aged woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, listened impassively to both attorneys, occasionally asking questions about details of their cases. She ruled quickly and definitively.
“It seems to me there’s not sufficient good cause here to require an exam that is overly intrusive,” said Scholl. “The court denies the motion.”

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St. John, who was First Selectman of Middlebury for 24 years from 1983 to 2007, and Perrotti, who grew up in Middlebury, are at the heart of deep divisions in the town that began as political feuds but quickly became personal vendettas. With its white-steepled churches, old-fashioned town green and leaf-strewn neighborhoods of Colonial homes, well-heeled Middlebury looks like Mayberry on the surface, but feels more like Baghdad without the bombs.

During his last re-election campaign in 2005, St. John’s foes gathered regularly in a pizza restaurant owned by Bill Perrotti, one of Neil’s brothers, who has his own lawsuit pending against St. John for allegedly holding up building permits he needed to expand his business.

Another Perrotti brother, Paul, who is the town’s volunteer fire chief, has been battling former fire chief St. John for years, essentially over control of the fire department, after being St. John’s protégé during his formative years as a firefighter. St. John’s other detractors include former Police Chief Ricky Bona — another former protégé — and Ralph Carpinella, the town’s presumptive richest man, who ran on a ticket against St. John in 2005. When Neil Perrotti’s lawsuit became public knowledge just prior to the 2005 election, St. John accused Bona and Carpinella of orchestrating and paying for it, enlisting Perrotti to bring the charges, according to Serafinowicz.

On the stand, St. John was prone to mumbling answers so quietly his own attorney harangued him to speak up. Interestingly, St. John has an infamous temper that makes him quite loud when it kicks in, but that happened only once, when Serafinowicz pressed him about an alleged misappropriation of town funds recently in the news.

Serafinowicz’s finest moment came when he led St. John through the litany of lies the First Selectman had told during his long public career. No, he did not have a Ph.D. No, he had not served in the military in Europe and the Middle East. No, he did not attend Brown University. No, he was not a civil engineer. No, he didn’t do post-graduate studies at the University of Maryland.

St. John brightened considerably when Keefe took over the questioning, striding confidently toward Perrotti at the plaintiff’s table and pointing at him as he asked St. John on the witness stand whether or not Perrotti had returned to Rhode Island the year after the alleged assault. He had.