By SARAH ALLAM
A Brooklyn jury found a child sex offender guilty of 37 counts of rape, criminal sexual conduct, and endangering the welfare of a child on Tuesday.
Mario Valdiviezo, who planned and participated in a filmed gang rape of a teenage girl, probably will spend the rest of his life in prison.
“He got out of her exactly what he wanted,” Assistant DA Olatokunbo Olaniyan said in her closing statements to the jury. “He didn’t care about her. He didn’t love her. He didn’t want to marry her. She was just a thing to him.”
Valdiviezo met the victim in 2008, when she was just 13. He was having an affair with her mother, which in turn led him to become acquainted with the child. He had given her his email address during a family party, and exchanged as many as five emails a day with her. The victim’s parents were both criminals, and her father had been on the run for 20 years for a murder he had committed. The victim also suffered from learning disabilities and struggled at school.
“The adults in [her] life failed her,” Olaniyan said. “She wanted to belong to someone. She wanted to be loved by someone. What 13 year-old girl doesn’t want that? But life hadn’t prepared her.”
In 2011, when the victim was 16, Valdiviezo lured her to his apartment on New Utrecht Ave., where he threatened her with a gun, raped her, and forced her to perform sexual acts on him and his friends. Valdiviezo recorded the entire incident on video, with the intention of selling it on child pornography websites. The child of Valdiviezo’s cousin later found the tapes and called the police.
In July 2014, Valdiviezo attempted to sue two the two detectives that arrested him. However, the charges were later dismissed.
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