Is that headline confusing enough for you?
Because the story is even more confusing.
I dug back into the archives here on NTB and found that we touched on this story way back in 2022 when it surfaced in relation to a county attorney election (search the page for "Arthur Knight").
However, that story hardly scraped the tip of the iceberg.
Rhode Island man Nicholas Rossi (legal name Nicholas Alahverdian) was accused of sexually assaulting his fiancée in 2008 after an argument. The two lived in Utah at the time. The woman, who had been living with her parents and recovering from a brain injury, responded to a Craigslist ad that Rossi posted. The two were engaged after two weeks of dating, after which he allegedly became violent and demanded money from her for his bills. She testified that he raped her in his apartment one night after she drove him home.
A decade later in 2018, Rossi was identified in a separate 2008 rape after the state cleared its backlog of DNA analysis for rape cases. The fiancée decided to come forward after seeing Rossi listed as a suspect on the news.
To evade arrest, Rossi fled back to Rhode Island, faked his own death of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, left the country for the UK, and pretended to be a disabled Irishman named Arthur Knight.
From the Associated Press:
Rossi was extradited to Utah in January 2024 while insisting he was an Irish orphan named Arthur Knight who was being framed. Investigators say they identified at least a dozen aliases Rossi used over the years to evade capture.
He appeared in court this week in a wheelchair, wearing a suit and tie and using an oxygen tank.
😂
Rossi was arrested after being hospitalized with Covid. Instead of admitting he isn't very good at identity fraud (or acting), he doubled down, giving media interviews with his "wife" to proclaim authorities had the wrong man.
Here are two of the full interviews he gave to media: One to a British outlet, and one to a Fox station in Utah:
This man was committed to the bit!
The act came to an end recently.
A jury in Salt Lake County found Nicholas Rossi guilty of a 2008 rape after a three-day trial in which his accuser and her parents took the stand. The verdict came hours after Rossi, 38, declined to testify on his own behalf. He will be sentenced in the case on Oct. 20 and is set to stand trial in September for another rape charge in Utah County.
Rossi was extradited from Scotland in summer of 2024, then admitted in court that he was, indeed, Nicholas Rossi and not Arthur Knight in October.
Rossi now faces five years to life in prison.
Here is a two-minute video summary with additional court footage if you want it:
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