Former NFL star Darren Sharper must serve a prison sentence of more than 18 years following his guilty pleas in a plot to drug women so as to make them easy to rape, a federal judge in New Orleans ruled Thursday.
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After ordering him to serve 220 months in federal prison, Milazzo told Sharper he was provided with a good education and excelled at football, which she said propelled him to stardom. The crimes, which Sharper pleaded guilty or no-contest to a year ago, occurred in Louisiana, Arizona, California and Nevada.
Prosecutors had offered a 9-year prison term for Sharper, which would have accounted for all jurisdictions, but Triche Milazzo rejected the deal, saying in June that it was too lenient. He was also fined $20,000. It included Sharper pleading guilty to raping three women in two New Orleans incidents between August and September of 2013.
Sharper or his friend Brandon Licciardi, a former sheriff’s deputy in neighbouring St. Bernard Parish, put anti-anxiety drugs or sedatives into women’s drinks so they could rape them, according to a 15-page statement signed as part of Sharper’s plea agreement. Judge Milazzo, however, has indicated that seven more women may have also been victims.
In New Orleans, he has admitted to drugging and raping two women at a condominium where he lived in the Warehouse District, after partying the night of September 23, 2013.
“I would like to apologize a thousand times to plaintiffs in this case for making them victims”, Sharper said in the federal court in New Orleans, tearful in shackles and orange prisoner garb. Their federal plea agreements say Licciardi has accepted a 17-year sentence, with 10 years for Nunez.
The details of what happened in many of these cases is downright sickening, including drugging women and having drugged women sent to him for him to then rape or attempt to rape. One of his biggest accomplishments came in 2010, when he won the Super Bowl as a member of the New Orleans Saints.
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She said Sharper was so arrogant and “twisted” that he kept drugging and raping women even after he knew the attack on her was being investigated.
