NY - Former sportscaster Marvell Scott pleads guilty in child prostitute case




Marvell Scott
Original Article

08/16/2011

By LAURA ITALIANO

Disgraced WABC sportscaster Marvell Scott will serve only 20 days of community service after pleading guilty today in a sickening child prostitution rap.
- That is all?????

In the wrist-slap deal, Scott, 36, admitted only to misdemeanor endangering the welfare of a child. The girl had been offered to him as a prostitute in Times Square back in 2008, and was only 14 years old, prosecutors had charged in court papers.

"On or abut June 5 2008 inside my then-appartment... I acted in a manner likely to be injurious to the welfare of a child by inappropriately touching her...[afterward] I learned she was 14 years old."

Scott had left television last year to be a doctor full-time. He had originally insisted to cops that he didn't even know the girl; confronted with hallway surveillance video showing him accompanying her upstairs, he then insisted that he only let the girl up into his apartment because she was "crying profusely" in the street.

But court papers painted a vividly sick scenario in which the girl and her 16-year-old friend -- both runaways from Albany -- were being pimped by a second man, a stranger who took advantage of them because they'd run out of money in Times Square and were desperate.
- So was this pimp arrested and thrown in prison?

The hallway surveillance video shows Scott taking the younger girl up to his W. 47th Street apartment. When the terrified child refused to have sex with him, he returned her downstairs to the pimp and demanded his money back, prosecutors charged.

But the older teen talked the kid into it. Surveillance video next showed both girls going upstairs with Scott, prosecutors said.

"Defendant had sexual intercourse with the 14-year-old complainant on the bed in his bedroom while the older teen stood looking out the window in the same room," Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ronald Zweibel wrote in a June 20 decision that referred to the prosecution allegations.

"Just a little more; just a little more," the girl said Scott kept repeating as the kid cried, court papers say.

Today's plea was only to endangering; he did not plead guilty to the original top charges of statutory rape and patronizing a prostitute.

"Mr. Scott has maintained from the very start of this case that he did not commit the serious crime he was originally charged with," defense lawyer Benjamin Brafman said afterward.

"Today's misdemeanor plea and his agreement to perform community service resolves this matter completely and will now permit him to continue his careers in sports medicine and broadcast journalism," Brafman said.

Scott practices sports medicine at Performance Health on East 60th Street.