I had not lived in New York City since March 2004. That spring, the Star & Buc Wild morning show, where I served as news director and on-air personality, had moved its broadcast base to Clear Channel’s WPHH Power 104.1 in the Hartford area. Every week from Monday to Friday 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., I was in the Connecticut studio, delivering the news and commentary that defined my voice.

My family—my then girlfriend and our son—had relocated with me to Manchester. On August 25, 2004, my son started at Verplank Public School there. We had leases, utility bills, bank records, school enrollment papers. The life we were living was documented, ordinary, and a hundred miles from Manhattan.

The apartment on the Upper East Side that prosecutors would later claim was the scene of a violent rape? It sat empty. Property management records later confirmed it was undergoing renovation. I had moved on. The show had moved on. Life had moved on.

Until April 2008, when a young woman—a former friend of my girlfriend’s daughter—told her mother a story during an argument over failing grades. That story traveled to the Manhattan Special Victims Squad.

By the time it reached a grand jury, it had become a nightmare: I had allegedly raped her in my bedroom while my stepchildren were nearby, ripped off her clothes, penetrated her, told her to “keep screaming, it’s hot,” kept her clothes so she had to wear my stepdaughter’s, and then assaulted my own stepdaughter. She was twelve at the time of the supposed attack. She was fifteen and a half when she reported it.

I learned of the charges the same way the rest of the world did—through the media and then through the cold steel of handcuffs on my own driveway.

The firing came first. On October 16, 2008, WRKO in Boston let me go amid company-wide cuts. Six days later, the arrest. I was held without reasonable bail—$100,000 cash or $300,000 bond—and shipped to Rikers Island. For two and a half years I lived in a cage while the lie breathed and grew.

I could have ended it early. In November 2009, after thirteen months inside, prosecutors offered me time served if I would plead guilty to a lesser sexual offense and register as a sex offender for life. I looked them in the eye and said no. I would not confess to something I did not do. I would not trade my name for my freedom.

That decision came after I had already begun fighting back in public. I reached out to CNN’s Brooke Baldwin for an interview. Sitting across from her, I laid out the facts: the move to Connecticut in April 2004, the radio schedule that kept me in Hartford studios every weekday morning, the family life in Manchester, the empty apartment in New York. The segment aired. And something shifted.

The evidence I presented on national television—the documentation that my former apartment was vacant and under renovation—became part of the defense file. It was the crack in the prosecution’s case.

Shortly afterward, the plea offer arrived. They knew what I knew: the timeline did not hold. But I had already chosen the harder path. I would go to trial.

The trial began in March 2011 in Manhattan. Jury selection was the least contentious part. What followed exposed the lie in real time.

The accuser took the stand and told a different story than the one she had given Detective Robert Arbuiso in April 2008. Gone were the ripped clothes, the screaming, the blood on the bed, the command to “keep screaming, it’s hot,” the stolen garments. In their place were softer, vaguer details.

She had not screamed. She had not bled. She had not said those things. The violent narrative that had justified my years in jail simply evaporated under oath.

Prosecutors quietly removed Detective Arbuiso from their witness list. He became mine. The man who had taken her original statement testified for the defense, his presence a quiet indictment of the case built on that statement.

After two weeks of testimony and two days of deliberation, the jury could not reach a verdict. The vote was 11-to-1 for acquittal on the most serious charge of forcible rape. On the remaining counts, the split was 10-to-2 or 8-to-4 in my favor. A mistrial was declared on March 24, 2011.

One juror later wrote to me. “I think the State has/had a lousy case,” the email said, “and I can’t believe that they are thinking of bringing this case to trial again.”

I was released on April 6, 2011, after bail was reduced to $20,000. Prosecutors spoke of a retrial. It never happened. The accuser was later arrested on an unrelated gun charge, and the case quietly died. No conviction. No retrial. Just silence where once there had been thunder.

I understand evil now in ways I never wanted to. It does not always wear a mask and carry a weapon. Sometimes it arrives as a story told in anger or confusion, repeated until it hardens into fact.

Sometimes it is enabled by institutions that move too quickly and ask too few questions. Sometimes it is the quiet erosion of a man’s name while he sits in a cell, unable to defend himself on the airwaves that once gave him purpose.

Lies destroy lives the way termites destroy houses—slowly, from the inside, until the structure collapses. They took my freedom, my income, my daily connection to listeners who trusted my voice. They forced my family to endure visits through plexiglass and nights wondering if I would ever come home.

But truth is patient. It gathers documents—leases, school records, utility bills, property management statements—and it waits. It gathers witnesses—detectives who tell what they heard, jurors who see through the fog. It gathers courage in the form of a man who says “no” to a plea deal and “yes” to a trial.

I am back on the radio now, hosting Reese On The Radio afternoons on WTIC in Hartford, the same market where I was working when this began.

I speak every day to an audience that knows my voice and, more importantly, knows the truth. The people who trespassed against me with their falsehoods took years from me. They will not take my platform.

Evil must be matched by truth. That is not a slogan. It is the lesson I earned in the hardest way possible. Those who bear false witness will answer for it—in courtrooms, in public opinion, or in the quiet judgment of their own conscience. Until then, the rest of us keep speaking.

We keep the record straight. We stay on the air. And we refuse to let the lie have the last word.

By then, the paper trail of my actual life said something else entirely. Keys returned. Rooms vacant and bare. A Connecticut lease. Morning radio in Hartford. A child enrolled in school in Manchester. I had not lived in that New York apartment since March 2004. The notebook did not pause to reconcile any of that. Notebooks rarely do. They take a story down. The system treats the story as a starting gun.

I was not in that room. I did not hear the first telling. I did not get to ask a question while the words were still soft enough to correct — while a date could still be questioned, while a detail could still be walked back, while someone might still say, wait, that doesn’t fit. Once ink dries in a Special Victims file, it acquires a kind of gravity. Prosecutors will build on it. Judges will hear it described as if it were a photograph. Listeners to the news will receive a version of you that was written before you knew you were being rewritten.

That is the part that is hard to explain to anyone who has never been processed by paper. Your life does not end only when the cuffs click. It ends a little earlier, in a handwriting you never saw, on a page you were not invited to read. Someone else narrates you. Someone else places you in a room you had already left. Someone else assigns you a crime that never happened.

From those pages came the complaint. From the complaint, the warrant. From the warrant, the first indictment. From the indictment, the years — Rikers, the cage, the name taken off the air and handed to a charge that never took place.

A detective’s notes can sound like truth if nobody checks them against daylight. An SVS notebook is not a novel. It is an intake — dates, actors, a theory of what occurred. That theory, once filed, does not need your consent to become the official story of your life. Checking the apartment. Checking the pay stubs. Checking whether “fall of 2004” can survive a man who was already living somewhere else — that work comes later, if it comes at all, and often only because the defense forces it into the light.

That spring, a story that started as words in a room became ink. Ink became process. Process became my life.

The accusation was a lie. The notebook was how the lie learned to walk.

March 9, 2011. Manhattan. Cross-examination is not a TV speech. It is a method. A lawyer takes a prior statement — here, the spring-2008 notes Detective Robert Arbuiso took from the young woman who accused me — and puts those notes between the witness and the story the case has been telling for years. The point is simple and brutal: did you say this? Under oath. With a jury listening. With the notebook’s words no longer floating as rumor, but pinned to a question that requires an answer.

For almost three years the public story — and the charging story — had worn a certain costume: force, noise, blood, stolen clothes, a sequel involving my step-daughter. Those details are how a lie borrows urgency. They are how a notebook becomes a warrant becomes a cage. He did not need to recite the whole catalog three times. After the scream came the blood — “all over the bed,” “so bad” — denied. After the blood came the clothes — stolen, kept, borrowed from the step-daughter so she could get home — denied. After the clothes came the sequel the notes had carried: after he raped you, he raped the step-daughter.

A. That was purely an opinion-based statement… not… factual.

One by one, the nightmare that had justified the years came off the truck.

Here is the institutional tell, and it matters as much as any single answer. The People had not called the lead detective — the man who took the April 2008 statement, whose notebook had been the spine of the case. We did. When a prosecution builds a cathedral on intake notes and then declines to put the note-taker on for the People, the defense is left to do what daylight requires: drag the handwriting into the room and ask whether it still stands.

I sat there and watched a story that had cost me two and a half years fail its own handwriting.

“I didn’t say that” is not a magic spell. It is a collision — between ink from 2008 and sworn memory in 2011 — and the jury gets to watch the collision in real time.

Nearly two years later, before a second grand jury, the window moved.

Spring.

Not because the sun changed. Because the paperwork had started to matter. Alibi notices went in. Leases and empty-room proof and pay records stopped being background noise. And the charging theory moved with the calendar — dates, counts, the shape of what the People said I had done. In plain English: when the first map of the case ran into documents it could not ignore, the map was redrawn. That is what I mean by a moving charging theory. It is not a law-school slogan. It is the experience of watching the official story shift under your feet after you prove you were already somewhere else.

On cross in 2011, the question was not only what she told the detective in 2008. It was who built the calendar that made the story fit.

Q. Before the second grand jury, you and the ADA talked about the dates, right? A. Yes.

Q. She told you there’s no way it happened in September, October of 2004. A. Right. That was after I had said I don’t think it happened then. I don’t know when it could have happened.

The fall window — the one the first grand jury heard as a clean “yes” — becomes, under oath years later, a window someone else told her could not be right. Then comes the line that belongs in any honest account of how a lie hardens into a case:

A. I wasn’t the one who set up the dates for September or October. That is the time that the district attorneys and the detective, given that I told them stuff, they came up with it, along with my mother… I never said it was for sure… Even in the grand jury, I said I think so.

As she sat there in 2011 — exact date? A. No. After Great Adventure.

So the notebook’s season becomes a negotiation. The first grand jury’s September becomes a soft “I think so.” The later theory reaches for spring. The accusation needed a man still living in that New York apartment in the fall of 2004. The paperwork said otherwise. The witness, under oath, said she was not the architect of the dates that made the architecture work.

I am not asking you to parse every count number. I am asking you to feel the unfairness of a moving target. You build a defense for the door they opened. They open another. You bring leases for the apartment they named. They adjust the season. The public still hears one simple sentence — accused — while the calendar underneath that sentence is being renovated in real time.

Ink wrote me into a room I had already left. Under oath, the ink’s witness spent an afternoon saying she never said the violent parts the notes attributed to her — and that she was not the one who set the dates that made the story fit the rooms.

We keep the record straight.

We refuse to let the lie have the last word.

HARTFORD’S HIP-HOP POWER PLAY

Hartford Courant · February 15, 2004

Who has Hartford on lock?

In the lingo of rap radio, one local station has backed up that claim for more than two years with top ratings. But since September and the emergence of another big player on the dial, the allegiance of the region’s beat-hungry listeners has become an open question.

As they vie for ratings, advertising dollars and essential street credibility, both the reigning champion, WZMX-FM (Hot 93.7), and the challenger, WPHH-FM (Power 104.1), have taken the stance of top dog, strategically ignoring each other except for the occasional on-air jab.

If the names on the local playlists — Chingy, G-Unit, Jagged Edge, Sean Paul, Lil John — sound unfamiliar to some, they probably do not to most teenagers, regardless of their race. It is the proven cultural and economic power of this music that has made it possible for two commercial “urban” stations to co-exist in a market ranked 49th in the nation.

Within one cycle of the ratings that Arbitron releases four times a year, the station had jumped from ninth place into first place among listeners 18 to 34 years old.

“I think it’s one of the great success stories in the format,” said Sean Ross, an expert on hip-hop and R&B radio at Edison Media Research in New Jersey.

The station’s local competitors were certainly watching. After Infinity had run free with Hot 93.7 for more than two years, its biggest competitor, Clear Channel Communications, jumped into the game.

One day the previous September, alternative rock vanished from 104.1 as Clear Channel launched the urban format with 10,000 songs in a row — a sonic incentive for listeners to “flip the power switch” away from Hot 93.7.

Companion Courant reporting from September 17, 2003, dates that flip to 5 p.m. on September 15. WMRQ became Power 104. The summer book had already placed Hot 93.7 first among adults 18–34 with a 21.8 share.

Two years earlier, Clear Channel’s then-Hartford market manager had called Hot 93.7’s format change the “flavor of the month.” The flavor stuck. Ratings kept climbing. By 2004, Hartford was rare air: two commercial hip-hop FMs fighting over the same young audience in a mid-size New England market.

Power 104 is the station that would take the Star & Buc Wild morning show that spring. That is the bridge from this Courant feature to the next two documents.

Hot 93.7, under program director DJ Buck, had already built a national reputation as a record-breaker — early on 50 Cent, Alicia Keys, Sean Paul, Lloyd Banks. Power 104 was Clear Channel’s answer, not a boutique experiment.

WPHH later left the format on October 25, 2007. The 2004 paper is what matters here: the market, the call letters, the year the show moved in.

STAR SENDS CLEAR SIGNAL ON AVOIDING EXPLICIT TALK

New York Daily News · May 18, 2004

If there ever seemed to be a radio mismatch, it’s former WQHT morning host Star and Clear Channel, the radio company that has vowed to keep its airwaves free of exactly the kind of explicit talk Star offered regularly on Hot-97.

But now he’s doing mornings on Clear Channel’s WPHH (104.1 FM, Power-104.1) in Hartford, and judging from a recent show, he’s doing what he says he can do: the same show, just staying inside the lines.

On this particular show, he was talking about “men on the down-low,” or closet bisexuals. In the old days, Star would have been explicit. Now there was nothing even close. The focus was how widespread the syndrome might be and what it meant for a man’s heterosexual partners.

With this and other stories, Star made a point of involving the whole team: his partner Buc Wild, Prozac Girl, “Crossover Negro” Reese and Miguel.

Reese got the most exposure in a long discussion about abortion, which he opposes under all circumstances.

Sex was a frequent topic, but the conversation never got more explicit than the semi-code term “carpet-munching” or Star saying his picture is “in the homo section” of a Web site.

“Folks, I’m here to protect the license,” Star said. “There’s too much money at stake now to be jeopardizing the license.”

When Prozac Girl brought up Michael Jackson, Star joked, “Maybe he’ll take himself out.” Reese cracked, “Wouldn’t that be great news?” and quickly added, “I mean, that’d be great media coverage.”

Reese started to say something else and Star cut him off: “Watch your mouth. Don’t even think it, buddy.”

Star still calls himself “a hater” and didn’t soften his opinions. He called Knicks guard Allan Houston “a bum,” asked “how ridiculous is gospel hip hop?” and said of Jayson Williams, “I want him in an orange suit and slippers.”

He invited e-mails and phone calls and thanked some respondents by name, an interesting twist for someone who always hated shout-outs. But some things don’t change. He’s still playing Rush songs.

He also says he’s “totally focused” on Hartford and has had no talks about going elsewhere, though he isn’t oblivious to the whispers that Clear Channel would like him in New York to challenge Hot-97.

“Attention, New York/Tri-state area fans,” says his Web site. “Please be patient. We are working on new ways to bring the hate directly to you.”

The date on this column is May 18, 2004. The show is in Hartford. Reese is on the air in that studio, named in a New York newspaper, two months after the move the memoir describes.

Behind the Scenes of Star (and Buc Wild)

Billboard Radio Monitor · July 22, 2005 · Ivory M. Jones

For the past five years, Star and his cohort, Buc Wild, have been taking on such industry big shots as BET (“Bamboozled Entertainment Television”), “Coward Stern,” and even their former radio home, Emmis-owned R&B/hip-hop WQHT (Hot 97) New York.

While still on the air at WQHT, Star had no qualms about expressing his feelings regarding the station. He chalks up his no-holds-barred approach to having a high level of confidence.

“I am very confident in myself. That’s what makes me how I am. Some might call it cockiness, but I’m just confident,” he tells Billboard Radio Monitor. “It comes from an early age.”

Whatever circumstances helped mold him into the Star who wakes up listeners every morning on Clear Channel’s R&B/hip-hop WWPR (Power 105) New York, they have worked in his favor.

While at Hot 97, his show rose quickly to become one of the station’s most successful. Star’s sharp-tongued approach and unique cast of supporting characters (show staples include Crossover Negro Reese and White Trash Helene) helped propel it to the top. At one point, “The Star & Buc Wild Show” even beat Howard Stern in New York’s 18–34 demographic.

His success has not come without a price. Often at the center of controversy because of his on-air antics, he and WQHT butted heads. Following failed contract negotiations, he walked away. Star maintains there are no hard feelings. “I’m not bitter,” he said. “I’ve moved on.”

Because of a noncompete clause, he could not work in New York for a year. By April 1, 2004, he was restarting his on-air career in Hartford, Conn., at Clear Channel’s R&B/hip-hop WPHH (Power 104).

Star packed up and relocated with Buc Wild; the show’s producer, Miguel Candelaria; and E. Reese Hopkins, who portrays Crossover Negro Reese.

Clear Channel provided two apartments. The Hartford show also piped into WUSL (Power 99) Philadelphia. From there the morning franchise moved back into New York at WWPR. Billboard reported a 4.0 share in the 6 a.m.–10 a.m. slot for winter 2005, up from 3.8 in fall 2004.

Star told the magazine the supporting cast was not disposable. Helene, Crossover, and Miguel were “there for him.” He also said Crossover “was let go at one point too, and then brought back.”

After several years together, Star and longtime partner and half-brother Buc Wild parted ways. Star said the two were headed in different directions and that the four-hour daily grind required a zest Buc no longer had. Kaheem “Killer Kaheem” Vance stepped in under the Buc Wild brand name. Star insisted the show would not be rebranded as “The Star & Kaheem Show.”

“Kaheem is under the ‘Buc Wild’ brand name, so that’s who he is. He stepped into some big shoes here recently, so I wanted him to keep his sense of self. But the brand name is very successful and always has been.”

Syndication at the time of the issue reached Philadelphia, Hartford, Miami, and Augusta, with more deals in progress. The July 22, 2005 charts in the same issue still list WPHH Hartford and WZMX Hartford on the R&B/hip-hop panel.

Trade paper. Full name. Hartford, April 2004. That is the document.

Ex-WRKO host facing child rape charge

Boston Herald · October 23, 2008

Former WRKO yakker Reese Hopkins, who was laid off last week from his midmorning radio slot, was ordered held without bail today and will be transported to New York City to face charges that he raped a 12-year-old girl, according to the New York district attorney’s office and police.

Hopkins, 39, is charged with one count of first-degree rape and one count of second-degree rape, said Manhattan district attorney spokeswoman Jennifer Kushner. The rape allegedly occurred four years ago.

New York police Detective Martin Speechley said the victim, who was 12 at the time of the alleged rape, was visiting a friend’s apartment in Manhattan when Hopkins allegedly raped her.

Hopkins lived in the apartment with his girlfriend, who was the mother of the girl the alleged victim was visiting, Speechley said. The girl, who is now 16, told her mother about the incident this past summer, and her mother called police. “We only became aware of it this year,” Speechley said.

Julie Kahn, vice-president of Entercom New England, owner of WRKO-AM (680), said in a statement: “We recently learned of the allegations regarding our former employee, Reese Hopkins, and obviously are troubled by them. As the matter is pending in court, however, we will have no further comment.”

Police arrested Hopkins, who lives in Malden, last night. Hopkins, who is listed as Edward Maurice Hopkins on the warrant, pleaded not guilty today in Malden District Court on a fugitive from justice without warrant charge. Hopkins is waiving extradition, and his attorney said he is scheduled to return to New York tomorrow.

After court, Hopkins denied the charge as he was being led into a Middlesex County Sheriff’s van.

“She charged me on Oct. 1 of 2004. I was living in Manchester, Conn. I couldn’t have been there,” he said, wearing shackles and appearing shaken and disheveled. “She was a former friend of my daughter.”

When asked how old the friend was, Hopkins said, “I don’t quite remember.”

Hopkins’ girlfriend, who declined to give her name, called the allegations a “vendetta.” “He’s a warm, loving, good-natured person. It’s a false allegation,” said his girlfriend of seven years. She said Hopkins was arrested as the couple headed out to dinner.

Hopkins was asked about a possible vendetta as he was leaving. “I believe it might be, but I don’t know why,” he said.

Middlesex prosecutor Sean Casey asked the judge to hold Hopkins without bail. Defense attorney Paul Mishkin said the incident allegedly occurred four years ago and was reported for the first time recently. “He hasn’t made any efforts to avoid prosecution,” Mishkin said.

Hopkins, who had the 10-to-noon gab slot, and eight other Entercom employees in Boston were laid off a week ago. He had been on WRKO less than a year. Mishkin said in court that Hopkins was negotiating with another Boston station and would not try to avoid prosecution.

Hopkins’ last radio job was with the “Star & Buc Wild Morning Show” on Power 105 in New York, where he was the lead news anchor and news director. Hopkins left the show in October 2005.

That is the Herald story as it ran on October 23, 2008. The charge is printed. So is the denial. So is Manchester, Connecticut. So is October 1, 2004.