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After spending more than a month gathering at the A.F. Bray Courthouse in Martinez, the 12 jurors for the criminal sex abuse trial of Nicholas Moseby have begun deliberations.
Closing arguments concluded Tuesday in the lengthy jury trial for the former San Ramon Valley cheer coach and biology teacher, which kicked off at the end of August after being rescheduled countless times over the past three years.
Over the course of the trial, now in its sixth week, jurors heard testimony from numerous witnesses including the four alleged victims, other former students of Moseby’s who attested to sexual and romantic overtures from him, and Moseby himself.
Moseby took the stand last week as one of the final witnesses in the trial, providing a lengthy account of how he initially transitioned from playing football in high school to cheerleading, the details of his return to cheer and his coaching career after four years in the U.S. Army, and how he came to the San Ramon Valley.
Moseby’s career as a cheer coach began when he came to California State University, Sacramento to study biology, where he said his return to the school’s cheerleading team gave way to coaching opportunities. He said he excelled as a coach due to his relatively large size for a cheerleader and his background and emphasis on strength training, something he said cheerleaders, gymnasts and dancers had typically overlooked at that time.
He went on to transfer to Arizona State University and continue coaching, but ultimately returned to California to finish his degree at CSU Sacramento, going on to coach at NorCal Elite in San Ramon starting more than a decade ago.
Although Moseby’s lengthy and detailed testimony came near the end of an already drawn-out trial that had been subject to multiple delays, his career trajectory and background played an essential role in arguments for both sides.
Prosecutor Jessica Murad contended that the criminal allegations facing Moseby pointed to an overall pattern of grooming and making sexual advances on young women he taught. Meanwhile public defender Manisha Daryani sought to paint a picture of how the attitudes and relationships that are common in high-level cheerleading could have led to Moseby’s interactions with the victims being misconstrued.
While Moseby has pleaded not guilty to all charges in the case, he admitted to accidentally sending a sexual video of himself to one of the alleged victims. According to Moseby’s account, the incident had occurred when he was “doomscrolling” one night and multitasking on multiple devices – playing video games, watching sports, and carrying on numerous conversations via social media and text.
Some of those conversations, Moseby said, were with adult webcam models, with whom he was exchanging pictures, videos and money. But others were with current and former cheer students, including one of the alleged victims.
Moseby said that he had begun using Snapchat for its video editing features to compile practice videos for his athletes to review, at their request, and to communicate with them in order to “build rapport” and encourage them to take private lessons, which were his most lucrative form of income in the cheer world.
All of that was done via a single personal account, rather than a separate professional account – a move Moseby said he had come to deeply regret after accidentally sharing the video with the then-15-year-old.
“I was horrified,” Moseby said, noting that he had deleted the message immediately and hoped the alleged victim hadn’t seen it. “My nighttime activities had turned into my daytime activities.”
The alleged victim had begun taking private tumbling lessons with Moseby at NorCal Elites prior to that exchange, with the goal of learning a back handspring before trying out again for the Monte Vista High School cheerleading team. In addition to sending the sexual video, she alleges that Moseby touched her inappropriately on the buttocks during lessons – which Moseby denied.
Murad contended that sending the picture was not an accident, pointing to raw data from his social media activity during that time in which he’d continued messaging and sending videos to sex workers while apologizing to the student and seeking to turn their conversation back towards cheerleading.
“The defendant was on Snapchat for one reason and one reason alone – his own sexual pleasure,” Murad said.
Meanwhile, Moseby also denied any and all sexual misconduct with the other three victims, all of whom were students he taught at the San Ramon Valley Unified School District.
Moseby first encountered two of the alleged victims in his first in-person teaching assignment in the 2021 to 2022 academic year at San Ramon Valley High School in Danville – his first time working in person with average high school students rather than the “elite” cheerleaders he said he was accustomed to in his coaching career.
From that perspective, Moseby said his assessment of the two girls when they allegedly arrived late to class and failed to adequately participate or pay attention the first day was that he was going to have problems with them – and that the feeling was mutual.
By the end of the semester, Moseby said that his frustration with the girls increased as did his concern that they would fail the class – a point Murad challenged in closing arguments, pointing to homework from one of the students obtained as evidence.
“A C+ is not failing,” Murad said. “An A is not failing.”
The two SRVHS students alleged that Moseby had made sexual and harassing comments to both of them, and that he had rubbed the shoulders of one girl against her will, going on to make complaints to school administrators that they said were ignored throughout the semester.
Moseby said he was told about the complaints of sexual harassment, however, to which his response was “absolutely not, especially not coming from these two who I admonish almost daily”.
The alleged shoulder rubbing was documented in a photo of Moseby contained in the prosecution’s evidence, in which a student whose face is not visible can be seen sitting at a desk with Moseby standing behind her and his hands on her shoulders.
Moseby testified that the student in the photo was his teaching assistant, not the alleged victim, which the prosecutor claimed was a lie. She argued that even if it was another student, however, that the physical contact would have been appropriate regardless.
That picture was the only photo or video evidence of Moseby making physical contact with a student, with Daryani noting the lack of video evidence and secondary witnesses backing up allegations from the youngest of the alleged victims – a Diablo Valley Middle School student, who alleges that Moseby had looked at and spoken to her in a sexual manner while substituting her physical education class, and that she had “felt something hard” against her back when he was behind her that left a “condensed milk” like substance on her shirt.
That shirt was analyzed by a forensics lab, which did not detect the presence of semen in preliminary testing and did not pass the item along for further confirmatory testing.
As Murad noted, false negatives are possible with such tests, and further testing would have been required to confirm the results. But Daryani contended that a more likely explanation for the negative test result was that there was no semen on the shirt.
Daryani also questioned the lack of both video evidence – with no surveillance footage available from the school at all for that day, according to a school resource officer – and eyewitness testimony corroborating the incident that had allegedly occurred in plain view in the middle of class.
Daryani also questioned the timing of the DVMS student’s allegations, which had come forward “the next day” after Moseby’s arrest in 2022, she said.
“The fact that it is so out of left field is how we know it’s false,” Daryani said.
According to Murad, however, none of the charges facing Moseby are out of left field. She pointed to a former cheer student of Moseby’s from his time in Arizona whom he admitted to having a sexual relationship with during her senior year in high school, but whom Moseby and Daryani maintained was over the age of 18 during the relationship. The prosecutor also pointed to an incident in which Moseby had sent a sexual picture to another student of his, who was 18 at the time.
In addition to arguing that Moseby was guilty of the charges he is facing, Murad contended that he had lied in his testimony both in his denial of the allegations and his denial of her theory that he had moved back to California because he was no longer employable as a cheer coach once news of his relationship and overtures with the two young women he had trained got out. According to Moseby, he was not fired from any of his jobs in Arizona, instead moving back to California because the all-stars cheerleading team he’d been working with had dissolved.
“He lied about anything he could find a way to,” Murad said.
Murad pointed to evidence that Moseby had advised his understudy and roommate – who had been in a sexual relationship with the cheerleader Moseby had intentionally sent a nude picture to – that he could “always move” if news about the relationship came out, and that no one in a new area would know about the relationship without criminal charges.
“We have eight victims that came before you with very similar stories,” Murad said.
In her closing argument, Daryani accused the prosecution and investigators of “cherry-picking evidence” throughout the case.
“This practice is pervasive throughout these allegations – baseless claims charging non-criminal behavior as crime,” Daryani said.
She noted that Moseby’s arrest had already been publicized when investigators contacted the witnesses from Arizona, and when two of the alleged victims came forward.
“It started with public shaming,” Daryani said.
With news circulating that Moseby was being accused of sex crimes of minors, Daryani said it was “natural” for the alleged victims to “revisit, reconsider, reexamine” their experiences with him. But she argued that with Moseby already being characterized as a sexual predator, that could cause the alleged victims to remember things differently than they had occurred, and to see their experiences through “jade colored” as opposed to “rose colored” glasses.
“We have to put aside public opinion,” Daryani said. “Did the people meet the burden in this case? The answer will be, time and time again, no. This is not about playing a game of gotcha, folks.”
Daryani acknowledged that Moseby had testified to some distasteful behavior, such as dating or attempting to date 18-year-old women he was coaching, consuming pornography – including content with the keyword “teen” – and engaging with sex workers online.
“It may not be savory behavior,” Daryani said. “It may not be how you Romeo. But it is not a crime.”
While Daryani argued that the prosecution’s case was resting on a conflation of a morally questionable – but not illegal – interest in “teen” porn and young women with sex crimes against children, Murad contended in her final remarks that Moseby’s pornography viewing habits and sexual encounters with 18-year-olds were an important part of the overall picture.
“You heard about that because it is deeply relevant to this case,” Murad said. “The defendant is into teens.”
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