A New Jersey lawyer is accused of attacking one woman twice within two weeks as part of a string of sexual assaults he's accused of about 15 years ago in Boston, prosecutors said Thursday.
Matthew Nilo was in court in Boston to face new charges over five attacks on four women in the city's historic North End between 2007 and 2008. Lawyers also discussed the case against him involving four alleged sexual assaults in Charlestown around the same time.
Nilo, who has pleaded not guilty to all the charges brought in the two sets of cases, planned to pay the $50,000 in additional bail set by a magistrate judge. That's on top of $500,000 bail he'd initially paid.
One of his alleged victims was at court on Thursday. She did not want to give her name, but she said she plans to be at every court appearance Nilo has to show him she is not afraid of him.
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"I am going to be a voice for any of the victims that don’t want to come, just so I can be here and make sure that he is held accountable," she told NBC10 Boston.
She added that she was disappointed Nilo's bail wasn't revoked. She wants him behind bars.
One woman was attacked twice in the North End, prosecutors said — first groped by a man who tackled her out of her shoes on Jan. 3, 2008, before jogging off, then penetrated by a man she was convinced was the same one. In that incident, police said the woman, in her 20s, was walking to work when she was tackled.
"I have a gun, don't resist or I'm going to kill you," her attacker told her, with a gloved hand over her mouth and nose and another hand assaulting her. She fought back and he fled when a car drove by, prosecutors said, allowing her to flag down a tow truck driver, who called police.
"The victim told detectives she was 100% sure that it was the same male who had attacked her 11 days prior," a Suffolk County assistant district attorney said.
Resources for victims of sexual assault are available through the National Sexual Violence Resources Center and the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-4673, and Massachusetts provides this list of statewide and resources for sexual assault survivors.
While no DNA profile was found from a sexual assault kit taken at a hospital after the attack, prosecutors said, her pants were sent to a private lab this year, which found DNA from three people, including one male — and it pointed to Nilo.
The prosecutor said it was "43.3 billion times more likely that the mixture included the defendant than another contributed."
In the other North End incidents, which spanned Jan. 2007 to July 2008, the women who reported being attacked said they were bear hugged from behind or pushed to the ground and groped or sexually assaulted.
Nilo's lawyer said the man "intends to fight these charges vigorously in court both on a factual basis and on a legal basis."
Nilo was raised in the North End and graduated from Boston Latin Academy. He was living in the neighborhood at the time of the alleged sexual assault spree about 15 years ago.
The 35-year-old lawyer was initially arrested in May at his home in Weehawken, New Jersey, on charges over four alleged sexual attacks in Charlestown, when he was between 19 and 20 years old.
Prosecutors later brought seven new charges after a grand jury indictment: one count of rape, one count of aggravated rape, three counts of assault with intent to rape and two counts of indecent assault and battery.
"It was a particularly difficult case, because there would be a number of months that would occur between the incidents," Ed Davis, who was Boston's police commissioner when the alleged crimes took place, has told NBC10 Boston. "We had a lot of undercover investigators in the area at the time."
