Roethlisberger was bar-hop pied piper

“Is Milledgeville dead tonight?” he asked. “Where should we go?”

The Velvet Elvis Supper Club and Capital City club, the man suggested, adding “it’s all college kids.”

“OK cool,” the 28-year-old Roethlisberger responded, “we just want a new scene tonight.”

That evening, a group of college girls had much the same plan, though the Milledgeville bars weren’t a “new scene” for them. The block of brick buildings and bars in the center of town is a well-worn route for students of Georgia College & State University, a historic institution growing in popularity with metro Atlanta students.

The group of Zeta Tau Alpha sorority sisters had a twist on the Thursday night bar hop — first they would attend a friend’s birthday party at her off-campus apartment. To liven things up, the hostess served vodka-laced Jell-O shots and assigned guests name tags with raunchy labels.

On one chatty 20-year-old sophomore Zeta, the hostess stuck a tag with an abbreviation for a vulgar phrase suggesting she was sexually available.

The two groups then set on their nightly rounds. During the evening, they would cross paths in three bars. By the end of the night, the sophomore with the raunchy name tag was leveling accusations of sexual assault against the star athlete.

Less than 12 hours after telling police, the allegation showed up on the gossip site TMZ, setting off a media frenzy in this quaint town 80 miles southeast of Atlanta. After a five-week investigation, District Attorney Fred Bright decided there was not enough evidence to prove a case and chose not to prosecute.

But the 500-plus-page Georgia Bureau of Investigation report on the incident, released April 16, contained enough evidence for the NFL to suspend Roethlisberger for six games last week.

Various details of what happened that night have been reported since the GBI report was made public. But this account provides details not previously published and paints a fuller picture of what occurred in Milledgeville that night.

This story is based on the GBI’s written accounts of dozens of interviews given to their agents by those on hand that night. The accounts of these interviews are contained in the GBI report.

A celebrity hits town

The Zeta sisters spent at least an hour at the birthday party before heading to the Velvet Elvis, a tap popular because of its $1 drink night. The Zeta gang had no trouble getting drinks; several had fake IDs. Thursday is a party night for GC&SU students, many of whom head home for the weekend.

It was after 11 p.m. and the atmosphere was electric. Text messages had alerted many students to the news that Roethlisberger and his entourage had arrived, and they began flocking to the bar to get a glimpse of the two-time Super Bowl champion. In fact, the alleged victim (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not naming her because she is an alleged sexual assault victim) sent out 30 text messages between 11 p.m. and midnight, roughly the time she spent at that bar.

The Zetas sidled up to the 6-foot-5, 241-pound star and posed for pictures, as did other boozy fans.

Roethlisberger asked what year the girls wearing name tags were in. Sophomores, one said. Sorority sister Victoria Garofalo told Willie Colon, a Steelers tackle standing next to his quarterback friend, that she was 19 and her friends were 20.

As the throng in the bar got larger and more insistent for photos and autographs, Edward Joyner and Tony Barravecchio formed a “protective pod” around the quarterback. Joyner, a veteran Pennsylvania State policeman, has been a friend and “assistant” to Roethlisberger for five years. He said Roethlisberger’s life “got difficult” from the fame that accompanied winning his first Super Bowl. The two cops say they try to protect him from bad publicity, like making sure no one shoots photos of him drinking.

Sorority sister Aliesha Scholten asked Roethlisberger why he was he was at Velvet Elvis. It’s a “freshman bar,” she told him. Go across the street to The Brick. It’s bigger and has an older crowd. And she and her friends were going there.

Fans and ‘Jager bombs’

Roethlisberger’s group did just that, finding seats at the expansive tavern-restaurant. Zeta sister Lesley Chesnutt recalls the bartender making Roethlisberger numerous “Jager bombs,” Jagermeister liquor and Red Bull energy drink.

The quarterback became a sort of Pied Piper of Milledgeville. At least 20 patrons from Velvet Elvis followed him to The Brick, which swelled with customers as word of his presence spread.

Garofalo and the Zeta sophomore with the suggestive name tag sidled up to Roethlisberger, who asked what the letters on the tag stood for. When she told him, Roethlisberger responded that he liked sex, Garofalo told investigators. The unnamed Zeta sophomore drank at least one of the Jager Bombs placed in front of Roethlisberger, another friend said.

One of the sorority sisters asked Roethlisberger if he wanted to go to the Zeta house.

“Hell no, that’s a LWTH,” Roethlisberger responded — a Lawsuit Waiting to Happen.

Roethlisberger is no stranger to thorny lawsuits. Last July, he was sued by a Lake Tahoe casino hostess who claimed he sexually assaulted her in 2008. She did not file a criminal complaint. He called the allegations “false and vicious.”

Colon, a 315-pound Steelers offensive tackle, said the girl with the raunchy name tag kept trying to get Roethlisberger’s attention, including pinching him. The quarterback was getting annoyed by the crowd and the requests for photos, especially when people kept taking pictures of him drinking.

Roethlisberger’s group left The Brick to walk around the corner to Capital City, a dark, warehouse-like dance club that comes alive after midnight.

In VIP area, women only

Milledgeville Sgt. Jerry Blash, who oversees city officers working the party district, asked to have his photo shot with Roethlisberger, and later accompanied his group to Capital City as a throng of about 50 people followed.

At Capital City, the Roethlisberger party was shown to a VIP area where they could better control contact with others. Colon complained they were surrounded by too many guys at the previous bars. The lineman said the group often deals with jealous boyfriends during bar-hopping, and has found it easier to just to keep men out.

Estimates of the number of young women in the VIP area that night ranged from 15 to 25. At one point, witnesses said, Roethlisberger held a tray of Patron tequila shots and yelled, “All my bitches, come take a shot.” One young woman told him he needed “to learn how to talk to women” and stormed out. Another, though, thought he was just having fun.

Roethlisberger apparently kept hitting on the women around him.

Katie Cromie, a friend of a Zeta sister, said Roethlisberger kept telling her she “had her stuff together” and asked her to go home with him, but she made excuses. Other girls, though, were “throwing themselves” at him, she said.

Cromie met Zeta sister Aliesha Scholten, who told her Roethlisberger had gotten angry and kicked her out of the VIP area because she’d told her friend, the alleged victim, not to go into a back room with the quarterback.

Zeta sister Nicole Biancofiore said she was in the VIP area when she saw the same girl being guided to a back hallway by one of the “bodyguards.” Still, she said, her friend looked like she was having fun. A few seconds later, Roethlisberger followed her into the hallway, she said. Zeta sister Ann Marie Lubatti turned to Biancofiore and said, “Did you see that?”

‘My friend has to leave’

Lubatti said she approached Joyner, the Pennsylvania police officer. “She doesn’t need to be back there,” she told him. But Joyner would not look at her, she said.

As Joyner recalled things, he was asked by Roethlisberger to kick a girl out of the VIP area and returned to find a girl approaching him saying, “My friend has to leave. She’s back there with Ben.” He said he looked down the hallway but did not see them.

Barravechio, the other Pennsylvania officer with Roethlisberger, said the quarterback called him over and asked him to show the girl to the bathroom, so he opened the door and walked down the hall. The girl was giggling, he said, and then just sat on a bar stool rather than walk into the bathroom. He thought it was strange.

Minutes later, Roethlisberger left the hallway through a back area. The alleged victim soon followed and, Biancofiore recalled, looked like she “had sobered up a lot and looked shocked and shaken up.”

The young woman, who by all accounts was extremely drunk, told her friends, “We need to go. We need to go.” She told them she had just had sex with Roethlisberger. They asked if it was consensual. “No,” she said.

Lubatti said her friend said she was sitting on a bar stool in the hall when Roethlisberger exposed himself to her. She said she told him, “No, we can’t do this. No, this isn’t right.” She said she tried to leave but walked into the bathroom, where Roethlisberger followed.

The alleged victim told her friends she did not want to report the incident because she felt embarrassed. Biancofiore, though, decided to call a friend who was a cop. He said to report the incident immediately.

Allegations doubted

At 2:20 a.m. the three Zeta sisters approached Blash, the Milledgeville officer. He recalled the alleged victim was “swaying, smelled of alcohol and talked all over the place.”

To the girls’ friends, it seemed like Blash was trying to talk them out of making charges, saying something like, “This man has a lot of money and you would be wasting your time.”

Those in Roethlisberger’s group remember Blash coming inside Capital City to tell them of the allegation: “The way she said it happened, there is no way,” Blash stated loudly. Blash told Roethlisberger the alleged victim’s friends were “talking for her.”

Blash’s derogatory remarks to Roethlisberger and his group about the alleged victim and his loudly voiced doubts about her truthfulness were factors the district attorney considered before deciding not to prosecute.

Blash, who has resigned, said Roethlisberger was at the bar talking with another woman when he entered. Roethlisberger angrily denied the allegations and left with his friends, driving back to his lake house.

The drive home, those in the vehicle said, was mostly quiet. The quarterback told one friend that he was in the back of the VIP area “messing around” with the girl when she fell. The friend took “messing around” to mean “kissing, whatever.”

Roethlisberger said he helped the girl up and then walked out.

The young woman quickly returned to her Atlanta-area home. Later, she and her family decided to not seek prosecution, citing the trauma a trial would bring, her lawyer wrote in a letter to the district attorney.

Ben-a-Palooza, meanwhile, was scheduled to continue until Saturday. Instead, the quarterback and his group caught a plane back to Pittsburgh Friday. At the airport, Roethlisberger’s parents were waiting for them.

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Coming Monday

The investigation into the alleged sexual assault was compromised from the very start.

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Meet our reporters

Christian Boone, a breaking news reporter for the AJC, has followed the Roethlisberger case since the beginning. A familiarity with Milledgeville helped; his great-grandfather, a longtime state senator from Wilkinson County, had a building named in his honor at the Central State Hospital, the state’s first public psychiatric facility. In his spare time, the Atlanta native cheers enthusiastically for the Braves. Boone has worked for the AJC since 2005.

Bill Torpy, who usually writes about Atlanta and DeKalb County for the Sunday AJC, joined the newspaper in 1990. He has covered many high-profile legal cases, including former Mayor Bill Campbell’s corruption trial and the 2006 Atlanta police shooting of Kathryn Johnston, among many other stories. A native of Chicago, Torpy is a graduate of Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and previously worked for the Daily Southtown in Chicago.

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How we got the story

AJC reporters obtained and examined the 500-plus-page Georgia Bureau of Investigation report on the Mar. 5 incident in a Milledgeville club involving NFL quarterback Ben Roethlisberger; the quotes and characterizations of that night in this story are taken from interviews contained in the report. Reporters also traveled to Milledgeville to conduct interviews and observe the college town’s bar scene. They conducted background interviews with several people knowledgeable about the case. They also attempted to contact many of the key participants and witnesses quoted in the report, but were either not granted interviews or did not have calls and e-mails returned.

Staff writers Bill Rankin and Katie Leslie contributed to this article.