Sentencing today for convicted rapist

AUBURN – A former Red Cross administrator convicted of raping two co-workers at the agency’s office in Auburn faces sentencing Monday in Androscoggin County Superior Court.

The prosecution said it plans to ask the judge to impose a 21-year sentence on Rocco Giberti, who was found guilty after a nine-day trial in July of seven counts of gross sexual assault and one count of criminal threatening.

In an attempt to show that Giberti has a long history of terrorizing women, Assistant Attorney General Lisa Marchese intends to present several women who claim to have been abused and harassed by Giberti over the past 30 years.

Defense counsel Leonard Sharon is trying to block those presentations, saying Giberti’s due process rights would be violated if his sentence were affected by unproven allegations.

“The court may not consider these acts unless and until the state can prove their existence,” Sharon wrote in his motion seeking to stop the other women from being heard at the sentencing hearing.

A former sheriff’s deputy and bail commissioner in Auburn, Giberti, 51, has been held in the Cumberland County Jail while awaiting sentencing.

Giberti’s brother, Angelo, said he and other members of his family would speak on Giberti’s behalf.

“It is not just the fact that he is my brother,” Angelo Giberti said. “The sentence doesn’t fit the crime. He did not rape those women. It was, in fact, willing and consensual sex.”

Rocco Giberti originally was charged with 13 counts of rape and one count of criminal threatening, all stemming from allegations made by three women.

All three women testified that Giberti took them to the attic, the basement and other parts of the Red Cross offices, forced them to have sex and then spanked them so hard that he left bruises.

The women said the rapes took place over a six-year period. They testified that they didn’t tell anyone until May 2001, when another Red Cross employee sent an anonymous letter to the board of directors, because they were afraid of losing their jobs.

Giberti has maintained he was having consensual affairs with them, similar to the four-year affair he was having with his boss, Bonnie Bickford, former executive director of the Red Cross.