He may be War Machine, but he wants the world to know he’s all heart.
The human deadly weapon formerly known as Jonathan Koppenhaver was in a Las Vegas court Tuesday as motions were being heard in his sexual-assault and attempted-murder trial when he allegedly made an unwanted amorous gesture at the very pregnant prosecutor.
“Judge, for the record, Mr. Koppenhaver just blew a kiss at me,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Jacqueline Bluth announced.
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Defense attorney Brandon Sua said he never saw the smooch.
Bluth retorted: “I’m not going to make up that he blew a kiss at me, which I find offensive.”
Like a scolded schoolboy, the shackled 33-year-old MMA fighter, clad in an orange jumpsuit, took a verbal reprimand from Judge Elissa Cadish. “Mr. Koppenhaver, stop. You are not to make any gestures of any kind toward counsel. Don’t go there,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” the grinning gladiator said.
Tuesday’s alleged court theatrics aren’t War Machine’s first apparent attempt at twisted courtroom levity. Last December, he allegedly snickered and smiled in court as his porn star ex Christine Mackinday was testifying about his alleged sexual attack in August 2014. When the accused sicko’s lawyer tried to downplay his client’s behavior, the judge fired back, “I watched him laugh.”
The defense Tuesday pushed an argument that the porn star’s alleged propensity for rough sex meant that the rape rap doesn’t hold up. War Machine’s attorney Sua said that even when she wasn’t acting as on-screen seductress Christy Mack, the accuser showed the “desire, the preference, to acceptability towards a particular form of sex activities that were outside of the norm.”
Sua added that details of the ex-lovers’ first meeting on a porn set are fair game for a jury, which will convene on July 11 next year. And he said they should know the “nature of this relationship, and what was customary and consensual, he said.
Nonsense, said prosecutor Bluth, who suggested that such transparency might compromise rape shield laws. And Mack’s profession doesn’t make her a willing participant in a rape, the prosecutor added.
“Because she consented to those acts through her course of employment does not mean the defendant is then entitled to think he can do that to her,” Bluth said. “You can’t make that leap.”
Emails and phone messages left with War Machine’s attorney were not immediately returned. Clark County prosecutors told The Daily Beast there was nobody available to comment.
How War Machine found himself facing 34 counts for kidnapping, sexual assault, battery, and attempted murder, among others listed in the criminal complaint from that Aug. 8, 2014, alleged attack on his ex gal pal, isn’t so mysterious when one takes a look at the horrific photos the adult actress tweeted from her hospital bed.
The photos are only half the story.
The 24-year-old accuser, who goes by the stage name Christy Mack in the adult film world, also wrote about how she managed to escape certain death at the hands of her jealous ex-lover.
It was around 2 a.m., and Mack and a friend named Corey Thomas had adjourned to bed. According to the Declaration of Warrant filed by the Las Vegas Police Department, Thomas told cops he had been “in a relationship” with Mack for “2 to 3 months.”
Mack tweeted that she and War Machine had broken up four months earlier after a year together and that he had “moved out of my house” to his native California. On this night, their pit bulls were wailing in her bed just as War Machine “arrived unannounced,” and according to Mack, the Muay Thai fighter saw red when he spied Thomas lying beside her.
The police report noted that War Machine “jumped on top of him and began punching [Thomas] in the face approximately 15 times,” then “put him in a [rear naked choke] hold, almost making him go unconscious.”
“Without a single word spoken he began beating my friend; once he was finished, he sent my friend away and turned his attention on me,” Mack wrote in her social media rant.
Thomas was allowed to leave after War Machine warned him to keep quiet or “his friends would kill Thomas,” according to the police report. Thomas disregarded the threat after fleeing, and called the authorities.
By then War Machine had already gone to work on Mack.
The quick-thinking actress managed to reach her cellphone and called 911. Bloodcurdling screams could be heard when that recording was replayed in court last year. “Stop! Jon! Stop,” she shrieked.
War Machine, she writes, “Made me undress and shower in front of him, then dragged me out and beat my face.”
Mack apparently blacked out. When she came to, she said, she found herself slumped on the master bathroom floor, naked, as War Machine kicked her in the ribs and punched her; “[he] broke several of her teeth” as a result, the police report said.
Sadistically, War Machine allegedly began perusing Mack’s Instagram and Twitter accounts, “every time [War Machine] found something he did not like, he would hit her in the face with both open and closed fists,” according to the police report.
As the bludgeoned woman lay there “bleeding and shaking, holding my side from the pain of my rib,” she tweeted, War Machine allegedly became aroused and shrilled, “that’s my pussy and I’m gonna take it back now,” according to the police report. Then, also according to the police report, he “licked his hand and put it on her vagina.”
Mack wrote that War Machine planned to rape her then and there, but he “could not get hard” and he was “disappointed in himself” about that.
Her attacker, Mack tweeted, allegedly “sawed much of my hair off with his dull knife” before the handle broke off. He vanished, and she suspected he was looking for a weapon to finish her off with, she wrote. After she heard War Machine rifling through her drawers for “a sharper, more stable knife to end my life,” she tweeted, Mack booked it, hopped a fence to the nearby the Las Vegas National Golf Club, and sought help. “Naked and afraid he would catch me, I kept running through the neighborhood knocking on doors,” she wrote.
One of the neighbors’ doors she banged on belonged to Alberto Giraldo. He told The Daily Beast he remembered hearing someone “knocking on my door like crazy” and that the panicked sound “scared the shit out of me.”
He looked out one window, he said, but couldn't make out whether Mack, with her shorn hairdo, “was a man or a woman.” But by the time he opened the door “[Mack] ran across the street to another neighbor,” he said.
She wrote that those neighbors “answered and I was brought to the hospital and treated for my injuries.”
Those injuries, she wrote in gruesome detail, included 18 broken bones “around my eyes, my nose is broken in two places, I am missing teeth and several more are broken.” Beyond the ruptured liver and the leg injury she sustained that restricted her gait, she said the knife War Machine allegedly used pushed into her “in some areas such as my hand, ear, and head.”
While Mack was in the hospital, War Machine was on the lam, tweeting more of his heart out.
“I only wish that man hadn't been there and that Christy & I would behappily engaged.I don't know y I'm so cursed.One day truth will come out”
The scorned lover kept tweeting tears for several days before he was eventually in brought under arrest: “The cops will never give me fair play, never believe me. Still deciding what to do but at the end of the day it’s all just heart break.”
It seems War Machine has been tweeting up a storm in the months since his arrest, replete with his inmate number and High Desert State Prison residence; and he appears to have found God, too.
“We all die. If we live by God’s rules, what do we miss out on if we die and simply turn to dust? At least we would have never came to prison! On the flipside if we live like maniacs, die, and come to find out that in fact God is real...what will we miss out on then? Everything brotha.”
A month after he was caught, War Machine penned a note to a friend from jail claiming he had tried “to surprise” Mack and help her set up a booth at a tattoo expo. Then things went south. “I dunno if they heard me come into the house or what but dude straight ambushed me as soon as I entered the bedroom, I can’t get into all the details but that shit was self-defense 100%,” he wrote.
And in the letter at least, a serious War Machine imparted that he had faith in the justice system proving his innocence: “I hope that the inconsistencies in their stories and some of the crime scene evidence will be enough to convince the jury of the truth!”
As for his behavior in court six months ago, War Machine tweeted a half-hearted mea culpa.
“I lost my composure a little bit at court the other day, it kind of makes me feel guilty, like I failed a test or something. I didn’t yell or curse or have an old-school war machine spaz moment, but still, I guess I should have just kept my mouth shut,” War Machine wrote.
He then dared the DA to give him a polygraph test, claiming he would plead guilty to crimes he actually committed and spare the costly circus show in court. “The state is going to waste all this money, make all this noise, and I’m only going to be found guilty of the stuff that I really did, the stuff that I would confess to and sign a deal for right now,” he wrote.
He went on to predict that the prosecutor will come out looking like “an overzealous moron” and that his alleged victim, whom he referred to as “Christy,” will also go down as a “big, fat, vindictive liar for accusing me of ‘rape.’”
“I was ‘raping’ my porn star girlfriend during our relationship and she never reported it, still wanted to marry me, and only made accusations AFTER I beat her and her lover?
“If that doesn’t have R-E-V-E-N-G-E written all over it then I don’t know what does. Juries are that stupid guys. High Desert State Prison, War Machine 1131480,” he wrote.
