Somehow, then, Mrs. Moon next ended up in her Lexus on Lake Olympia Parkway and then Highway 6, with Mr. Moon following in his Lexus. Although one eyewitness estimated their speeds at close to 90 mph, Felicia Moon says her Lexus never got over 75. Finally, she lost Mr. Moon and drove to a Dairy Queen to call a friend before returning home to find that her housekeeper had summoned the police.
And that was pretty much her story. At no time did she say her husband had actually hit her that day. Those scratches and bruises that were clearly visible in the photos might have been self-inflicted, she said.
After Elliott had finished with Felicia Moon, Hardin stepped up to elicit that dramatic denouement from his client's wife.
It seems the district attorney had unearthed a 1986 divorce petition Felicia Moon had lodged in which she claimed that Warren Moon had physically attacked her on three occasions -- including two days before the divorce filing, when he "beat her with closed fists in the presence of the children." The suit was never pursued and was dismissed the following year. Felicia Moon told Hardin she was "outraged" when she learned the prosecution might use the suit during her husband's trial, because it would bring up "a time in my life I would rather not remember."
It was a time in her life, she said, when she had been "diagnosed with an illness," which she later referred to even more elliptically as "the very dark secret from my past."
What happened last year, she continued, "was dŽjà vu of what happened ten years before. I had already drove a car in the midst of anger, and smashed into a brick wall."
And so, on July 18, her husband didn't intend to hurt her, she testified.
"I'm thinking he was trying to keep me from injuring myself -- trying to keep me from smashing into another brick wall."
Following Felicia Moon's first day on the stand, Rusty Hardin called her the most compelling witness he'd seen in his 20 years of practicing law. Nobody could watch her performance, he added, and come away thinking that she was anything but a strong, independent woman who thinks and does for herself.
Inarguably, that was the impression left by Felicia Moon. She was smart, funny and self-possessed, and she consistently got the better of it with prosecutor Elliott.
But the story Felicia Moon told so confidently said something else entirely: that she's a fragile, perhaps unsound woman who can't control her emotions or her spending, a woman who needs her husband to keep her in line, wherever he had been the night before.
That's okay. Felicia Moon certainly is under no obligation to you, me or the battered women of the world to be anybody but who she wants to be. Her critics, she said, "want me to be something that I'm not, and I don't want to let them do that to me."
On the other hand, I must concede, the Fort Bend County district attorney was under no obligation to confirm Felicia Moon's conception of herself and her marriage. Somebody called the cops. There was evidence of an assault. The law now allows the state to force a woman a testify against her husband. The D.A.'s office used it.
In the end, though, the prosecution obviously was not well-served by the new law. Even though the state, as of this writing, had yet to rest its case, it's difficult to imagine any jury convicting Warren Moon on the evidence that had been presented. Hardin was so confident that he vowed to jump off of the Empire State Building if the jury found against his client.
At the same time Felicia Moon was on the stand testifying in Fort Bend County, a Harris County jury convicted Agustin Vera of a misdemeanor assault, the same charge Warren Moon faces. Vera was accused of hitting his common-law wife 15 times as they argued on the shoulder of the Eastex Freeway last November 2.
Both of Irma Ventura's eyes were blackened. Her nose was swollen and her lips were split. She told police that Vera beat her because he was jealous that she worked. But after charges were filed, Ventura grew reluctant to pursue the case. She asked that the charges be dropped, then evaded a subpoena to testify against her husband at this trial.
The district attorney's office tried the charge anyway, and considered the conviction to be a small but significant victory, since, as prosecutor Drew Cozby notes, "usually it's impossible to proceed without a victim." Cozby says that on the morning of his trial, Vera was overheard talking with his wife from a pay phone in the courthouse hallway.
The defendant argued self-defense. There were no media or big-shot lawyers present. It took the jury nine minutes to return a verdict, and then the judge sentenced Vera to the maximum year in jail.
