HOUSTON - A former KBR Inc. employee who said she was drugged and raped while working in Iraq lost her lawsuit against the military contractor Friday.
The jury of eight men and three women rejected Jamie Leigh Jones' claims a day after starting deliberations in a Houston federal courthouse. Jones, 26, said she was raped in 2005 while working for KBR at Camp Hope, Baghdad.
Jones sued KBR, its former parent Halliburton Co., and a former KBR firefighter, Charles Bortz, whom she identified as one of her rapists. The Houston-based companies and Bortz denied her allegations.
The alleged sexual assault was investigated by authorities but no criminal charges were filed.
"I was going up against a monster," Jones, sobbing loudly, told The Associated Press. "I'm devastated. I believe I did the right thing coming forward."
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KBR applauded the jury's verdict, which in addition to rejecting Jones' claims that she was raped also denied her fraud claim against the company.
"Since 2005, KBR has been subjected to a continuing series of lies perpetuated by the plaintiff in front of Congress, in the media, and to any audience wishing to lend an ear to this story," spokeswoman Sharon Bolen said in a statement.
Jones said the civil trial wasn't a fair fight. She said she felt she lost because the jury wasn't allowed to hear details of her attacker's past but were allowed to hear hers. Bortz said the sex was consensual.
Her attorney had asked jurors to award her as much as 5 percent of KBR's net worth in actual or punitive damages. That would be more than $114 million, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Jones, who had been a clerical worker in Baghdad's Green Zone, testified that she was drugged and then raped by a group of KBR firefighters. She said Bortz was in her room the next morning. During four days on the stand, she told jurors she has no memory of what happened because she believed she was drugged with Rohypnol, known as the "date-rape drug," just before she was sexually assaulted.
