Japanese Businessman Pleads Guilty To Times Square Hotel Rape: DA

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — A Japanese technology executive pleaded guilty to raping a coworker in a Times Square hotel, prosecutors announced.

Masakatsu Yukitoshi, 46, is facing jail time after pleading guilty to first-degree rape, fire-degree sex abuse and facilitating a sex offense with a controlled substance, prosecutors said. Yukitoshi drugged and raped a female colleague while they staying in the Row NYC hotel on Eighth Avenue between West 44th and 45th streets in 2017, prosecutors said.

"This defendant abused workplace power dynamics to prey on a junior colleague in an appalling act of sexual assault," Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., said in a statement. "This ordinary business trip devolved into an utter nightmare as he drugged her with sleeping pills and then forced himself on her while she was totally incapable of consent."

On the night of Nov. 17, 2017 Yukitoshi told his female coworker to come to his hotel room to prepare for a business meeting, prosecutors said. When the woman arrived at the room, the technology executive gave her a glass of orange juice mixed with triazolam — a prescription-strength sleep aid — and raped her after she lost consciousness, prosecutors said.

The next morning the woman woke up naked inside Yukitoshi's hotel room and confronted him about the night before, prosecutors said. After the businessman confessed to drugging and raping her, the woman left the hotel, went to a hospital and reported the rape to police.

Yukitoshi was arrested on Nov. 21 while attempting to board a flight at John F. Kennedy International Airport, prosecutors said. The businessman's guilty plea represents the first conviction on charges of facilitating a sex offense with a controlled substance in Manhattan since 2008 and just the third conviction on the charge since it was created in 2001. Yukitoshi is expected to be sentenced on Aug. 29, prosecutors said.

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