Read an excerpt from Reese's upcoming memoir, "[T]hose Who Trespass Against Us: The People Vs Reese On The Radio"
I was walking out my front door in Malden, Massachusetts, on the evening of October 22, 2008, dressed for dinner with my girlfriend, when the police drew their guns.
“Get on the ground! Now!”
I dropped to the pavement, hands behind my head, as officers swarmed. Handcuffs bit into my wrists. Neighbors watched from windows. In that instant, my life as I knew it ended. I was no longer Reese Hopkins, the radio host who had spent years telling hard truths on the air. I was a fugitive, accused of raping a twelve-year-old girl in a New York City apartment four years earlier.
The accusation was a lie. And that lie would cost me two and a half years behind bars, my career, my reputation, and nearly everything I had built. This is the story of how falsehoods nearly destroyed me—and how truth, stubborn and relentless, fought its way back into the light.
I had not lived in New York City since March 2004. That spring, the Star & Buc Wild morning show, where I served as news director and on-air personality, had moved its broadcast base to Clear Channel’s WPHH Power 104.1 in the Hartford area. Every week from Monday to Friday 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., I was in the Connecticut studio, delivering the news and commentary that defined my voice. My family—my then girlfriend and our son—had relocated with me to Manchester. On August 25, 2004, my son started at Verplank Public School there. We had leases, utility bills, bank records, school enrollment papers. The life we were living was documented, ordinary, and a hundred miles from Manhattan.
The apartment on the Upper East Side that prosecutors would later claim was the scene of a violent rape? It sat empty. Property management records later confirmed it was undergoing renovation. I had moved on. The show had moved on. Life had moved on.
Until April 2008, when a young woman—a former friend of my girlfriend’s daughter—told her mother a story during an argument over failing grades. That story traveled to the Manhattan Special Victims Squad. By the time it reached a grand jury, it had become a nightmare: I had allegedly raped her in my bedroom while my stepchildren were nearby, ripped off her clothes, penetrated her, told her to “keep screaming, it’s hot,” kept her clothes so she had to wear my stepdaughter’s, and then assaulted my own stepdaughter. She was twelve at the time of the supposed attack. She was fifteen and a half when she reported it.
I learned of the charges the same way the rest of the world did—through the media and then through the cold steel of handcuffs on my own driveway.
The firing came first. On October 16, 2008, WRKO in Boston let me go amid company-wide cuts. Six days later, the arrest. I was held without reasonable bail—$100,000 cash or $300,000 bond—and shipped to Rikers Island. For two and a half years I lived in a cage while the lie breathed and grew.
I could have ended it early. In November 2009, after thirteen months inside, prosecutors offered me time served if I would plead guilty to a lesser sexual offense and register as a sex offender for life. I looked them in the eye and said no. I would not confess to something I did not do. I would not trade my name for my freedom.
That decision came after I had already begun fighting back in public. I reached out to CNN’s Brooke Baldwin for an interview. Sitting across from her, I laid out the facts: the move to Connecticut in April 2004, the radio schedule that kept me in Hartford studios every weekday morning, the family life in Manchester, the empty apartment in New York. The segment aired. And something shifted.
The evidence I presented on national television—the documentation that my former apartment was vacant and under renovation—became part of the defense file. It was the crack in the prosecution’s case. Shortly afterward, the plea offer arrived. They knew what I knew: the timeline did not hold. But I had already chosen the harder path. I would go to trial.
The trial began in March 2011 in Manhattan. Jury selection was the least contentious part. What followed exposed the lie in real time.
The accuser took the stand and told a different story than the one she had given Detective Robert Arbuiso in April 2008. Gone were the ripped clothes, the screaming, the blood on the bed, the command to “keep screaming, it’s hot,” the stolen garments. In their place were softer, vaguer details. She had not screamed. She had not bled. She had not said those things. The violent narrative that had justified my years in jail simply evaporated under oath.
Prosecutors quietly removed Detective Arbuiso from their witness list. He became mine. The man who had taken her original statement testified for the defense, his presence a quiet indictment of the case built on that statement.
After two weeks of testimony and two days of deliberation, the jury could not reach a verdict. The vote was 11-to-1 for acquittal on the most serious charge of forcible rape. On the remaining counts, the split was 10-to-2 or 8-to-4 in my favor. A mistrial was declared on March 24, 2011.
One juror later wrote to me. “I think the State has/had a lousy case,” the email said, “and I can’t believe that they are thinking of bringing this case to trial again.”
I was released on April 6, 2011, after bail was reduced to $20,000. Prosecutors spoke of a retrial. It never happened. The accuser was later arrested on an unrelated gun charge, and the case quietly died. No conviction. No retrial. Just silence where once there had been thunder.
I understand evil now in ways I never wanted to. It does not always wear a mask and carry a weapon. Sometimes it arrives as a story told in anger or confusion, repeated until it hardens into fact. Sometimes it is enabled by institutions that move too quickly and ask too few questions. Sometimes it is the quiet erosion of a man’s name while he sits in a cell, unable to defend himself on the airwaves that once gave him purpose.
Lies destroy lives the way termites destroy houses—slowly, from the inside, until the structure collapses. They took my freedom, my income, my daily connection to listeners who trusted my voice. They forced my family to endure visits through plexiglass and nights wondering if I would ever come home. They turned a radio host into a headline and a headline into a presumed monster.
But truth is patient. It gathers documents—leases, school records, utility bills, property management statements—and it waits. It gathers witnesses—detectives who tell what they heard, jurors who see through the fog. It gathers courage in the form of a man who says “no” to a plea deal and “yes” to a trial.
I am back on the radio now, hosting Reese On The Radio afternoons on WTIC in Hartford, the same market where I was working when this began. I speak every day to an audience that knows my voice and, more importantly, knows the truth. The people who trespassed against me with their falsehoods took years from me. They will not take my platform.
Evil must be matched by truth. That is not a slogan. It is the lesson I earned in the hardest way possible. Those who bear false witness will answer for it—in courtrooms, in public opinion, or in the quiet judgment of their own conscience. Until then, the rest of us keep speaking.
We keep the record straight.
We stay on the air.
And we refuse to let the lie have the last word.
