Former Wisconsin football recruit Dominic Cizauskas was found guilty of third-degree sexual assault in Dane County Wednesday night, via Kaitlin Phillips of the Mukwonago Chief. According to the criminal complaint, Cizauskas raped a woman in her dorm room last December while he was on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus for a recruiting visit.
Cizauskas, 18, previously knew the woman from his hometown and visited her Dec. 14. The Wisconsin State Journal has a thorough account of the trial, which began Tuesday at the Dane County Courthouse and concluded Wednesday.
Cizauskas and his family appeared stunned by the verdict, and quietly left the courtroom after it was read. Cizauskas now faces up to five years in prison and five years of extended supervision when he is sentenced in about two months by Reserve Judge Daniel LaRocque.
The verdict, reached after about five hours of deliberation, came at the end of a hard-fought day in the courtroom that saw testimony by the woman and by Cizauskas, whose accounts of the incident differed on key points, particularly whether she consented to have sex with Cizauskas.
Cizauskas is a 2014 Mukwonago High School graduate and was named Wisconsin Football Coaches Association Defensive Player of the Year in 2013. He was verbally committed to play for Wisconsin as of June 19, 2013, but never signed his National Letter of Intent on Signing Day, Feb. 5.
Cizauskas was a somewhat glaring omission from an otherwise heralded recruiting class, though the university has not commented on the situation as the NCAA forbids schools from talking about recruits who have not signed a NLI.
At issue in the criminal trial was the existence of a prior relationship with the victim and whether or not the sexual contact that occurred early in the morning of Dec. 14 was consensual. As the State Journal's report describes, that was a central point of the five-hour deliberation.