photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

Public defense attorney Allyson Monson is pictured in Douglas County District Court with her client Jordey McTaggart at a motions hearing.

Two 15-year-old girls on Tuesday testified that a Lawrence man sexually abused them several years ago during sleepovers at his home, and one of them told the jury that she didn’t report the abuse until last year because she was afraid she wouldn’t have been believed and would have been beaten by her own father.

The testimony came Tuesday during the trial of Jordey M. McTaggart, who has been charged with two counts of aggravated indecent liberties with a child whose birth year is listed as 2010 and one count of raping a child whose birth year is listed as 2011. The abuse allegedly occurred around eight years ago.

The first girl to testify said she was on the floor in the bedroom of McTaggart’s daughters, who were sleeping. She said it was “really, really late” and she was playing a game on her phone when McTaggart opened the bedroom door and lay down behind her. She hid the phone under her pillow and pretended to be asleep, she said, because she feared she would get in trouble for being up so late. If she had been at her own home, she said, her dad would have “beat me” for that.

The girl, who is now in foster care, testified that she liked to go to McTaggart’s house because it appeared to be a refuge from her own dysfunctional home where beatings were common. That appearance proved incorrect, though, as McTaggart took liberties with her, she said, touching her sexually as she lay on the floor. She testified that he did so on another occasion too as she slept in a bunk bed on another night in the same room.

The girl said she told her brother about the experience and that he replied by saying it was her fault. After that, she said, she didn’t feel like she could tell anyone else for fear of being blamed or possibly beaten. She also feared losing her friends, McTaggart’s kids, if she got their dad into trouble, she said.

The girl said she did mention the experience to her grandma once but after the telling asserted that it had been a dream because she was afraid that her protective grandmother would hurt McTaggart or jeopardize her friendships.

The girl said she never told the other alleged victim what had happened to her – a statement that defense counsel later sought to discredit via a witness, the sister of the other alleged victim, who testified that she had told police that the girl had told “everyone” that the man had “raped” her. That same witness also admitted to having told police that the girl had a reputation for being dishonest.

The girl said that she told her therapist about the abuse in 2025. The therapist, being a mandated reporter, called the police.

The girl’s foster mother, a high school teacher, testified Tuesday that she learned about the abuse only after a police officer had told her about it. The foster mother said the girl seemed sad and scared to talk about the experience, believing she’d be judged. But eventually, the “barriers” came down and she opened up. Though defense counsel had tried to highlight inconsistencies in the girl’s statements — for example, regarding whether she had been sexually touched once or twice and how many kids were in the room — the foster mother testified that the girl has never recanted her account.

When asked whether she had told police that the girl “embellishes things,” the foster mother admitted that she had said that but had only meant it in the sense of normal teenagers sometimes exaggerating.

The other alleged victim also testified on Tuesday, often through tears and with her head down. When she was asked about the “bad” thing that happened to her at McTaggart’s when she was about 8 years old, she sobbed for several minutes and wiped her eyes repeatedly with a tissue.

Eventually she said that McTaggart had touched her vagina with his penis, though she said she couldn’t remember how exactly that had come about and whether it had been on the floor or on the bed. In previous testimony she had said McTaggart picked her up, put her on the floor and raped her as she lay on her side. Defense counsel Jessica Glendening pointed out that she had on another occasion stated that McTaggart was on top of her.

Glendening also pressed the girl on when this had occurred, as she has stated different seasons of the year. The girl’s actions after the incident were also called into question because she stated on Tuesday that she had left in the middle of the night crying but on another occasion had stated that she went to sleep and left McTaggart’s house the next day.

Both girls testified that they had previously always liked McTaggart and enjoyed spending time at his house, where he often played video games and had “tickle fights” with the kids. Jurors heard varying descriptions of the tickling from inappropriate and creepy to harmless fun.

Testimony in McTaggart’s trial began Monday and was set to resume Tuesday afternoon.