photo by: Kim Callahan/Journal-World

The Douglas County Judicial and Law Enforcement Center is pictured on Friday, June 26, 2026.

A Douglas County judge on Thursday ordered a 38-year-old Lawrence man to stand trial for rape after a woman testified that the man, a close friend, had assaulted her at his apartment last year.

The 30-year-old woman, who sobbed and shook as she testified, said the assault occurred in June 2025, when she slept over on Brian Allan Greenleaf’s living room couch after a birthday party and a night of heavy drinking.

She testified that Greenleaf came out of his room in the middle of the night while “I was still very groggy and I believe very intoxicated” and forced himself on her as she said no multiple times and as he whispered to her “not to fight it.”

She recalled falling asleep afterward, hoping it had all been a “nightmare.” But it hadn’t been, she said. The man’s wife discovered the two on the couch hours later in a compromising position and reacted with anger, kicking the woman out of the apartment while Greenleaf sat with his head in his hands, she testified.

The woman went to the hospital for a sexual assault exam, then reported the incident to police a few days later, she said.

Greenleaf’s attorney, Vanessa Riebli, through cross-examination of the woman and a police officer who testified, offered a counter-narrative that the incident was a consensual encounter stemming from an already sexually charged friendship.

Riebli suggested that the woman, not Greenleaf, had initiated the encounter and had not been as intoxicated as she had said, given that she had recorded a video of Greenleaf’s cats in the middle of the night in which she, in Riebli’s words, was “talking and laughing coherently.” The woman said she did not remember recording a video.

Riebli also questioned why the woman had not cried out for help during the incident, even though two other people were present in the apartment, but the woman replied that she had been “too scared” to do so.

Detective Kelsey Kemppainen testified that she interviewed Greenleaf after the incident and that he had said both of them had been extremely intoxicated and had shared a CBD gummy, but he denied that a criminal act had occurred as they had sex, which he said she had sought. When asked if the woman had been awake during it, Greenleaf told Kemppainen that she was responsive.

Afterward, Greenleaf texted the woman to apologize and to say that what had happened was “incredibly wrong” and that he hoped she was OK. Riebli, however, argued that the text was not an admission to a crime but simply an acknowledgement that the encounter had been a mistake that had negatively affected their friendship as well as his marriage.

Greenleaf is out of custody on a $100,000 bond, and is scheduled to appear before Judge Stacey Donovan on Dec. 8 for a status conference.