Oksana Grishuk, 36, an Olympic gold-medal skater from Aliso Viejo believed a business dinner with an aquaintance last month at the St. Regis Monarch Beach resort was for all the right reasons.
Instead, she found her head swirling, her stomach aching and wondering "Am I going to die?"
Grishuk, a two-time Olympic gold medalist for Russia in ice dancing, had been drugged with Nimetazepam, a date rape drug, on April 12 during a meeting at the resort. Grishuk was at the hotel to meet with James R. Halstead, 61, of Santa Ana, whom she had known for a couple of years and had grown comfortable with, said Sheriff’s spokesman Jim Amormino, but the relationship was strictly business.
The District Attorney’s office has issued an arrest warrant for Halstead, in connection with the alleged drugging.
Halstead is suspected by police of trying to drug the skater with the intent to sexually assault her, the complaint states.
Authorities also want Halstead to submit DNA, thumb and palm prints, according to the felony complaint.
At a news conference this morning at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department she gave her account of what happened during the meeting, which took on a personal tone at the dinner table after she had sipped her first drink at the insistence of Halstead at a bar before heading into a restaurant.
Grishuk said she met Halstead to discuss starting a vitamin nutrition product line and had met with him several times previously and had come to trust him as a business professional.
Halstead, she said, tried to insist she finish her first iced beverage, which she would not describe. She ended up taking that drink to the dinner table, when she said Halstead left to go to the restroom.
In a telephone conversation she had with him at the urging of sheriff’s officials the next day, she said Halstead told her he had taken Viagra in the bathroom.
When he returned about 10-15 minutes later, Grishuk said she had already ordered a glass of wine to go with her meal. At this point, she said the tone of the conversation changed from business to personal and she started feeling awkward and looking away at times.
Grishuk said she never actually saw Halstead put a pill in her drink, but insisted that no one else approached them since the drink was poured by the waitress. She soon started to feel shaky and having a burning pain, she said putting her hand on her chest, and discovered her wine cup was cloudy at the bottom.
At first she thought it was a food particle and she finished her wine and turning her glass upside down discovered a still undissolved pill, she said.
"I was absolutely shocked," she said, "I just said ‘wow, there’s a pill in my glass.’ "
Grishuk said Halstead reacted very calmly and told her to get rid of it. But as she started to feel ill, he took off, she said.
"I wasn’t sure what it (was). ‘Am I going to die?’ " she found herself thinking.
It was hotel staff that helped her get medical attention and sheriff’s officials helped get her to a hospital, from which she was released five hours later, she said.
Authorities discovered the drug in a glass of wine that Grishuk was having during dinner and found traces of the drug in a glass she used in the resort’s lounge, Amormino said. The drug was tested and found to be a common date rape drug used in Europe and Asia, but illegal there and in the United States, authorities said.
Halstead, who is now considered a fugitive, had not been arrested as of midafternoon today.
Halstead was also named in an FBI affidavit along with Robert Harvey as partners who collected investors’ money on behalf of Jeanne Rowzee, 49, an Irvine lawyer arrested on suspicion of bilking 150 investors out of $20 million. She is being held without bail because a judge has deemed her a flight risk.
Rowzee, 49, was arrested at her Irvine home in connection with the scheme, which the FBI said solicited investments in money market programs and offerings known as public investments in private entities, or PIPES.
Halstead netted $11 million in 2006 from the scheme, money he spent on two Ferraris, a Porsche, an Aston Martin, credit card bills at Neiman Marcus and a girlfriend in Las Vegas, according to a civil suit filed against Rowzee by William Buus, an Irvine lawyer who represents 45 clients who had sued Rowzee and her business partners.
Marc Halliburton, a Newport Beach mortgage banker, said that Halstead enticed him to invest $275,000 of his own money and nearly $3 million from Halliburton’s friends and family.
“We’d give Jim money and he was supposed to forward it to Rowzee, who was supposed to be this big securities attorney,” Halliburton said. “It was very clear he never forwarded it.”
Halstead’s attorney in the civil suit, David Casterline, said, “My client’s position is he’s a victim of Rowzee like everybody else.”
The crime of wire fraud carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in federal prison.
Rowzee is also under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for investment fraud, the FBI affidavit said.
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