An American alleged conman who faked his death in 2020 and fled to Britain to evade rape charges, only to insist he was someone else when caught, will finally stand trial in Utah, a judge ruled Thursday.
The saga of 37-year-old Nicholas Rossi, whose real name is Nicholas Alahverdian, has played out over a decade across two continents amid a series of increasingly outlandish claims, a fake obituary, and a laughably poor attempt at an English accent.
Rossi appeared in a Salt Lake City courthouse Thursday, where Judge Barry Lawrence ruled prosecutors put forward enough evidence to merit a jury trial.
A convicted sex offender, he is accused of raping a woman in the city of Orem in 2008 and another woman in Salt Lake County later the same year. In the first case, Rossi went unidentified as a suspect for about a decade because of a backlog of DNA tests at the state crime lab.
In reality, he grew up in foster homes in Rhode Island—Rossi is the surname of his stepfather, who worked as an Englebert Humperdinck impersonator on Florida cruise ships.
But the former fugitive has constructed an increasingly dubious maze of surreal claims in order to avoid trial. Most notably, he is accused of faking his own death in February 2020 and then fleeing the U.S. His foster family doubted claims he had late-stage non-Hodgkin lymphoma and dismissed an obituary that claimed the disease took his life. The notice appeared after the FBI opened a fraud investigation into Rossi and Rhode Island police issued a warrant over his failure to register as a sex offender for a previous offense.
Rossi was arrested at a Glasgow, Scotland, hospital in December 2021, where he was recognized as a fugitive while undergoing treatment for COVID-19.
Since his arrest, Rossi has claimed he is, in fact, a former Irish orphan called Arthur Knight, who worked his way up from selling books on the street to become an academic. In making these unverified claims, he has variously put on what can be generously described as a spotty English accent that comes and goes like the wind over the Scottish hills.
Authorities identified him in the hospital by his tattoos and fingerprints, but he outlandishly claimed the tattoos were grafted onto him while he was in a medically induced coma during his treatment and that the fingerprint evidence was false.
“I conclude that he is as dishonest and deceitful as he is evasive and manipulative,” Judge Norman McFadyen of Edinburgh Sheriff Court, who ruled Rossi was indeed the fugitive he claimed not to be last year, said. “These unfortunate facets of his character have undoubtedly complicated and extended what is ultimately a straightforward case.”
After a two-year extradition fight, Rossi was taken into U.S. custody in January, following the Edinburgh court’s ruling. At a virtual hearing that month, court officials struggled to understand him because he insisted on wearing an oxygen mask. He called out objections at the presiding judge, referring to her as “M’Lady,” though she ignored him.
On Thursday, Rossi could be heard much more clearly, though he continued to assert he is Arthur Knight, speaking over the judge and insisting that the court has the wrong man.
Rossi is scheduled for an arraignment and bail hearing on Oct. 17. Local ABC affiliate KTVX-TV reported that court documents state Rossi is also accused of sexual assault, harassment, and a possible case of kidnapping between 2007 and 2019 in Rhode Island, Ohio, and Massachusetts.
