DEDHAM — The assault trial of former New England Patriots wide receiver Stefon Diggs began in district court here Monday with jury selection.
Diggs, 32, is charged with strangulation or suffocation, a felony, and a misdemeanor count of assault and battery.
Prosecutors say Diggs hit a woman working for him as a private chef across the face and wrapped his arm around her neck from behind, choking her, on Dec 2. The woman reported the incident on Dec. 16. Diggs’ defense says the incident never happened.
Judge Jeanmarie Carroll is overseeing the trial. Assistant Norfolk District Attorney Drew Virtue is prosecuting the case, and attorneys Andrew Kettlewell and Sara Silva are representing Diggs. The jury comprises six women and one man.
Below are updates from the first day of testimony.
4:28 p.m. - Trial recesses
As the defense continued to cross-examine the woman, Carooll told the jury that they were dismissed for the day.
Before the recess, Silva suggested to the woman that she got mad at Diggs when his business manager sent her a non-disclosure agreement.
The NDA was “an indication that Stefon still didn’t trust you,” Silva said. “You thought you had to sign it because Stef thought you leaked something.”
“You didn’t say anything about an assault when you talked about an NDA?” she asked.
“It does not change the fact I was assaulted,” the woman countered.
Silva said the first time the woman connected the agreement with the assault was when she spoke to police on Dec. 16.
“All of those things you said were not true,” Silva said.
The questioning turned to an argument between the woman and Diggs on Dec. 13 — Silva characterized the discussion as Diggs firing her.
That day, Diggs paid the woman $2,000 and left $2,000 cash for her in the home. He repeatedly asked if he owed her any more money.
The woman said she had already made her mind up that she was leaving her job.
“You were furious with Stef,” Silva said, asking the woman if she told a fellow coworker she was planning to sue Diggs. The woman said that wasn’t the case.
Silva’s cross-examination of the accuser is expected to resume Tuesday morning.
3:48 p.m. - Defense suggests accuser ‘apologized’ to Diggs
Silva moved on, introducing texts between the woman and Diggs’ assistant on Thursday, Dec. 11 and between her and Diggs that day.
The woman texted them because she was having difficulty entering her bedroom after Diggs had the entry code on the door changed.
Diggs told her he did so because he didn’t know if she was going to return to the home. The woman replied that she was “very emo” on Dec. 2 and that she didn’t want to leave and wanted to stay and take care of Diggs.
“You admit you were apologizing to him?” Silva asked. “Not by choice,” the woman replied.
On the stand, she said she was only trying to be nice to get him to pay her.
Silva moved on to the issue of payment, pointing the woman to an email she sent where she claimed to be owed thousands of dollars in pay for three weeks of work and reimbursements for groceries.
“It turns out ... you had gotten paid for two of the three weeks,” Silva told her. “You knew you had actually been paid for two of those last three weeks.”
“I can’t answer that question correctly,” the woman countered. “I don’t understand the question.”
Silva had the woman review her texts with Diggs, in which she confirms she was paid for two of the three weeks she claimed to be missing payment for, and tells Diggs that if he doesn’t want to pay her for the week she didn’t work, that was OK.
The woman also sought more than $3,000 for grocery reimbursements, which she needed to submit receipts for.
“Is your testimony that you submitted receipts justifying (the reimbursement)?” Silva asked. “It was messed up. Some receipts were the wrong receipt and we cleared it up,” the woman replied.
3:22 p.m. - Woman confronted with video footage from New York trip
Silva moved on from the subject of the woman’s injuries to questions about her trip to New York from Dec. 2 to Dec. 9
The lawyer showed the woman stills taken from a dash camera inside the car of a woman she spent the week with. Silva suggested the images were from Dec. 2 and Dec. 3, but the woman couldn’t confirm that.
She also played a video taken on Dec. 6. Silva then handed the jurors two images taken from that video.
The lawyer moved on to the woman’s return to Diggs’ Dedham home on Dec. 9.
The woman admitted she tried to enter Diggs’ room, and then returned to work the next morning, making him breakfast.
Silva noted that the woman told police she left her position on Dec. 2. The woman said that didn’t mean she quit her job, only that she left the home.
“I had no plan, nowhere to go, so I needed to be nice to him,” she said of her return.
3:07 p.m. - Defense pushes accuser on injuries
Silva pressed the woman on how she described her injuries to police when she reported the assault on Dec. 16.
“You said you had redness, tenderness, pain and bruising on your neck?” Silva asked. “Bruising for me is redness,” the woman replied, “it was sore.”
“His whole right arm was across my chest,” she continued.
Silva asked the woman about her claim that Diggs used “ten out of ten” force to choke her.
“He takes hits from 300-pound men. Do you know that?” she asked. The woman said she didn’t know what Diggs did on the football field, despite attending several games.
She explained away not taking photos of her injuries, telling the lawyer, “This is someone that I love that put his hands on me.”
Carroll again had to interject and tell the woman that she needed to let Silva finish her questions.
2:50 p.m. - Cross-examination begins
Silva began her cross-examination of the woman by asking her about other instances in which she recounted the assault.
“The story you told this jury was very different than what you told (police), do you agree?” Silva asked. The woman said she did.
Silva then moved on to a series of questions about the nature of the dispute between her and Diggs. The defense lawyer suggested that the first time the pair spoke about money was Dec. 5, not Dec. 2, as she told police.
“I had been begging for my money since the 5th,” she countered.
The woman repeatedly delivered long responses to the lawyer’s questions, prompting an instruction from Carroll that she needed to answer the question and the trial wasn’t a forum for her to say anything that came to mind.
Silva quoted from the texts, suggesting to the woman that Diggs was going to fire her.
The woman said that wasn’t true, again insisting that “the back and forth text messages (were) about money.”
Silva moved on to whether the woman documented the injuries she claimed she sustained as a result of the incident.
“You took no pictures of your face on Dec. 2 did you?” No pictures of your neck on Dec. 2? No pictures of your chest on Dec. 2?" she asked. The woman said she didn’t, and that she was “in shock” after the incident.
“My face was red and my chest was red,” she said.
2:41 p.m. - Testimony resumes
After the break, the woman explained that she deleted some messages from the exchanges between her and Diggs before turning them over to police because of a “fear of how it would be perceived.”
Virtue then gave the woman a printout of text messages and asked her to read the last exchange she had with Diggs.
After she called him an expletive, Diggs replied, “Show me how I’m a (expletive).”
Virtue ended his questioning by getting the woman to confirm no one else was in the room at the time. She confirmed other people were in the home at the time.
2:32 p.m. - Recess called
After a sidebar with the lawyers, jurors were ushered out of the courtroom and Carroll stepped off the bench.
Virtue attempted to begin questioning the woman about text messages between her and Diggs that she turned over to police when she reported the incident.
Many of her answers were met with objections from the defense and struck by the judge. Carroll asked to see the lawyers at sidebar twice during the questioning, and the recess was called after the second.
2:06 p.m. - Accuser describes alleged assault
Diggs’ accuser returned to the stand after the lunch break on Monday and began to describe the incident.
On Dec. 2, she recalled being upset with Diggs for not telling her he wasn’t bringing her to a trip in Miami.
She recalled lying on her bed, reading a cookbook, when Diggs entered her bedroom. He closed the door behind him and leaned against a dresser on the opposite side of the room.
“He looks very angry,” she said. “He came in with intent to hurt me.”
Diggs was upset from the text exchange they had been having, she said, asking her, “what was all that (expletive) you were talking?”
The woman said she began to speak but couldn’t finish her sentence because Diggs “smacked” her. She said Diggs hit her with his right hand on the right side of her face.
She paused to collect herself while she described the incident.
After Diggs hit her, she said she tried to push him off of her, at which point he wrapped his arm around her neck and began to choke her. The woman said she was having trouble breathing and recalled Diggs falling on top of her onto the bed.
His grip got tighter the more she tried to fend him off, she said.
When Diggs got up, he pulled her hair and said, “yeah, I thought so,” she said.
The woman said she couldn’t recall how long Diggs was in the room, but estimated the incident lasted roughly 10 minutes.
“I had peed my pants. I was bleeding really bad,” she said. “I was so scared.”
12:54 p.m. - Judge calls lunch break
With Diggs’ accuser still on the stand, Carroll dismissed the jury for lunch. Without the jury in the room, she asked the lawyers if there were any issues that needed to be addressed. They said there weren’t.
Testimony will resume around 2 p.m.
12:40 p.m. - Accuser takes the stand
Diggs’ accuser was the first witness called by the prosecution.
She began her testimony by describing her background, explaining that she has worked as a private chef for 13 years.
The woman said she met Diggs through Instagram in 2021. When Virtue asked her about their relationship, she exhaled and said it was, “complicated.”
They began as friends, but their relationship turned sexual, she said. She was officially hired to work for Diggs in February 2025.
The woman then began to explain a dispute she had with Diggs and a woman who worked for him, beginning in November 2025. The disagreement came after someone direct messaged someone who was friends with the mother of Diggs’ child.
The message accused the woman of “telling his personal business of women he was sleeping with, ”she said.
Diggs confronted her about the messages, as did a woman who worked for him, she said.
12:22 p.m. - Assault ‘never happened,’ defense lawyer says
Kettlewell began his opening by telling the jury simply that the assault the prosecution described “never happened.”
There were six people in Diggs’ home that day, including his assistant, who will be a witness at trial, and none of them saw anything out of the ordinary, according to Kettlewell.
Prosecutors have no physical evidence, medical records or photos and videos showing injuries to support their case, he said.
On Dec. 2, Diggs was in a “good mood,” having played well the previous night in a Patriots victory over the New York Giants.
That week, the Patriots had a bye and Diggs had made plans to bring some friends to Miami.
The woman was “quietly sheeting about being left off” that trip, Kettlewell said. She was not just a chef for Diggs, she was a friend and, at times, a friend with benefits, he said.
She was hired to work as his chef in July 2025 and paid $2,000 a week. The woman lived full-time in Diggs’ home, as did several other staff members.
As the regular season went on, the woman’s place in Diggs’ entourage “began to slip,” Kettlewell said.
By Dec. 2, she was “furious” about being left off the trip.
Kettlewell told jurors to carefully examine the woman’s text messages with Diggs — they will show that what she turned over to police was a “curated” selection of their conversations.
There was “nothing out of the ordinary” for the woman about Dec. 2 — she cooked dinner for Diggs, then flew to New York City to spend the week with friends, Kettlewell said.
A week later, on Dec. 9, she returned to the home. When she spoke to police, she would say she was going to pack her things. Kettlewell contended that she “went back to work like nothing had happened.”
Speaking to police, the woman “told them a made-up story” because she was “furious and wanted Mr. Diggs to pay,” Kettlewell said.
Her demands for money began on Dec. 29, and have continued as the case has neared trial.
“That number has only gone up,” Kettlewell said.
Diggs sits before the jury an innocent man, falsely accused of a crime, the lawyer said. He urged them to find Diggs not guilty.
12:13 p.m. - Prosecution delivers opening statement
Virtue began by addressing the jury directly, explaining to them that their role was going to be to determine the facts of what happened on Dec. 2, 2025.
He offered a roadmap of the prosecution’s case: they will hear from the woman who worked for Diggs about her background, how she came to work for the wide receiver and a disagreement they had that started over text.
On Dec. 2, Virtue told the jury, Diggs entered the woman’s bedroom at his home, walked up to her, slapped her, put her in a headlock, threw her down on the bed and left.
The woman continued working for Diggs after that and had a dispute over a payment. Virtue told the panel that members of Diggs’ staff told the woman she needed to sign a non-disclosure agreement in order to get paid — the first time any such agreement had been raised.
Virtue told them he would call a Dedham police officer to the stand, who would explain how charges came to be filed against Diggs.
“Right now your main job is to listen,” he said, asking them to consider each witness’s financial relationship to Diggs.
11:30 a.m. - Jury picked
After a little under two hours of jury selection, seven people were picked to serve as jurors in Diggs’ case.
Because the trial is being held in district court, only six jurors are needed to deliberate. Superior court cases have 12 deliberating jurors in Massachusetts.
The judge presiding over the trial is addressing the panel. The trial will adjourn for a morning recess after that. When the case resumes, the jury will hear opening arguments.
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