It’s the two-fisted drinker defense.
A city school teacher accused of plying a 16-year-old student with beer and trying to seduce her on an outing to the Metropolitan Museum of Art insisted at his child endangerment trial Wednesday that while he ordered two beers — both were for him.
Taking the stand in his own defense, Dean Bethea, 56, told jurors the Met’s Grand Hall Balcony Bar was packed and servers were slammed so he ordered two bottles of Lagunitas Pilsner, explaining, “I drink beer fast.”
But the former English teacher at the public Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering, said he had no intention of offering the girl a sip.
Bethea said his companion drank water while he had five beers on the Dec. 4, 2015, outing — he’d already downed two at the Met cafe an hour earlier. Besides, he said, a teen girl wouldn’t drink that beer.
“How does that beer taste?” asked his lawyer Matthew Myers.
“It’s probably the most bitter beer you can drink,” Bethea said of his drink.
The attorney then asked about the difference between a pilsner and an IPA.
“I don’t want to turn into a beer geek, but they’re night and day,” Bethea told the panel of six jurors before Judge Ann Scherzer. “A pilsner is very sharp and golden and an IPA is brown and hoppy and bitter in a different way.”
But according to a review on the Beer Advocate web site, Lagunitas Czech Pilsner is “light and crisp enough for a Coors light fan.”
They spent a good 20 minutes discussing beer before the jury, with Bethea saying seven beers were nothing for him and that he throws back four to six brews on a typical weeknight — but only after he hits the gym.
“16-ounce German beers,” he specified.
“How do you feel after six beers?” Myers asked. “Relaxed,” he answered, but not intoxicated.
Bethea said it was the girl, whose older sister he dated for two years, who hatched a plot to lure him to the museum.
After he rejected her, he said, she was embarrassed and claimed he’d tried to seduce her.
Prosecutor Pierre Griffith grilled Bethea for over two hours, honing in on his colorful love life. But first, he just had to know, “You drink both the beers at the same time or do you pick one?
“I pick one,” Bethea answered.
The teacher, who had been fired as a professor at Western Oregon University for attacking the ex-boyfriend of a 21-year-old student he was dating, moved in with his 33-year-old girlfriend in New York.
“Is it fair to say she expected you to be exclusive?” the ADA asked. “Yes,” he answered.
But that didn’t stop him from picking up his student’s sister at a parent-teacher conference. While dating the 23-year old, he forged a close bond with the teen, who often ate lunch with him. “She blossomed in the humanity courses,” he recalled.
“You’d agree that a 54-year-old teacher making romantic advances on a 16-year-old student would be a damaging event?” Griffith asked.
“It would be creepy, disgusting and damaging,” the professor agreed, denying the allegations.
The high school senior took the stand Tuesday and said that Bethea had invited her to the Met.
Once there, they perused the Greek and Roman wing and then settled into a table at the balcony bar where a string quartet was playing. He allegedly ordered her two beers, she said.
“He began to compliment me, telling me I was very smart, beautiful, basically hitting on me,” she said.
“He told me that when he was with my sister, he wished that our ages were reversed, so I was old enough for him to date. He said he felt this way since I was a freshman in his class, so that would have been when I was 14.”
After he walked her to the subway station, he allegedly asked if he could kiss her.
She claims she rejected the advance and then reported the creepy incident to police.
Bethea was removed from the school after his arrest and reassigned pending the outcome of the criminal case, according to a Department of Education spokesman.