[Source: AP]

Actor Danny Masterson drugged then raped three women at his Hollywood-area home between 2001 and 2003, a prosecutor told jurors Monday in his opening statement in the retrial of the star of “That ’70s Show.”

Deputy District Attorney Reinhold Mueller said Masterson put substances into drinks that he gave to a longtime girlfriend and two women he knew through friend circles around the Church of Scientology, all of whom Masterson is charged with raping.

“The evidence will show that they were drugged,” Mueller told the jury.

Masterson has pleaded not guilty and his lawyers, who will give their opening statement later Monday, have denied any of the assaults took place, saying the accusers’ decades-old accounts are full of inconsistencies and not credible.

A mistrial was declared on all three counts at the end of Masterson’s first trial in November when jurors told the judge they were hopelessly deadlocked.

Direct discussion of the drug element was missing from the first trial, with Mueller instead having to imply it through the testimony of the women, who said they were woozy, disoriented and at times unconscious on the nights they described the actor raping them.

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Charlaine F. Olmedo is allowing the direct assertion at the second trial.

The actor, 47, could get 45 years in prison if convicted.

Masterson, who has been free on bail since his 2020 arrest, sat at the defense table, with a large coterie of supporters behind him who also sat through his first trial. They included his wife, model and actor Bijou Phillips; his sister-in-law, “One Day at a Time” actor Mackenzie Phillips; and his brother, “Malcolm in the Middle” actor Christopher Masterson.

Actor Leah Remini, a former Scientologist who has become one of the church’s most vocal opponents on social media and through a TV series she hosted featuring dissident ex-members, sat in the front row of the courtroom in support of Masterson’s accusers.

Because the investigation that led to Masterson’s two trials did not begin until about 15 years later, there will be no direct or forensic evidence that he drugged the women, Mueller said.

But Mueller said he will call an analyst from the police toxicology unit, “who will tell you how some of the most common drug-facilitated sexual assaults, how some of the most common date rape drugs work, how quickly they’re metabolized, what side effects look like.”