ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times

DATE: Friday, January 31, 1997               TAG: 9701310067
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: C-1  EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER

EXECUTIVE GUILTY IN PARTY RAPE MCDONALD'S EMPLOYEE WAS ASSAULTED AT HOTEL

A former corporate executive was convicted Thursday night of raping one of his female employees after a company Christmas party at a Roanoke hotel.

After deliberating about three hours, a Roanoke Circuit Court jury set a five-year sentence for Thomas F. Kulis. The jury acquitted Kulis of two additional charges of sodomy and attempted sodomy.

Kulis, 36, was director of operations for MKG Enterprises, which owns 28 McDonald's restaurants from Bedford to Wytheville. As the No.2 man of the company, Kulis used his clout to have his way with an intoxicated employee at a Christmas party for store managers in 1995, Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Betty Jo Anthony said.

Describing how Kulis - wearing a black tuxedo and a red Santa hat - served as host of the party at the former Sheraton Inn Roanoke Airport, Anthony compared his actions to a lion on the Discovery Channel that seeks out the smallest and weakest prey.

Kulis picked a 24-year-old woman who had obviously been drinking, and who had the lowest position on the corporate ladder, to invite to a smaller party in what turned out to be an empty hotel room.

"He was second in command, and he was in command of her," Anthony told the jury.

The woman testified that Kulis tried to kiss her after she agreed to go with him to the room. He then forced her onto a bed and raped and sodomized her, she told the jury.

"He kept saying, 'I know this is what you want,''' the woman testified at an earlier hearing.

Kulis, who is from Pulaski County, testified that the woman came on to him during the party and that she consented to sex.

His lawyer, Tony Anderson, called it "a consensual act between two adults who had partied all night. They both went into that hotel room knowing full well what was going to take place."

The defense called several witnesses who said that during the party, the 24-year-old woman danced suggestively with several men, some of whom she kissed and rubbed as they danced.

"She was pretty much out of hand, I thought," one employee testified. "She had herself all over several different people."

Anthony called the defense strategy an attempt to "slime the victim." She also suggested to the jury that testimony from employees might have been colored by the fact that they still work for MKG Enterprises.

In testimony Thursday, Kulis said the woman rubbed his buttocks during a slow dance. "It was not a typical dance that I would have with an employee," he said.

Later that night, after the woman missed her ride home, Kulis said, she took him up on an earlier offer for a room, which the company was providing to employees who had drunk too much to drive. Kulis said he took the woman to the room and that she began to kiss him.

"This was all consensual," he said. "There was never, ever anything other other than consensual with this lady."

Kulis, who started working for McDonald's flipping hamburgers as a college student and worked his way up through the ranks, left the company after the charges were filed against him.

He had faced a maximum punishment of two life terms plus 10 years, but the jury chose the minimum sentence for rape. Judge Clifford Weckstein allowed Kulis to remain free on a $30,000 bond until his sentencing April 11.

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