A Redondo Beach man held in jail for 15 months on charges he raped a woman and an 11-year-old girl was released from custody last week when prosecutors dropped their case against him.

Corey Delaine Stewart, 42, who had claimed the sex with the 40-year-old woman was consensual and that he had never met the girl, is living with his parents and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, said his attorney, Ninaz Saffari.

“His life is basically turned upside down,” Saffari said. “Obviously, his wife left him. There was an extramarital thing that he had. He’s pretty depressed right now.”

Prosecutors would not say Stewart was innocent, but rather that their case against him could not be proved before a jury. Deputy District Attorney Lisa Houle said she announced in court on Friday that prosecutors were unable to proceed just as trial was set to start in Torrance court.

“I stand by the charges that were originally filed against Mr. Stewart,” Houle said. “We had a preliminary hearing in this case. Both victims testified and their testimony was believable and credible. Unfortunately, although the case was set for trial, we were in a position where we felt that we couldn’t prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Saffari said that was because she uncovered evidence that refuted the Hawthorne woman’s story, including online posts that revealed she arranged a meeting with Stewart at a motel for sex. Saffari said she had 15 witnesses to call that were going to “completely destroy and discredit” the accuser. A statement on Saffari’s law firm’s website accused the woman of making up the rape story when her family learned she was meeting men on the Internet for sex.

“Her story was filled with lies,” the attorney said.

Gardena police detectives arrested Stewart on Feb. 27, 2013, when DNA evidence linked him to the woman’s Sept. 28, 2012, report that she was raped.

The woman testified during a preliminary hearing on May 9, 2013, that she befriended a man on the social networking site Tagged.com. During their chat, he offered to help her get a job at Gardena Memorial Medical Center, so she agreed to meet him, she said.

“We were driving and laughing and talking and all of a sudden he turned into a different person,” she testified. “He pulled a gun out and he told me to pull my pants down.”

Stewart, she said, raped her on the reclined passenger seat. She was unable to escape, she said, because her door did not have a handle.

During that hearing, Stewart’s attorney, Richard Mendez, questioned her truthfulness, asking if she had sent photographs of herself over the Internet and whether she and Stewart engaged in consensual sex in a Gardena motel.

The woman cried and refused to answer his questions.

The other alleged victim, a 20-year-old Long Beach woman, said she saw a story about Stewart’s arrest on television and recognized him as the man who raped her when she was an 11-year-old prostitute. She said she tried to escape from him, but the car’s doors and windows would not open.

Mendez said at the time that the girl was mistaken and that Stewart had never met her.

As trial neared, Saffari said she uncovered evidence that showed the Hawthorne woman was lying. Cellphone GPS data showed her near the Western Motel in Gardena and not where she described, and a Tagged.com chat revealed they had never talked about a job interview, but about getting a room for a sexual encounter.

“He always adamantly said he met up with her and he took her to a hotel in Gardena,” Saffari said. “They had a very brief sexual encounter.”

The woman left when Stewart confessed he was married, Saffari said, adding that police never found the vehicle that she described.

The former prostitutes’s story would have been shown as inconsistent, and simply wrong, Saffari said.

“I believe that she was just mistaken about my client’s identity,” the attorney said.

Saffari accused Gardena police of conducting a shoddy investigation and said they never should have arrested Stewart. A statement attributed to her on her law firm’s website, said that “instead of investigating the accuser’s blatant lies, Gardena Police Department immediately ran to local news cameras, plastering Corey’s face across the news in the most salacious and suggestive ways possible.”

Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast said Gardena detectives “provided every bit of information that was available to them at the time to the District Attorney’s Office for consideration of filing” and acted with good judgment.